Z3R0B4NG

For Videos you have an option "Tools > Audit [System Name]" that will spit out a spreadsheet, you scroll a bit to the right and click once on the column "video path" and it sorts all the empty entries to the top, now you got all the games with missing videos neatly sorted to the top. I then use the EmuMovies FTP Server and look for the missing videos by hand (you need to have donated to them to get access to their Server). ...well i did this ONCE and it worked well enough. You can do the same with music files i guess. But i don't see manuals in that audit list. LaunchBox is awesome, it finds like 90 - 99% of the good stuff, it just gets tedious for the last few % where it doesn't, exponentially so with the growing size of the collection.

Not quite correct @neil9000 the No-Intro naming scheme for example has "Legend of Zelda, The" while LBDB has it as "The Legend of Zelda", small stuff like this can already throw off the matching process. (this stuff i usually end up adding as alternate title and is easy enough to figure out quickly on your own, just tedious to go through if there are many like that in a system) Redump often includes Disney or Disney-Pixar as the first bit of a games name which then often won't match LBDB. (just working through PS1 games has a ton of none matches just because of this alone). What i didn't consider and just realized is that many of my mismatches are because i also import Euro and maybe worse German versions, those are less likely to be matched because the naming can differ wildly and you probably have way less German users that moderate the DB than US based users. V-Rally 2 on the PS1 for example was "Need for Speed: V-Rally 2" in the US because it was published by EA.... (just for lols: the Dreamcast version of the game was published under the Test Drive Series, again by a different Publisher, i just find that funny as those Series have usually been seen as rivals.). That is the kind of stuff that is a bit harder to find matching entries for and even requires checking Wikipedia pages sometimes (in fact there were 2 entries for the same game and i needed to merge those and delete the obsolete Euro one after that, that one will be matched properly next time, you're welcome ? ). Maybe i just expected if the full No-Intro / Redump dats were worked with instead that all region variants would automagically be covered by that approach as well. But yeah, somebody would probably still need to manually match the odd stuff (but at least more eyeballs would be on it and we would have a list of stuff that is missing to work through).

The Problem: The Launchbox GamesDB Naming scheme doesn't always match what No-Intro or REDUMP use for filenames. Some rules in the naming convention are drastically different, some files may have minor spelling errors or include or not include some words (if somebody uses the old "GOOD" sets its much worse with spelling errors)... Leading numbers in filenames are a huge pain to deal with. LaunchBox doesn't detect the correct DB entry for games when names don't match, even EmuMovies doesn't always have identical naming so some games that are covered over there are still not scraped while importing here. How i deal with it for now: I always add the filenames of not detected roms to the LBDB as alternate names as i stumble upon them, if i or someone else imports the same rom again they will hopefully be detected properly next time and i hope that i'm not the only one doing this. It would be slightly more helpful if there were options like No-Intro or Redump in the drop down menu for the language selection. Or maybe just some universal "ROM DETECTION" option. Just so the next guy working on that same entry doesn't delete it again thinking it doesn't match our naming scheme or is a spelling error, but understands that it has a reason for being there. Feature Request: BEST would be of course if the Launchbox Devs could find a way to utilize the popular .dat files and somehow merge them with the LBDB. Result 1: better match accuracy, as most users will be using No-Intro and Redump sets anyway (GOOD? TOSEC?) and use the .dat files to build their collections. Result 2: as the hash values are part of the .dat files, it should be possible to not only match by filename but by hash value as well, which will be 100% accurate instead of the guesswork that sometimes goes into matching by name. (as i understand it, LaunchBox would not even need to run a hash check on every file, which could take a lot of time, AFAIK the crc values are included in zip and rar files which makes the scanning process a lot faster). additional thoughts: The .dat files would occasionally require to be updated as No-Intro and Redump are of course ongoing projects that get new dump data on a daily basis (maybe the dev's can figure out a way to automate this, maybe some cooperation with the various projects is possible or maybe allow users to upload .dat files unless that could break stuff to be as hands off as possible). There would be no need to clean up old data or bad dumps or even hacked dumps (fan translations etc.) as people might still be using outdated sets (GOOD) and it is not LaunchBoxes job to keep the Users collection clean or up-to-date but to find matching metadata and pretty pictures, so only the new data would need adding. The initial matching between .dat and LBDB could be done by the existing algorithm that matches by name, what isn't matched would need to be manually linked, this is something the users could do if a web interface is added in form of a new Tab in the LaunchBox Database moderation interface. I think it should be pretty important for the LaunchBox Dev's to find a way to do this somehow as it would effectively increase the match rate to as close as 100% as possible (i mean not every game was dumped in a .dat file yet, not every dumped game or media has a matching LBDB entry etc.). ...i can only imagine it should be easier to implement this (maybe more tedious) than to deal with the mess that importing MAME was, i have no clue how anyone can even make sense of that stuff. This stuff just keeps spinning in my head, i would love to hear what you guys think. Would this be doable? Are there some big roadblocks i'm not aware of?

The Problem is when Steam Link goes to the Desktop it emulates the mouse input on the right analog stick, shoulder buttons are mouse clicks and more stuff like that, basically you can't use the Gamepad as gamepad with anything else except for the .exe files that are directly launched through Steam. So i add BigBox.exe as Steam game and BigBox works fine with the Xbox or the 8bitdo SF30 Pro. BUT any emulator that LaunchBox then starts is not launched directly by Steam so the gamepad goes into this mouse mode and everything goes bonkers. I found this tool called OSOL Origin Steam Overlay Launcher ( https://github.com/WombatFromHell/OriginSteamOverlayLauncher/releases ) ...where you can select the .exe file of a launcher and the game (in this case emulator), i had SOME success with this (i got F-Zero to recognize the Xbox 360 pad), but it is far from the way it is supposed to work... i started BigBox, clicked on F-Zero and it started but wouldn't work, so i exited out of RetroArch and then BigBox again and NOW OSOL starts RetroArch again, in the main menu and suddenly F-Zero was there and working with the Pad... ...there has to be a better way to do this.

OK, so now i have the next stupid AF problem. The SFC30 is now properly connected in Xinput mode, but RetroArch does not see the D-Pad anymore by default, i have to go into the config and re-bind it. (so whoever made the default config for the SFC30 pad for RA made the same silly mistake of connecting it wrong that i did !? ) ...after that it works fine. It even still works when i disconnect it and connect the SF30 PRO without it messing up, so the config is saved per pad, which is good so the on the fly swapping isn't broken by this. PROBLEM is, when i restart retro arch it has forgotten the config again and i have to do it all over again. Each time i start a game through Big Box. I pressed the save config button in the RA main menu (i want the pads to work globally with every core, so i change the input config in the main menu, for some reason RA has the keybind settings in the main menu AND in the quick menu for the game/core, i guess so you can change it on a per game basis? ...makes sense for N64 i guess)... anyway i restart retroarch and the keybinds are just forgotten, what the hell am i doing wrong now?

Yeah i didn't think about budget stuff, i don't upgrade my CPU that often and when i do i make sure it's at least nice mid range and can overclock well so all boards i had contact with were at least better mid-range boards with overclocking options. I just assumed that this stuff is so small and cheap now that the lower end stuff would have it by default as well. TIL ...

oh, welp, ok...

I just use the Bluetooth that came with the Motherboard, anything up to 5 years old should have Bluetooth on-board already, at least for Windows there should be no dongle required unless you are using some ancient system. (check your manual, chances are it is just disabled in your BIOS) I only bought a Bluetooth dongle for my super old 90's PC that i wanted to use for DOS + Win9x games with Voodoo 3 2000 and some EAX soundcard etc. but then never went for it (some day!), i made sure the driver was compatible with Win 95/98 and tried it once and it was a PITA to setup because you needed to pair it each time you wanted to use it. (i had the silly idea to use that retro PC also for emulation, that was a few months before i actually got into emulation and found out how the entire scene exploded over the past few years, now i'm using my 5GHz 7700K gaming PC of course [single threaded speed is still king]). ok back to the 8bitdo pads. i noticed i set most of them up so they turn on when i just press Start, that starts them as Generic Bluetooth Gamepad, if i press X + Start it starts them as X Input Device and A+B are the correct way around... next problem was that RetroArch then decided to not see the D-Pad on the SFC30 so i fiddled around with config options there again... but i think i got it now. Only annoyance is that now i have to double check all my gamepads and from now on i have to start them all, EXCEPT for the SFC30 PRO by pressing X + Start or they won't connect. The Nintendo 64 pad (i hate that thing, just bought it as a joke because its so terrible and for the 3 times a year i want to emulate N64 as shitty as it originally was ) ... doesn't have an X button though, not sure how to get that one connected into Xinput mode... if anybody would happen to know that. That would be nice. Another thing i noticed is that both 8bitdo Pads that have analog sticks use the D-Pad as P.O.V. hat in the windows config, the other 2 pads that don't have sticks use the D-Pad as analog input like sticks instead... i guess that is what is throwing Retro Arch off. (i just hope i don't have to config that for each core now... ugh that would suck)

Ahoy... i have a bunch of retro controllers, i swap between them on the fly in Big Box and Retro Arch (works almost flawlessly out of the box, very convenient) to be specific i have the SF30 PRO and the SFC30 (...AND THEN SOME) both SNES styled pads. the issue i am having is that the A and B button keybinds react reversed on both controllers within Big Box. i press B on the SF30 PRO and it goes forward / starts the game i press B on the SFC30 and it backs out of the current menu. A is also reversed. this is a bit irritating when swapping between pads on the fly, especially since the facebuttons are identical on these 2 pads (i could understand when the ABXY buttons are in a different order, like on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation pads, that stuff is just a mess). i'm not sure how to trouble shoot this right now... but for starters it would be good to know if i can change the keybinds in Big Box for one pad without it applying to the other? keep in mind those are bluetooth pads, i connect and disconnect them on the fly so only one is visible to the PC at the same time.

good info on 3, thanks, i have not done anything with that function yet but i've seen it before, will have to dig into that.

OK, i finally got my Big Box license, i got my premium Emu Movies account. I selected a few systems and did let it scrape everything it could find. So far so good but i noticed a few weird things. - 1: There seem to be 2 different types of videos, the normal gameplay videos from Emu Movies and then there are "Theme" videos which look like they are supposed to be used as background video only. Those seem quite rare and i think they come from LaunchBox, not Emu Movies? But with the default Theme that Big Bix comes with (i have not fooled around with custom themes yet) these videos are both played in the same spot, either the background OR in the game details screen, whichever i select in the video options. I can only tell it to prefer theme videos or not but is it possible at all to play the theme video in the background AND the gameplay video in the detail window at the same time? or does that depend on the theme? How do i get Big Box to differentiate between the two and only use each the proper one in the proper place? - 2: i noticed a weird glitch with the default Big Box theme. If i set the videos to play in the background and then scroll over the list of games, some games do not have videos so the gameplay screenshot appears in the game details (as it should), but then i select the next game, which again has a video that appears in the background, that gameplay screenshot from the last game won't go away. ...i'm not using it like that, i just noticed the glitch and thought it might be worth reporting. - 3: how do you best manage the downloaded videos and music files within Big Box / LaunchBox? I don't see anything in the Edit dialog. And is there some convenient way to tell which games have missing audio/video media so i can manually go search for it? (not everything that is on Emu Movies is detected by LaunchBox, there are always some mismatches because of weird naming scheme differences, how would i best go about finding those?).

Yes they do affect each other, at least with the default theme that LaunchBox comes with, i have the exact same Situation as OP and his description is 100% on point. Big Box itself doesn't seem to have options to change the background as far as i can tell, only Videos can be enabled/disabled. Maybe you are using a custom theme that acts differently?

I've been using GoodTools for a few weeks now, i'm starting to think that the project is dead and outdated, last update on the official blog was 2 years ago and i've found a few errors with the rom naming that are bad enough to throw launchbox off from detecting the proper database entry. But there are a few things i really like about it, like sorting the roms into different folders depending on region, if its a hacked rom or a bad dump and things like that. So when i import roms into LaunchBox i only import the folders with the perfect dumps in my languages while i can still "collect" the other more weird stuff on HDD. It also detects bad dumps and dupes which seems important. There have to be similar up-to-date tools for No-Intro or HyperSpin naming schemes that can do the same? The ultimate goal is of course as well that LaunchBox detects the proper DB entries and that EmuMovies finds the proper media when scraping. So if somebody could teach me a better way of sorting through this stuff, that'd be nice.

I got a little problem here, first of all i LIKE when the intro screens play for each system, i know there is a Skip Bios option but i would prefer to not have to use that. (it is bad enough when i start to overclock the emulator's cpu and bump up the resolution and use the widescreen hack and some other settings that the bios screen just crashes RetroArch and i have to disable it then... but that i only do for per-game configs on a few specific games, i want the standard config to look like the PS1 did (accuracy) and that should include the Bios intro screen thingy playing properly) specifics: RetroArch, core: mednafen_psx_hw_libretro.dll the RetroArch page here ( https://buildbot.libretro.com/.docs/library/beetle_psx_hw/ ) tells you what bios files are required by each core and i checked the hash values, they all match, so i should have the correct bios files. The actual Problem is, the Sony Text here shows up for a second, then the text and that top triangle in the graphic suddenly disappear, the intro sound keeps playing normally, it stays like this for a second or two and then the text and upper triangle re-appear as if nothing happened. This glitch happens all the time when i start any game, but sometimes it randomly doesn't when i'm fiddling with options and it restarts the core/game while RetroArch is still running, i have yet to nail down what the culprit for this weird glitch is. It drives me nuts, maybe one of you guys had to deal with this before? I don't know what search terms to google for to find this specific error either...

for the record: the Bitcoin thing is also not happening, turns out that is an old option on the Music Box App website, which needs updating and Stripe stopped supporting Bitcoin.

OK, i finally caved and signed a credit card contract just now... 36€ per year for a pre-paid card, should be arriving sometime this or next week. Big Box better be worth the hassle, because i seriously would not need it otherwise.

might this be something worth scraping for LaunchBox?

I'm currently adding Nintendo 3DS games to the Database as i have worked with Robin55 to make about 100 new 3DS 3D Box artwork and am still adding more for later ( https://emumovies.com/files/category/2099-artwork/ ), most of those games aren't in the DB at all yet. (i search and throw pictures at him, he makes the 3D Box art out of them. I get new 3D Boxes for MY collection and add them to the DB here as i go through my list etc. win win) Especially the eShop stuff is very hit and miss as there are no real "covers" in that sense, there are only those pictures on the eShop sites and i find plenty of 3D Box art has already crept in with nintendolife (.) com watermarks, i'm trying to find better versions of those pictures as well to clean those up a bit while i'm at it. So, the eShop games are pretty obvious, just a little confusing sometimes when you don't actually know when and where something was released in digital or retail format or both... but whatever. The problems start when we are talking "Virtual Console" games. First of all is the question, does it even make sense to emulate GameBoy and NES roms through Virtual Console eShop roms through Citra when you can just use the actual Game Boy or NES roms with the according emulators? ...probably not. But since those roms are out there and available i guess we should have entries for them in the DB anyway? (opinions?) I just found a ROM for Donkey Kong that is available as NES and as GameBoy version. https://www.nintendo.de/Spiele/NES/Donkey-Kong-780429.html https://www.nintendo.de/Spiele/Game-Boy/Donkey-Kong-275550.html how would you differentiate between those 2 in the DB in a way that LaunchBox would still find the proper entry but complies with LaunchBox DB's naming convention? Or ...should i just not waste my time with those Virtual Console titles?

Sometimes when i submit something, the moderation queue will tell me later that 3 moderators approved and one rejected. It would be nice if i could read the reason that was given by that one guy. Is he full of donkey poop? Did he spot an error and i should fix something? i'll never know.

...well .co.uk isn't an option anyway, that Amazon Pay buttons sends you to .com I just remember that .co.uk didn't accept PayPal that one time 5 years ago when i wanted to import some game that was censored over here or something like that. I would never import something from the US either, those shipping prices are freaking insane (fun fact, importing stuff from Asia via Plane to here is cheaper then sending stuff here locally by car. I did import region free Xbox 360 games all the time, takes a bit longer, 2 or 3 weeks, but saved a lot of money and no giant USK logo on the DVD box either.). BitCoin would probably do the trick. The option is already there on that Music Box App, so it shouldn't be unreasonable to add it to the Launch Box site as well.

pre paid credit cards apparently also cost a yearly fee here, that would only get rid of the schufa checking thing. (there are some free offers when you look online but they apparently come with hidden cost like having a giro account that then will cost money etc.) I'm just seeing that Music Box Alpha accepts BitCoin... i've never done anything with BitCoin but i could look into how that works if that option was added for LaunchBox. (i'm assuming BitCoin is less of a PITA to deal with).

oh... ok, that sucks big time. Well, maybe somebody can then work with me in some other way? I could send a amazon.com gift code for example if that would be acceptable? Any other suggestions are fine with me.

Please add some payment option(s) for the Big Box License that do not require a credit card. In Germany those things are used very little (if i said i could use a CC like once every 3 years, that would be overstating things), they cost a yearly fee and i'm not willing to pay that or sign any contracts, i also don't like the idea of them checking my SCHUFA status just so i can buy a piece of software online (not that there is anything wrong with that, i just don't like the idea of people digging through my data for what should be a simple transaction). I do have a PayPal account (millions of users have, works worldwide, i honestly don't get how you can ignore that) and last time i checked regular Bank transactions with IBAN/BIC work internationally (i don't know if world wide or just EU wide), those are the two payment options i can offer, if you got any other ideas that don't include a credit card or some stupid yearly fee i'm all ears. As for that "Amazon pay" button, that sends me to Amazon.com, Amazon.de accepts paypal just fine but Amazon.com (and also .co.uk) again insists on a credit card. I can buy Amazon.com gift cards with PayPal, so i could in theory get money onto that .com account to buy stuff without actually owning a CC, but that gift card money does not work with Amazon pay... i guess i'm not the only one who has that idea, they have it written down in their FAQ after all (i mean frequently asked questions ;P i can't be the only one then...).

i build myself a little NAS recently as well (and with little i mean TINY, only 4TB storage, i really need to buy more and bigger HDDs and get this thing to a level where it deserves the name "storage server", but you gotta start somewhere and the old HDDs i had still around were that starting point). First i looked into FreeNAS, i do NOT recommend. The "Free" in the name attracts a lot of attention but there are a few things that really aren't good for home users at all. Starting with HDDs, you can't simply add drives to your array. In the according reddit they will verbally lynch you if you even suggest turning the system off for longer amounts of time because the file system is ZFS and it constantly tests the storage for "bit rot"... don't even dare suggest a stanb-by mode when idle... i don't want a Server at home that has 10 HDDs spinning 24/7. I want my Server to spin down drives that are idle for noise reduction and i want to be able to add a HDD here and there as i need to expand, without losing my data on the entire array. Also i turn the thing off when not used, i have it OFF for sometimes up to 3 months because it is literally just a data dump for me, with some redundancy. unRAID can do all that, and much much more while being super user friendly. Now FreeNAS has better data security of course, but for the home user having a Parity Disk that can rebuild a dead drive's data on a new drive is really all that is required anyway... what is the worst that can happen with bit rot? a single file with a CRC error? a short flicker in a 10GB movie file? All of that stuff can be replaced, i just don't want to lose multiple TB of data if a single drive fails. The only real rule with unRAID is that the parity disk has to be the largest disk or same size as the largest disk in the system, it won't work with a smaller disk. And you probably want to use a motherboard that has plenty of at least SATA 2 ports (mine has 8) so you can use plenty of HDDs without resorting to PCI extension cards instantly. Using a Fractal R5 case, that has solid build quality for the HDD cages, no vibrating or anything and the case has noise dampening as well PLUS the ability to spin down drive when idle ...as long as you don't have any screeching HDDs the server will run relatively silently. unRAID also has a vibrant community that creates plugins (think like Chrome/Firefox browser plugins), if you can think of something that you want to do with it, somebody probably already wrote that plugin and you just need to find it. Pro Tip: DO NOT (ever for anything!) use Molex to SATA power adapters! Those are known to catch fire frequently, you don't want your storage server to go up in flames because of some cheap shitty mass produced cable. Best get a PSU that has enough SATA power connectors for the project, or do your homework which adapter cables are quality and which aren't.

wow... that is quite the warehouse half those systems i've never seen in person.