Landcross

I came across this issue yesterday. Can anyone confirm this behavior/problem?

Cool, thanks!

Hmm, I was either very blind or someone added it in the meantime without removing Holland. Either way, having 2 names for the same country is even worse than only 'Holland'; that's bound to create confusion. I propose to remove Holland and move everything that currently uses Holland to The Netherlands. It's simply the official (English) name of the country, no other way around it (here's a fun video about it). And besides, most/all popular datfiles for roms also use 'The Netherlands' for naming roms too

Hmm, 5TB doesn't sound that bad. I bought a 4TB external drive a week or 2 ago to store all my roms etc. But, it's by far not enough But, if buy more storage, I want to do it the proper way with a nas and all that instead of keep adding more external drives. And maybe some redundancy as well. But that's all going to cost quite a lot Also, I suppose with 'fullset' you mean just USA or something like that? Because the fullset I came across contained all regions and was something like 10TB...

Do you have full sets of all those consoles or just games you picked yourself? How much storage do you use in total?

I had to edit a few things, because it's not that useful to other people if the paths to nNASOS and Dolphin are hardcoded in the script. Powershell was probably not the best idea (I mainly decided to use it just because I never used it before), but I'm too lazy to rewrite it in another language. And it works, so there's not much of a problem, it's more an annoyance. Here are the files. It contains both the source powershell script and an exe generated with this tool (because launching a powershell script from Launchbox doesn't work, again, powershell was probably not the best idea). So if you don't trust a random .exe file from the internet you can also generate your own using that tool. Usage: Download nNASOS from here if you don't already have it and place it somewhere. Obviously you also need to place the nNASOS-Proxy.exe somewhere too. Add nNASOS-Proxy.exe as an emulator in Launchbox. You need to add 2 command-line parameters in the edit-emulator window: the (full) path to nNASOS and the full path to Dolphin. It's best to surround them in quotes. So, the parameters should look something like this: "D:\full\path\to\nNASOS.exe" "D:\full\path\to\dolphin.exe" Then launch a gamecube or wii game (which should be already compressed using nNASOS to the .dec format) using nNASOS-Proxy as emulator and it should work. It should pop-up a console window, decompress the file and launch dolphin. Don't close the console yourself, otherwise it won't remove the decompressed .iso after you close dolphin. Again, it's a super simple script (just a few lines) and it basically doesn't have any failsaves or checks. E.g. if you try to launch anything other and a nNASOS compressed .dec file using it, it probably crashes.

I've actually got it completely working today, including the removal of the decompressed iso. Works great now. I can save hundreds of gigabytes on gamecube (and especially wii) games and at the same time launching a game is also a lot faster then having to wait on a 7z to extract. Gamecube games take ~15 seconds to decompress and wii games take about 50 seconds to decompress (which is still a lot faster than 7z) on my machine (with an i5 4690k). I'll tidy up the script and then put a download link here, although again; not sure if anyone here is even interested in it

There's a not very well known program called nNASOS that can compress GameCube and Wii games lossless. Not only is it lossless, it also saves a ton of space and a ton of time compared to zip or 7z. Depending on the amount of games you have, you can save tens or hundreds of gigabytes. And decompression takes only about 10 seconds per game instead of the minutes a 7z takes on my cpu. That's all great, but the drawback is that Dolphin doesn't natively support the compressed file format that nNASOS creates. I opened a feature request for Launchbox to support nNASOS (which I think is super simple yet has great benefits). However, so far nothing has been done in that regard. Not even sure if @Jason Carr has read it Not that I blame the guy, he's probably working on a ton of other cool stuff. Nevertheless, I wanted to (try to) make use of the space savings now. So, I got the idea to create some kind of proxy. A program in between Launchbox and Dolphin that decompresses the rom file. Thus, I made a really simple (and probably crappy, first time using PowerShell) PowerShell script and added it as an 'Emulator' in Launchbox. I wasn't really expecting it to work, and... it didn't. It just opened the PowerShell script in notepad instead of running it . I was like 'Damn it! The one time I decide to use Powershell instead of batch, it doesn't launch '. But I was to lazy to rewrite it in another language (a batch file for example) so I found a little tool that converts a powershell script into an .exe. I added that to Launchbox and low and behold: it actually worked and launched the game in Dolphin. So many places where something could go wrong, but it worked. So, this is the chain it creates: Launchbox -> Proxy -> nNASOS -> Dolphin But it works like a charm. I can add compressed roms to Launchbox and actually launch them with the click of a button. There's only 1 major drawback: it doesn't remove the decompressed file after Dolphin has been closed (just like Launchbox removes an decompressed 7z file after exit). And I'm not sure if that's even possible without adding this functionality directly in Launchbox. If anyone has any idea if that's possible and how, please let me know. If anyone wants the powershell script, let me know and I'll upload it somewhere. Honestly not sure if there would be any interest it, at least not with that big drawback.

Or this 'developer': Sega, Arc System Works (some programming) That's 1 developer entity in the database (including the info between brackets).

About developers/publishers is certainly true. An example I came across yesterday when I wanted to add the publisher to a certain game, there's: Apogee Apogee Software Apogee Software Ltd. Apogee Software, Ltd. And they're all the same damn company as far as I know... It makes both adding a publisher to a game and viewing 'all' games from a publisher really hard. That's something I was wondering about too. I'm new to Launchbox and the LaunchboxDB, but I was surprised to see so many romhacks in the db. And I don't quite like that. Because when you think about it, a romhack is a bit of the same thing has a 'mod' is for modern games. Are all mods allowed in the LaunchboxDB? When I was moderating some changes, I came across a few modern PC mods already, unsure what to do with it. My personal opinion is to just skip all romhacks, mods and whatnot; it's just a big can of worms. Draw the line at prototypes/unlicensed games and make a database that's actually useful for Launchbox as a program but also a good source of general game information. But that's just my personal opinion.

Nope, it does the same thing even if I have not a single game selected. Another thing I found: like I said above it wrongly merges Donkey Kong Land and Donkey Kong Land 2 together even though the database has listed 'Super Donkey Kong GB' as alternate title for Donkey Kong Land. The thing is: Super Donkey Kong GB is nowhere to be found in Launchbox either, but I do have the rom. Thus, it probably merged Super Donkey Kong GB with a whole other game too. The feature is clearly messing things up. Is there any way to search through merged titles (to find the wrongly merged Super Donkey Kon GB)?

Another thing the automatic consolidate feature is doing wrong: it's merging Donkey Kong Land and Donkey Kong Land 2 (both from the Gameboy) together, but they're clearly separate games. I've tried it multiple times and it consistently merges them. That's 2 'bugs' already, should I report those in the issue tracker or is this topic enough?

Maybe I wasn't clear enough, but I'm talking about the automatic consolidate feature (in the beta) that merges roms based on their alternate titles. Tools -> Consolidate ROMs Manually merging works perfectly fine.

Ok, here I am again. I expanded the single Sea Battle (which I merged manually) into 3 separate games again. Then pressed the consolidate roms button and it did exactly the same as in the first post. It merged the German and French titles together, but didn't merge both into the English version.

Well, the quick fix is just manually merging Sea Battle together with Bataille Navale (which was already merged with Schiffe Versenken) But yeah, I'm not sure why it didn't merge those. I did have the newest local LaunchboxDB and I pressed the consolidate button minutes before I came across this. I just realized though that I can unmerge all three again and see what happens when I auto-consolidate again. I'll report back in a minute.

So, I'm quite new to Launchbox but I love the whole launchboxDB idea and especially the merging feature in Launchbox. When I heard that the beta supported automatically merging roms based on alternate titles, I immediately installed the beta. I've been slowly adding a lot of missing alternate titles to the database (I kinda envy the future users who don't have to do that anymore but can merge everything with the press of a button ), but today I noticed something interesting. There's this gameboy game called Sea Battle. It has 2 alternate titles on the database; a German and a French title. Launchbox correctly identified the English version (I added the roms just before I installed the beta). However, the consolidating roms feature does something weird: it did merge the German and French titles together in a game with the French title as main game, but it did not merge the German and French title together into the English version. In other words, it was like this: Sea Battle Schiffe Versenken Bataille Navale It created this: Sea Battle Bataille Navale Schiffe Versenken But it should have created this: Sea Battle Bataille Navale Schiffe Versenken

That's true. It's a pretty niche usecase. I honestly can't think of another usecase myself either. Although, I could very well imagine people creating playlists and creating accompanying custom covers so that they all look in the same style or something like that. But I'm not really a media creator, so that's not my, uhm, 'area of expertise' I would much rather see something like this having a higher priority than the feature discussed here, but if the developer(s) have nothing left to do, I still think it would be nice to add

Yes, I understand that it's currently just for sharing/detecting the games. But that's why I thought it wouldn't be that hard to implement. It's just writing and reading 2 extra data points and they can be certainly shared. Custom titles are just text in the xml file, can be shared without 0 problems. Custom covers is of course a little more complex because if you have a playlist with custom covers that you want to share you have to include the cover images. But, I'm not familiar with the programming behind Launchbox, maybe I'm dead wrong

Why not exactly (just wondering, I don't want to hurry anyone )? To me it looks like it wouldn't be that much work to incorporate. Playlists are saved in the xml files with a data-entry per game. You could very well add 2 more data points to the XML: DisplayTitle and DisplayCover or something like that.

I hope this is the right place, but it's certainly a small thing: please rename the 'Holland' region option to 'The Netherlands'. Calling the country Holland just sounds so 'dumb' to people who actually live there (*cough* *cough*) and more importantly The Netherlands is simply the official name as far as I know, not 'Holland'. Alex Edit: Opened issue #348 to track this change.

Today I made my first playlist, mostly to see how the feature works. I've made a playlist of the Atari 2600 Sears Tele-Games. It was a bit of work because a lot of the Sears editions have different titles than the original releases (and yes, I submitted all alternative titles to the LaunchboxDB ). The thing is, the games in my games list all have their original titles and covers and I would like to keep it that way. However, it would be great if I could rename the games in this specific playlist + give them the special Sears covers too. I don't think that's currently possible, is it? Or am I missing something?

Yeah, I guess I have to do that. I already submitted 1 feature request and 1 bug a few days ago. It seems like the issues list is huge already so I wanted to make sure there's not already a setting I overlooked (or if it was already being worked on). Well then, I suppose I have to wait. I'm pretty sure my feature request isn't a high priority at all, pretty niche I think

I've been searching for an external application too, but did not come across that one. It's far from ideal though. It looks like it's forcing the whole screen resolution (or video output) to 16:9 and not just the selected application. In other words, the whole OS gets cropped which messes up my desktop and other windows (you know, just like when you fire up an old PC game which starts at something like 600x800 ). And besides, it did not list my desired resolution of 2560x1440. I chose 1920x1080 but because that's not an exact multiple of a 1440 screen it looked horrible. I think the solution really has to come from Bigbox itself. I'm not an expert on this, but I suppose Bigbox should just render at the native aspect ratio and just add black bars to the sides on its own instead of relying on gpu/monitor scaling like most emulators do. But thanks, I appreciate the help!

To quickly get to the point: I have an ultrawide monitor. 21:9 aspect ratio, 3440x1440 resolution. It's a great monitor, I love it. But, it's not a very common aspect ratio (certainly not in the emulator world) and thus things get a bit annoying. Launchbox, bigbox, emulators etc. etc. all work fine on this screen (or at the very least a lot better than Hyperspin), that's not the problem. The thing is, pretty much all media files are in a 16:9 format. I see a cool video-collection in the downloads section; arg, 16:9. I see a cool set of backgrounds; arg 16:9. I don't have the skill nor the time to start creating piles upon piles of my own 21:9 media, so I'm wondering if it's possible to force BigBox in a 16:9 aspect ratio (thus with black bars on the sides in my case). I'm not 100% sure if it would look better at 16:9 or not (in my personal opinion of course), but that's what I would like to find out. Forcing bigbox to 16:9 on my 21:9 screen instead of creating 21:9 media would have the added benefit though that if I were to take my launchbox installation (which is on an external hdd) to another pc which has a normal 16:9 monitor it would still look fine instead of having stretched out media. So... Any thoughts on this? Any idea how (or if) I can force bigbox in 16:9? Thanks!

Yup, I saw that. I've now successfully used the new merge feature on freshly imported roms/consoles. It's working pretty well. By examining which files it did not scrape I can pretty easily spot missing alternative titles or just roms that have a different title than the LaunchboxDB (but I don't think a lot can be done about that, there'll always be a bit of manual work). But it does look like the scraper doesn't look into alternative titles; it would be nice if when the scraper cannot find a game-entry matching the rom-name it would look into alternative titles. I've had a few cases where it did not find the Launch-box db entry even though the game was in there because my title was an alternative title. Also, a right-click on a game menu item to directly go to the launchbox-db page would be nice. I might add that as a feature request