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Z3R0B4NG

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Everything posted by Z3R0B4NG

  1. right, same for me. It still just says "Archer" though. I also get just one result when i search for Jaws, exact same behavior. It isn't a database bug then but something with the LB Client has changed in one of the updates... that is inconvenient to say the least. hmm... i'll try removing the Alternate Archer names so that only the ones with developer names are available, lets see what happens then.
  2. C64 has 2 games named Archer, so as usual the names have been changed to include developer names in brackets as a workaround, that is the default approach for C64 (tons of homebrew stuff with identical names). Name Archer (John Van Ryzin) Alternate Name Archer https://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/games/details/87383 Name Archer (Pinhead Games) Alternate Name Archer https://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/games/details/131404 when searching in Launchbox for just "Archer" both entries should show up in the drop down menu because of the Alternate name, but they should both show up with their full names But instead only one "Archer" shows up and it is the John Van Ryzin version... i'm trying to connect to the Pinhead Games version. Even when i change the name in my LaunchBox to include (Pinhead Games) in the name it still won't find the entry... it does find the correct DB entry, but also just says "Archer". I know those entries have been changed months ago, so it is not a matter of having to wait for a metadata update.
  3. A Kiosk mode like that is not the worst idea, one could even extend that to a custom skinned Big Box Mode. I think there is already functionality where you have like a main admin account that is password protected and a guest mode so no one else messes stuff up, but that is only in Big Box and only for a local install, but half the work is practically done, a few more tweaks and we are almost there. At least in BigBox idk if that functionality is in LaunchBox as well. The question on the development end is just how to hand out Keys for this, would this be something that should be monetized etc. And once i throw my own license file in the folder i'm no longer in "guest" mode but can use it normally. Sounds like a Feature Request...
  4. Yeah i'm not a fan of those either, they kind of need their own category in the database so it is optional, Fanart - Box - Front wouldn't work either, reconstructed also makes no sense... maybe Advertisement? ...nah not really. Even worse are those collections with 50 or 100 games, but i guess this is what you get wíth a system that has this much Homebrew ... and it was indeed published that way. And you also have to take into consideration that the people who coded these little games at home were probably really proud when their little homebrew game made it onto a magazine so other people got to see it (and now we do because of it), It is at least a noteworthy achievement of some sort and i wouldn't want to hide that. ...just maybe not as box cover in the frontend?
  5. The easiest way to contribute is to work on the LaunchBox Games Database and add / improve media etc. to the games that are in the collection or listed as being added with the next version. (and hopefully that will make its way into the release version at some point). C64 is a bit painful to work on though, lots of games with identical names so one needs to be super careful to actually have the correct game on the screen, in many cases that means firing up the game and looking what it actually looks like and that slows everything down to a crawl (also because you often get stuck playing for a few minutes while you are at it ?). Either way i don't see many people working on C64 when moderating in the DB (my gut feeling says there are at most 2 people working on it every now and then), so any help there is welcome (and i probably should get back into it myself).
  6. Sorry ...i got nothing. ...and the 3D Box stuff i wanted to do for C64 all pretty much went nowhere. I just did a huge pass on SNES that took me 2 months and i really had to force myself to finish it, i do not feel ready to jump into the next big project just yet, i need some time off from the LBDB.
  7. Those are some good sources (bookmarked!). But my graphics skills start and end with MS Paint, so don't expect anything from me there, i've seen and appreciate the work you put in with the cartridges. Of course there is always work to be done, i'm just saying i'm done with my big pass that i talked about in the OP. The EURO/PAL cardridges definitely could do with a better set, the one that is available is terribly low res and many of the stickers are even incorrect, that is what i call a "better than nothing"-set... at least the EU exclusive games have gotten the higher res pictures from another set so as long as you go for US > EU > JAP in your priorities then you shouldn't even see the lower res ones. The JAP/NTSC-J games still generally have a lot of holes in the 3D box and cartridge categories but now there are quite a few less holes than before. If you are doing lots of new artwork, i suggest you also collect them in a zip and put them in the download section, here and/or on Emu Movies so Users of other Frontends can use them as well.
  8. just wanted to say... DONE! finished my pass on the last page (21+22) of the SNES database today and all changes have been accepted by the mods. ...that was almost 2 months.
  9. I just updated to 11.3 now when i try to open the options menu the app just stops responding (freezes) and that's it. Just me? Do we need to reset our options to default (delete some old config files?) or something? //*sigh* NEVER MIND! ... turning it off and on again did the trick, i guess Windows just needed a reboot after installing the new C++ redistributable it downloaded.
  10. heh ok, that makes more sense now... still, it looks... not quite "solid" if that makes sense.
  11. 1200 ... wow, i did not expect THAT many anymore. So, did you do anything else during the lockdown or have you just been slaving away on this this the entire time? I looked through all of them quickly, i found a broken one: Supreme Warrior.png it is like two different half transparent boxes over each other and one is like a triangle box, everything else looks fine.
  12. And the result of these "old topics and debates" is a bunch of mismatched artwork when you scrape Cart - Front for SNES, clearly it has not worked out as intended and i'm not happy with that at all. People are constantly replacing reconstructed clean SETS with higher resolution photographs (which are sometimes good, sometimes bad) because some people just seem to think that resolution is all that matters and i'm not gonna bother to "defend" my edits forever. Trying to keep the reconstructed sets in Cart - Front is a fight against windmills, it ain't working, period. btw. i've seen your text in the moderation comments, you didn't bother reacting to my email, instead you started randomly editing a few things i've changed back and making a mess of it again (i'm assuming you are the same person, as this is practically the identical text from the moderation comments... if not then nevermind). Every single one of my changes has been accepted by the moderators, i had 64 rejections on my account before i started working on SNES and i still have the same 64 rejections as before, every single edit went through. I'm half done now (page 13 of 21 is done) and i intend to finish what i've started. A few things for you to consider: - the point of the database is so LaunchBox can scrape artwork. - most people (i assume) want unified looking SETS, not a mess of random pictures. - if the photographs are in Cart - Front (they are clearly not fanart, where else would they go?) and the reconstructed stuff, like i'm doing is in Fanart - Cart - Front, it makes literally no difference to people who don't care what that stuff looks like, it will be displayed the exact same in LaunchBox, but the people who do care can choose with one click if they prefer the reconstructed stuff or the real photographs to be displayed, either by not even scraping Cart - Front or by prioritizing Fanart - Cart - Front in the LaunchBox options menu (it should not matter that this is a premium option, the workaround for freepers is to delete the content of the one folder they don't want). BUT if you throw all of it in the same category, the user will have to go through every single game manually, every picture one by one to throw out the stuff they don't want. Most people at that point won't bother and just delete the entire folder, download the Sets they want from Emu Movies or Hyperspin's download sections and that makes the entire point of having a scraping mechanic in LaunchBox and a database just obsolete. (i've been doing way too much of that myself and am trying to clean stuff up so others get better results). - also, as this stuff is all reconstructed i can not even guarantee that the stickers are "real" for the entire set, in fact i'm sure most of those tiny EU carts are fake, i got no clue about the JAP stuff unless there is a photograph as "proof" to go along with it in the database which i could compare it with (i'm not gonna check other sources for every single one, that would take forever). With the US set you could argue that it looks real enough, i guess, but even there i found some stickers that are clearly the artwork from the Box and not the cart (i've even seen some that have different artwork on the 3D Cart and the 2D Cart). (these guys are doing the best they can with what they got, but if i can't guarantee that all of it is "authentic" artwork i don't wan't to have that stuff as the main "real" thing, it is very easy to miss-represent history by being sloppy like that... and what is a database good for if not the archival of information?). Having a category Cart - Front - Reconstructed ...and maybe even a Cart - Front - Photograph would communicate much clearer to the User what he is downloading, then this would not even be an argument. But i only got Cart - Front and Fanart - Cart - Front to work with... and "Fanart" where stuff is intentionally made up, really only exists for rom hacks and unlicensed stuff, there it is obvious that it is fake to anyone and doesn't need explaining.
  13. some people are just weird...
  14. I also reject those deletion attempts when i see them. This is a database for a Emulation Front End, if there is a ROM in a set that somebody might try to scrape then there should be a DB entry for it. Even if it just exists to let the user know "this is not a game but a XYZ thing" so they can decide to delete / hide the rom in their own collection instead of having a mysterious none matched icon. Also: one mans trash is another mans treasure, you may not care about a GameBoy Sewing Machine rom from Japan ...but somebody will. I don't care about Demo Discs or these GameBoy Color Videos on cartridge... but somebody does.
  15. I just saw while moderating that somebody tried to change 4x Disc to random other categories, i screenshotted the last 2 (1 is a error, 2 is "i'm drunk editing lolz", 3 is suspicious AF, at 4 it is starting to be trolling ... if you ask me). Maybe a Admin want to look into educating or banning that person?
  16. Launch Box randomly pops up at 6:07 that's all. (wasn't sure where to put this, no forum really seems to fit, this seemed the most generic off topic one)
  17. worked my way through pages 3 + 4 (of 21)... somebody send Help Pizza! //progress report: page 8 of 21 is done.
  18. Anybody know where these SNES EU Cartridges come from? i don't see them in the Emu Movies or Hyperspin download sections, but they must be coming from somewhere. I've seen a few of them in the DB uploaded, but not enough to really feel like a consistent "set". As i don't have the full set i'll just leave these untouched for now (as cart - front, not changing it to fanart yet either) they do look real enough, had me fooled the first few pages, but they all look the same and clearly come from a template that somebody made... and i have to say i don't LOVE how they look, the top right not showing the grooves just weirds me out a bit, other than that they are nice and high res and certainly better than the fallback options i got. I have 2 other sets of EU carts, one is tiny pictures (i'm sure everybody hates those) that i'd rather not use at all but it is better than nothing and if you just look at it as front end icon you can even just about get away with it without noticing (if you use them for any kind of loading screen where they are displayed bigger, it would be noticeably getting blurry). in fact those are two different sets, one is 301x210 the other 275x192 but i think the 301x210 one just used the smaller ones and scaled them up a bit, either way both are TINY and you don't notice a visual difference once they are in the frontend... no idea why anyone would go through the trouble of making a set like this and then make it at such a tiny resolution where you can't even read the text on closer inspection the other EU set that i very much prefer looks like this (and looks the same as the JAP carts i got), only problem is i think they only made these for games that have no US cart at all, so it is "incomplete" if you do not use US as your primary version in LaunchBox. JAP region is generally far more incomplete (and naming is a bitch, i don't speak the language, why can't we just all stick with the No-Intro naming on these for consistency? *sigh*) but anyway i add these where i can: there are also the tiny carts available, same as EU for JAP that i use as fallback option here and there AND there is an even worse fallback option for Jap carts, that i only use as a "last resort". Those look very much "painted" and are kinda low res too. Still better than nothing. Oh and US carts i replace with these higher res versions a lot. I am also tagging these reconstructed carts as "Fanart"... i've seen some people in the past weeks REPLACE what is clearly fanart in the DB with photgraphs (not cut, no transparent BG, sometimes just plain bad ugly pictures i wouldn't want to have in my Frontend to begin with but the motto seems to be higher resolution = better by default with some people, so i'm hoping by tagging these as fanart they won't be replaced with photos from ebay in the future), they should be treated as entirely different categories if you ask me, so that is what i'm doing (and the moderators generally accept when i change it to fanart so i think i'm on the right track with that and i did that for a few other systems i updated previously (GameBoy Color for example) as well and nobody complained there either, i just wanted to say it out loud so maybe other users will start doing it that way too but it is clear that new users would always upload this stuff as cart front and not think twice about it being reconstructed fanart, some very few of which even has actual fanart as sticker that doesn't match the real thing). I'd prefer the term "reconstructed" (or "reconstructed - clear") like there is with Box Front Reconstructed but that is not an option in the DB so i'm sticking with "Fanart" (i mean i'd just rename the category, no need to add another one only to re-tag the entire LBDB, that'd be dumb). Updating 3D Boxes with what is currently available. US has recently received a nice authentic set (but i'm leaving the already existing 3D boxes intact, nothing wrong with them, i'm not replacing them as some people may prefer the old set's cleaner digital look, if you guys decide to kick the old ones out, that is on you, but i'm also not uploading the missing ones of those ...what i DO delete are these old weirdly angled ones, i'm sure you know which ones i mean, everybody hates those, right?). for EU there is a set that looks like this that i rarely see being uploaded, so i'm uploading these (note the spine is generic, not authentic but since there is only text and the nintendo seal on the left side for EU boxes i don't see a big problem with that); the authentic set from before also covers some EU exclusive games, again not every game so this may be a bit inconsistent, you may see me uploading both variants where available (so you can chose yourself what to keep after scraping). for the jap region Super Famicom boxes i have 2 sets, that look a little bit different, i upload both of them as there is not one set that is objectively "better" than the other, they both look fine and they both are not really complete sets, one covers games that the other doesn't and so on... so sometimes you will see two 3D Jap boxes for one game of both styles but often only one or the other. (sometimes the spines have different artwork, i can't find an example right now, but i am NOT gonna bother double checking which is more "authentic", somebody put in effort to make these so they are both worth having if you ask me, even if sometimes one is a bit more "fanart" than the other). I just added the US 3D cart set to my Media folder, they are uploaded already it seems, but i've been adding region tags on every page i went through so far and maybe i can plug a few holes if there are any while i'm at it. I know there is a JAP 3D cart set on Emu Movies that you can scrape (good luck with the naming inconsistencies though), but it is not in their download section on the website (or i'm blind) which is weird... (i'm not a huge fan of 3D carts myself, but i guess i can plug some holes there too while i'm at it). //edit: it seems like somebody only went through pages 1+2 to add them and just after writing this he gave up on it at page 3, so i've been adding a ton of these for the last 6 pages now. and for the record: i try to avoid uploading versions that clearly do not even exist, like if there is only one EU cart picture but nothing else EU in my search results or in the LBDB already i check in my LaunchBox if there is even an EU rom and if there is not then i skip that one (same if there was only a EU version release and no US, then i skip the US picture). Some will of course slip through or have already been uploaded by others, i won't bother deleting them. end of edit// Why bother with JAP and EU artwork? Well first i'm from the EU myself (germany), so i want the EU stuff to look good for myself, especially the EU exclusive ones (i still set US as primary and play everything in english). For JAP games i recently started adding fan translated roms (i finally found a way that doesn't require me to patch them one by one, see https://romhackdb.com/ ). In general i think if we want to see more EU and JAP users for LaunchBox, who may not be using US as their primary region, then we should do some ground work in the database so it is not a complete mess when you import an EU or JAP only set... or they do it once and say "this is crap" and look for something else. And without EU and JAP users we won't get EU and JAP database moderators that can fix the errors or add content... chicken and the egg problem / when you build it they will come. (and lets be real, SNES is the one most popular retro system for a ton of people, this has to be as good as possible for the first impression if nothing else). Workflow: i'm going through the database "as is" from page to page, i will not be adding any missing games right now, i'm not keeping a checklist of what i uploaded and what i didn't, so i'm making no guarantees that there aren't some oversights here and there. I downloaded all pictures in a folder and am using the search function to find art for each game from all the sub folders at once, so naming inconsistencies (JAP games!!!) may cause me to miss a few here and there if nothing matches but otherwise i'll never get through all of it. If anybody has some comments / suggestions / artwork i'm missing, now is the time to tell me ? And if you want to help making SNES look good, well have at it. (maybe let me know so we are not screwing around in the same corner at the same time). Just moderating so the changes go through fast will help as well of course.
  19. If this is just about the new default theme, you can go to Options > Visuals and select the Old Default theme or whatever custom theme you used before (i strongly suggest "Bad Old Monkey" it is practically the old default minus a lot of wasted space between stuff). I'm not a fan of the new default either.
  20. it would be nice if we could see and edit the region of the picture like we can in the database.
  21. ok, true but explain that to the moderators who press the reject button
  22. MAME has added a new Turtles game to it's set and there is no DB entry for it yet. I want to add it but i'm not sure where in the DB because it is not really an "Arcade" game but one of these Plug & Play TV games... there is no extra category for those either. MAME also has those Nintendo Game & Watch LCD games, those do have an extra category in the DB of their own. https://turtlepedia.fandom.com/wiki/Teenage_Mutant_Ninja_Turtles:_Battle_for_the_City Do i just add this to the Arcade section so it can be found when importing the MAME set or what do i do?
  23. I only really noticed this behavior with retro consoles that do have one fixed native resolution. For modern consoles and PC that would of course be ridiculous because there is no real native resolution.
  24. The thing is if the screenshots are at native resolution and scale up to whatever the screensize of the picture in LaunchBox is, it will still look sharp no matter what, so the high resolution is not really required, unless you want to look at it in full screen mode, which isn't really the point. You can have a screenshot at 1080p and a scaled up 256x240 picture and they will look identical but the 1080p screenshot will obviously require quite a bit more storage and with tens of thousands of roms that just bloats up the install folder size of LaunchBox.... so there is a bit of pro and con for you to consider. Personally i only reject screenshots if the game already has a ton of screenshots and it is getting to silly levels (2 to 4 is absolutely enough, there is no need for 10 or so screenshots), or if i see black lines from a 4:3 game screenshotted in 16:9, that would only result in letterboxing, those i always delete when i stumble over them. I don't think there are any hard rules for the resolution of screenshots.
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