RocketLauncher

[AladdinSane]

The RocketLauncher setup is standard. Really there are 2 components here, getting things setup in RLUI, meaning you can go to a system and launch a ROM using RL. Setting up the emulators and such through RL is covered in a few places. The challenge is getting LaunchBox to integrate with RL. Here you can see how Launchbox is in the Front End section of RLUI: However, all the systems are setup in RLUI, and you can only see them when that is selected as the default/active FE. Once you get these setup, you should not have to change it to this state, however. Here is my Manage Emulators box. You can see I do not manage everything through RL as of now. That's just a personal preference. I mainly use RL to run anything in Retroarch and manage the shader/configs per system. Here is the Edit Emulator screen: Here is the heart of it, the Associated Platforms that has the command-line to pass to invoke RL, which then knows what config files and emulators to load. I hope this helps. Any Rocket Launcher config guide should be able to help configure your systems on that side, it is agnostic to what you use to call it. Just think of it as a big traffic cop that sits in the middle directing traffic. Once you can successfully launch games using RLUI, it is just a matter of directing Launchbox to call RL instead of the native emulator. If you need anymore screenshots or help, let me know. I'll be busy all day Saturday, but I should be able to post more on Sunday.

[Jason Carr]

WOOT! Thank you @AladdinSane, that's a huge help. I think I'll put a blog post up for this soon. :D

[AladdinSane]

Jason Carr said WOOT! Thank you @AladdinSane, that's a huge help. I think I'll put a blog post up for this soon. :D

Great! Let me know if you need anything else!

[hadokenpower]

Please forgive me for possibly seeming daft here. But could someone please list the adavantages/reasons one would want to integrate RL with LaunchBox? Im not seeing what makes it worth the hassle when LB seems to handle my needs quite well?

[SentaiBrad]

Sorry if I offend anyone with this, but quite honestly no, I do not see any reason Rocket Launcher even needs to be anywhere near LaunchBox. The only thing it does really is do some metadata management (which LaunchBox does and is getting better at) and Archive Decompression (which is also on the list anyways). The decompression is the only thing I see people constantly saying they are missing from Rocket Launcher and I personally and honestly think that is BS. An NES game in an archive is not saving you any reasonable amount of space and is just adding in another layer that can also potentially corrupt or jumble data over time with being compressed, decompressed, recompressed etc. PS2, PS1, DS, Gamecube etc games can benefit from compression but then performance can deteriorate. PSP, PS2, Gamecube and Wii games all have a special compressed container that they all use. On Gamecube and Wii it's less compression and more removing the junk data from a disc so that a 4.9GB ISO is just the size of the game (in the case of Wii) or so a 1.4GB disc (gamecube) is just the size of the game. PSP and PS2 games I hardly find at full disc size so what these two use are compression. I made Dark Cloud 2 go from 4.7GB to 2.6GB. This type of compression is a little different... First It's not being decompressed and recompressed so the chance of losing data is really only the once. Performance can also be improved greatly and the CSO container format doesn't lose that much to performance if any in some cases. The only draw back is that a few games can't be converted to a CSO because they won't function correctly. On PSP, GTA Stories need to stay uncompressed. After that, I see no reason at all why RL should be added as another layer quite honestly. Again, I am sorry if that pisses someone off but adding more points of failure for minuscule and outright dumb "enhancements" is really a bad idea to me. Let me also say that I've been convinced of other programs in the past not seeing why someone would want to use something, and they've convinced me why it is good in their case and if you are totally ok with using Rocket Launcher then more power to you, but I don't see anything it does better over LB.

[SentaiBrad]

Also (again sorry) but I do post this knowing that will annoy someone, and that is totally fine. However, I do also think of these forums as a place where we can talk about this stuff and where two people have differing opinions. Derek and I have differed on threads in the past and I would still call us friends. :P With the exception of a few posts recently that have pissed me off because people are dicks for no reason, I do still believe our forums and our community is great in the fact that we are not an A-Typical forum in the vast ether of anon dicks. Edit: I even thanked you, and I never thank anyone! I still think that this has value to people who hell or high water want to make Rocket Launcher work, which again is still fine.

[CriticalCid]

RL can extract games from 7z, zip or rar files when you start a game. So you can compress your games even if an emulator don’t support these file formats. And no there is absolutely no loss in performance. It just adds at game start some loading time for you to wait until it’s decompressed. It even deletes the temporary extracted files when you quit the game. It also features a customizable fade in and fade out when you start or exit a game, has a pretty decent bezel support for all emulators, features automatically ISO mount and de-mount with Deamon Tools and supports individual xpadder profiles for single games or whole platforms. Furthermore it has a feature called HyperPause. With HP you can pause every emulator even if the emulator doesn’t support it by itself and within the pause menu you can view manuals, guides, etc. Some frontends like HyperSpin need RocketLauncher to work properly. So when former HyperSpin users switch to LaunchBox it’s just more comfortable for them to use their already set up RL then configure everything again in LaunchBox.

[AladdinSane]

CriticalCid said RL can extract games from 7z, zip or rar files when you start a game. So you can compress your games even if an emulator don’t support these file formats. And no there is absolutely no loss in performance. It just adds at game start some loading time for you to wait until it’s decompressed. It even deletes the temporary extracted files when you quit the game. It also features a customizable fade in and fade out when you start or exit a game, has a pretty decent bezel support for all emulators, features automatically ISO mount and de-mount with Deamon Tools and supports individual xpadder profiles for single games or whole platforms. Furthermore it has a feature called HyperPause. With HP you can pause every emulator even if the emulator doesn’t support it by itself and within the pause menu you can view manuals, guides, etc. Some frontends like HyperSpin need RocketLauncher to work properly. So when former HyperSpin users switch to LaunchBox it’s just more comfortable for them to use their already set up RL then configure everything again in LaunchBox.

Yep, for me, I already had it setup for Hyperspin, but then HyperPause, the fades and the bezels are a big draw for me.

[SentaiBrad]

The Pause I could see being a cool feature, but of the emulators I do use I don't need it... I do kind of want to like RL because it looks cool.

[DOS76]

It sounds like if you are coming over from Hyperspin and you already set it all up then yeah why wouldn't you use it, but for someone who has never used it and already has all of their ROMs decompressed with little interest in bezels why bother. Sort of how I feel about RetroArch which sounds cool and full of features but do I really need them compared to what I already have spent time setting up

[SentaiBrad]

Yea I guess it was a very similar deal with RA. Except RA has clear improvements over some emulators and I do believe the swap there is more practical. I also personally like it all being in one locations. One set of configs, one set of options and the automatic reading of my PS4 controller. The difference in this case though I think is that LaunchBox is already too damn similar to Rocket Launcher and the few "missing" features can easily get added in and will be added in the future.

[kmoney]

I feel like Rocketlauncher is very beneficial and I have used it for many years with hyperspin,retrofe and now launchbox. I have mine set up perfect for myself with all the emulators already setup. These features have already been mentioned but being able to use bezels,fade and pause support and have your emulators all set up in one place and configured how you want them is amazing. Already having RL setup, it has made setting up launchbox a breeze for me because all my emulators have been setup already along with everything pointed correctly at files and folders. Especially for someone who uses multiple frontends you just point RL at the frontend and you are all setup. To me LB and RL are a perfect match and I love using the setup together. RL is not all that hard to setup once you get your feet wet with it and is being actively developed for. It has a great wiki page to help you get started. Check it out and look at some of the features to see if any of them interest you.

[fromlostdays]

Rocketlauncher is by no means necessary for Launchbox. The Launches are surprisingly clean, actually. But there are a ton of bells and whistles that, if you're into messing with emulation as much as emulating games, like me, it doesn't make sense not to use it. As a launcher its really incredible. And the devs mold it around each individual emulator. For instance, I have over 100 different configs in my RA folder. RL automatically launches whatever config I tell it to with RA on a per system basis. Though I use the same core for SNES and NES, they launch with different configs. All I had to do to make this happen was name them differently. It might not seem like much but I juggle a lot of systems, and before RA, used to juggle a lot of different emulators. RL also doesn't just decompress a game. For instance, when I launch a PS1 game, RL puts a fade in progress bar on my screen to track the percentage, unzips the bin/cue onto a flash drive, if it is a multi disk game generates an m3u file and launches that through RA so I can swap disks within the emulator. It could delete the bin/cue/m3u file afterwards if I told it to. (I'm not very computer savvy but I wanted to spare my hard drive the writes and rewrites.) And I mean, yeah, I already have it set up, so why wouldn't I want to utilize it through LaunchBox? Having said that, I'm writing up a little tutorial on how to set up RL easily and how to integrate it with launchbox. Should I not post it on the forums? Integration is surprisingly easy actually. Going from having neither program installed to having LaunchBox using RL to launch a game takes less than 15 minutes.

[DOS76]

No you should definitely post it, just because I don't use it or really have an desire too doesn't mean that I would ever try to discouraging any type of idea and information sharing on the forum that is what it is all about. Like Brad said last night this is a forum where we are all free to express our opinions even when they conflicting.

[Jason Carr]

DOS76 said It sounds like if you are coming over from Hyperspin and you already set it all up then yeah why wouldn't you use it, but for someone who has never used it and already has all of their ROMs decompressed with little interest in bezels why bother. Sort of how I feel about RetroArch which sounds cool and full of features but do I really need them compared to what I already have spent time setting up

Yeah, this is the point. I don't recommend people work at setting everything up with Rocket Launcher for new collections. However, the reason why it's so important is that there are lots of people with existing setups that already work flawlessly through Rocket Launcher. We have many people who are coming from Hyperspin who have labored over their setups to make them perfect, and keeping Rocket Launcher makes the transition much, much easier.

[Jason Carr]

fromlostdays, very much looking forward to seeing your tutorial, thanks. :)

[SentaiBrad]

fromlostdays said RL also doesn't just decompress a game. For instance, when I launch a PS1 game, RL puts a fade in progress bar on my screen to track the percentage, unzips the bin/cue onto a flash drive, if it is a multi disk game generates an m3u file and launches that through RA so I can swap disks within the emulator. It could delete the bin/cue/m3u file afterwards if I told it to. (I'm not very computer savvy but I wanted to spare my hard drive the writes and rewrites.)

To me that is performance loss though. If the game takes 2 to 10 min to load (depending on size and drive speed) isn't that considered a loss? Not to mention decompression takes drive writes each time too. So why not eat the slightly extra space (can also depend on the game) and cut out the middle man? If you are super super pressed on space I could get that though. This is ignoring the pause and bezels which I personally know I can do without. The only compression I do is .cso's for PSP and PS2 games but they don't require decompression. Yea making the transition makes sense, but booting RL up out of the blue seems like it's not going to add much if anything to make the time worth it. Also please do post the tutorial, don't ever feel like you can't post something like that here. :P

[djvj]

AladdinSane, very nice tutorial! Thank you. SentaiBrad, RL does so much that it would be hard to sit here and sum up everything. Fromlostdays mentioned on only a few things it can do. If you have never used it before, then I can understand the hesitation from the outside looking in. Let me know what other launcher handles multidisc games from within the emu? Ever played a game that requires you to swap discs w/o shutting down? RL can do that. Ever want to view a guide within the game while playing it or take screenshots that automatically get saved to your artwork? Want to control the order of controller IDs in windows because you want to keep them all plugged in have that order customized for each system? Like your aimtraks as ID0 and ID1 when you launch gun games? Want all your games compressed and only the most popular ones uncompressed so they load faster on subsequent launches to save on space? I could go on all night like this, but I have development to do Just get your feet wet and you'll understand why so many use it.

[DOS76]

I know that Gens Plus is capable of doing so for Sega CD games and that you can do so with SSF by hitting open then loading the second disc to Daemon tools and then using close under the hardware menu. I believe that PCSX2 allows disc swapping from inside the emulator too but I've never gotten that far on a PS2 game to know how it works from LaunchBox.

[djvj]

But can you do any of those things with just your controller or your CP? Who wants to mess with a keyboard and mess in a finished system? That take's you out of the trance of having a polished system when you have to 1) find kb/mouse 2) leave fullscreen 3) extract disc if compressed 4) browse to the menu to swap disc 5) re-enable fullscreen Really?