RocketLauncher

[SentaiBrad]

It is Inception, and anyone who gets it to work I do applaud.

[kmoney]

I just wanted to add that I would have never even tried out launchbox if it did not work with rocketlauncher with me already having everything all set up and I am sure I am not alone on this. I am glad it was easy to use the two of them together because LB has become my new favorite frontend because of this. Again with users coming from hyperspin which is arguably the most popular frontend out there (which I can see that changing very soon with LB being actively developed for and with Jason listening and considering the users feedback), RL is an easy jumping on point for hyperspin users to try out LB. As djvj said they are even looking at making an official launchbox plugin which is going to make the transition from hyperspin even easier. Again not suggesting anyone is saying this but for new users reading, launchbox and rocketlauncher are not in competition which each other as they are two different programs trying to achieve different results and can work in unison with each other to give the user an even better experience,especially those transitioning over from hyperspin.

[Jason Carr]

^^^^^^ THIS. Thanks, kmoney. We're trying to gain ground. Ex-Hyperspin users are the biggest way to do that, and we need to appeal to them in every way possible, as soon as possible.

[SentaiBrad]

Yea, I am very happy we can fill the void for so many users now regardless of my feelings on software. I think I speak for Jason as well as myself that it warms us very much to have so many people loving our software.

[rich2k4]

Can someone please help me. I just installed RocketLauncher, but do not see any Systems on the left menu. It says 0 Systems Found. I went into the settings folder and removed the (examples) from Global Emulators.ini, thinking that might fix it but it doesn't. What am I missing?

[SentaiBrad]

I don't know if RocketLauncher has forums, but you'll probably get more help there for this if they do have them.

[DOS76]

They do have a forum.

[fromlostdays]

I personally encourage people to visit the RL forums for questions and troubleshooting. Having said that, I wasn't going to post this, but it seems like it might have a place here after all. This doesn't cover integration with LaunchBox yet, as I'm hesitant to speak on the program until I've had more experience with it. I apologize for a lack of screenshots here people, but here's a quick guide on setting up RocketLauncher and getting it ready for LaunchBox. I also apologize if the formatting is wonky in places. I wrote this at work and its a copy and paste job. Once you get the basics, it takes less than 5 mintues to set up a system in RL. But before you do that, you need to set up LaunchBox as your Active Front-End in RL. Step One: Setting up LaunchBox as a Front-End for RocketLauncher Please note that Rocketlauncher.exe is useless to you. You will now and probably forever be making all of your changes in RockerlauncherUI.exe. It will be in a subfolder named “RockerLauncherUI”. If you’re curious, this step is necessary because Rocketlauncher was designed to support multiple front ends simultaneously. So you’ve installed RocketLauncher. Now what? Open RocketLauncherUI Don’t freak out. There’s a lot of stuff but that’s because RL has a lot of options. The UI gets very intuitive once you work with it a little bit. Click the tab on the top right of the UI called “RocketLauncherUI” Directly below that, and to the left, you’ll see another smaller tab called “Front Ends”. Click it. Now click the green Plus Sign. It’ll ask you for a name: Input LaunchBox or something similar. Browse to the path of the LaunchBox.exe Make sure and set both plugin tabs to “RocketLauncherUI.” Click the save icon (It looks like a little floppy disk) Now you need to make LaunchBox your default and Active front end. Under the Front Ends tab, highlight the new Launcbox Front End profile you created Above there are buttons to Set As Default Front End Set As Active Front End Click both, and on the right you should see the little checkbox marking off LaunchBox as your active and your default front end. Congrats! You’re done. Step Two: Setting Up Your First Emulator in RocketLauncherUI: RocketLauncher supports too many emulators for me to bother counting, and setting them up is easy. For new users, the most important thing to understand is the concept of Global Emulators. If you set up your emulator as a Global Emulator, you can set that emulator to any system you want with just a few clicks. Even if you only plan to use an emulator for one system, you should set it up globally in RL. Here’s how: The big rectangle on the left of the UI with the word “Global” in it is your Systems Tab. When you start adding systems they will appear here, but your Global System will never disappear. It’s there that we want to set up our emulator. Click Global in the Systems Tab. Click the “Emulators” Tab (top middle) You should see a pretty impressive list of supported emulators at the bottom. Scroll through it until you see your preferred emulator and double click it. A new window will pop up: Feel free to rename the emulator if you’re so inclined. Set the path to the emulator.exe. There should be a module listed the same name as the emulator with the .ahk extension e.g “RetroArch.ahk”. You don’t need to worry about any of the options on the bottom of this window for most systems. Lastly: Make sure the extension of your roms is listed in the File Extensions slot. If it isn’t, the emulator may not support your romset, but it might, so go ahead and add your extension, separate by this thing | . Its right above your enter key on your keyboard. No spaces. Having a bunch of unused extensions in this slot is expected, and perfectly fine, so long as your rom extension is listed there. Example: sfc|smc|7z|zip Congrats, you’ve set up your first Global Emulator. Global Emulators can be assigned to any system you create, though obviously they will only work for supported systems. Step 3: Setting Up Your First System in RocketLauncher RocketLauncher, like LaunchBox needs a few additional things before it can launch games. Namely, it needs to know where to find your roms, and it needs an xml list to populate its own games lists for your systems. We’ll be using Super Nintendo as an example. To set up a system in RocketLauncher, on the top left of the UI there’s a green plus sign. When you however over it, it should say “Add New System”. Click it. Naming is important* As far as naming your system goes, you’re going to want to use Rocketlauncher standard naming conventions. This will allow Rocketlauncher to recognize your system and show the default artwork etc. The naming is pretty intuitive, pretty much what you would see on a box if you bought a certain console, but you want to be sure you get the name right to save yourself possible trouble later on. In order to get the right names, in your rocketlauncher folder you should navigate to: Rocketlauncher/rocketlauncherui/media/icons The icons in the icon folder use the preferred naming convention. For instance, Correct: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Incorrect: Super Nintendo, SNES, or any other variation. So in this instance, the name does matter. Also note that the name you choose here is going to affect the code you have to put into LaunchBox to make these programs work together. Once you have it right, click “Next” In the next section, Select Emulator, you merely click the magnifying glass and browse to your emulator exe. You’ve already done this once when you set up your emulator as a Global Emulator. This step is going to tell RL to use that emulator’s listed extensions when generating its system XML and auditing your roms. In the next section, Select Rom Path(s), click the green plus sign and add the path to your roms folder. In the next section Database creation, you’re going to want to Generate Database from Rom Path. Explanation: Like LaunchBox, Rocketlauncher will automatically create an xml list of all the files in the rom folder. Unlike LaunchBox, RocketLauncher will only see the files that have extensions listed under the emulator extensions for that system. This can be a problem if, for instance, you’re using retroarch, and your roms have a .xyz extension, and you didn’t put that under the retroarch extensions like we talked about above. RocketLauncher will not see any files with the .xyz extension, and creating the database will fail. If you get an error here saying you have no roms in your rom folder, you have to go back to the Emulators Tab, find your emulator, and make sure the extensions are listed there as noted above, then try again. Further note, the databse will generate even if you have your roms zipped, as long as the zip extension is noted under your emulator, and for the most part, zip|7z automatically are. Click next. You’re done. Check the Overview. Looks good? Click finish You should get an “Are you sure” pop up. You are. You should then see another popup saying Database is properly generated. Congrats, RL is set up, and you should be able to immediately launch games from within it. To test this, look at the Systems Tab again and you should see your new system there. Instead of clicking Global, this time click [system name], and then click the “Games” tab. Audit your games, (they should show up green) click a game, and click the launch button. Again, I encourage you to visit the RocketLauncher forums and browse around, introduce yourself, etc. if you're interested in using it as a Launcher. Either way, Happy gaming.

[Jason Carr]

Woot. Thanks for this @fromlostdays. I'm gonna give it a shot myself.

[damageinc86]

The only thing I need from LaunchBox that RL currently does, is apply Bezels to the emulators, and a PAUSE menu which we can specify the autohotkey button presses to send to the emulator to use it's save slots. Those are the only two things. If you can manage that, then you will have a ton of people converted instantly I think.

[SentaiBrad]

Depending on the emulator, it probably already has a pause function too. F1 in RetroArch brings up the menu that pauses, and P in most others. I do like the bezel idea, but I imagine that would take a lot of time for Jason that he wont have for at least another month.

[CADScott]

If you use Retroarch for your emulator, you can do both of those things already. The pause menu in Retroarch allows you to save to multiple save states, and you can create bezels from what I have seen. The issue with RocketLauncher that I have found is that the media needs to be organised in such a way that is very incompatible with how LaunchBox is organised. RocketLauncher needs each game to have an individual directory with the media inside it, and it is VERY fussy about the naming being exactly the same as the rom, which Launchbox does not as it uses fuzzy matching. I love the idea of the RocketLauncher pause system with the manuals and game media available when paused, but it would be extremely time consuming to get the RocketLauncher pause system with it's media to work with Launchbox. It would either require a complete change of how LaunchBox media is handled, or a lot of manual work on the users part using symbolic links between media files.

[damageinc86]

The only thing I like about the PAUSE menu in Rocketlauncher is that you can save and load your states without having to press any keys, because the AHK script that Rocketlauncher sends to the emulator, does it all for you. All you need to do is specify those keys, and then when in the PAUSE menu, select it and the rest is done for you. It wouldn't even need to be a full pause menu necessarily, just a little savestate overlay would be nice to have. That is seriously one of the nicest features out there. oh and I didn't mean pause menu like an emulator pause menu, I mean what used to be called Hyperpause from the old Hyperlaunch days.

[Jason Carr]

Thanks all. Does anyone have any information or has anyone done any testing with Windows 10 and controller support in AutoHotkey? Anyone know if Rocket Launcher uses AutoHotkey controller support? The reason I ask is it seems that AutoHotkey game controller support is broken on Windows 10 in many cases.

[fromlostdays]

RocketLauncher does allow you to use AHK scripting for controller support. I don't personally use it, but the more I use Windows 10, the more I'm seeing SOME kinds of bugs.

[Drybonz]

I've made some progress with setting up RL, and I can now launch MAME games from the RLui. However, I'm not having any luck launching RL from LaunchBox as an emulator (lol... I read that sentence back to myself and wonder if this is worth it). So, when I try to launch the game with Launchbox the jeering RL error message pops up and tells me that there is no default emulator set in RL, even though I have set the default emulator and can even launch games from the RLui. Any guidance is really appreciated. Thanks. *edit* I finally got it! lol... it was a simple oversight on my part, but I can now launch Launchbox, which can launch RocketLauncher, which can launch MAME with a default bezel. whew

[kmoney]

The bezel feature is awesome! There are some guys over at the rocketlauncher forums that have created some awesome looking bezels like this one. Makes it feel like you are playing on a real arcade machine with a bezel.

[Drybonz]

Can anyone tell me how to open an individual game on a second monitor with RocketLauncher, while using a bezel?

[ALIE]

You should see a pretty impressive list of supported emulators at the bottom. Scroll through it until you see your preferred emulator and double click it.

the list dont appear?

[fromlostdays]

RocketLauncher just got a pretty massive update. I haven't updated yet, as I'm in the habit of waiting for bugs to get worked out. However, if you can't find a list of emulators here, let me know.