My thoughts and ides

[Shades2585]

First I would like to say congratulations on turning a hobby in to a paying job. Kudo’s to you as this is the best front end I have ever seen. Some requests, ideas, and visions if I may… Requests: Could you please make a tutorial on using SucmmVM? Thanks. Idea: The Youtube video’s and Q&A are great ways to keep active with the community. May I also suggest you make a progress page with your Goals that you are working towards, both short term and long term, and marking when they are completed. And maybe some FAQs. I think this would be a good place for people to see what you are doing and where LB is heading. LaunchBox Things I would like to see. Games can have multiple exe’s for different things like save files transfers and the directories where they are looking to need to be mounted as well. The ability to link to your GOG account and download and install from there. GamesDB I see the GamesDB as a separate entity from LB in which as much information as possible should be stored. I point to PCgamingwiki.com as an example. Features I think would be good to see in the DB: For games that are sold, Links to where they are sold: Gog, Steam, etc. Suggested Emulator in order of precedence. (ScummVM, Dossbox, etc) Show path to config file, saved game file, Additional Exe file. Other directory’s to mount for saved game transfer. Keyboard keys used in the game. (this could be useful for future premade key-mapping for predefined gamepads and joysticks.) Sort game name Name of games that are part of the series. (Wing Commander 1-4) Related games not part of the series. (Wing Commander Privateer) Related game on a different platform (Super Wing Commander) List the system specs required for the game, CPU, memory, storage, video, soundcard, mouse, joystick, keyboard etc. Media it came on: 5.25 3.5, CD, DVD. Version numbers of the game. Names of the official game guides and links to where to buy them. What product come in the Game box (Scans of these could be nice.) If manuals could be legally uploaded that would be nice. Back of the box text. Developer and publisher logos. Languages released in. ESRB Logo Instead of personally keeping track of all the emulators out there have you thought of having LB update the various emulator after they have been tested and approved? While Retroarch is a strong middle layer, it is not an easy thing to work with and configure. In the long run will you be making your own middle layer as well so we don’t have to deal with Retroarch? Vision For the Arcade games it would be neat if we could have picture of the sides of the arcades uploaded and maybe their gamepads. I was thinking that maybe when you launched an arcade game I would show the sides on the left and right of the game and maybe the gamepad at the bottom. Just an idea to further immersion. I foresee someday installing and running all my dos games and console game on an Intel comput stick or Intel NUC. Someday I can see either LB working in the Linux version of KODI. Maybe even making your own fully encapsulated Linux engine only running LB and the emulators. Here is an interesting project you may be interested in working with to work on Android. http://magicbox.imejl.sk/ Keep up the Great work! :D Shades2585 PS. You can use any of this in your Q&A video if you like.

[SentaiBrad]

I may not hit all the points but some I will hit right now: Everything on YouTube has a chance to change and ScummVM for a tutorial has been kicked around but it's going to take some fiddling from me to get it work right. I am working on Amstrad CPC right now for tomorrow actually. All of those LaunchBox Games Database suggestions are great, some of the requests are coming or have been requested, but the best place to check is the specific LBGDB Sub-forums and the specific LBGDB BitBucket, not the LaunchBox BitBucket. Go to the Database and click the Request button at the top, should take you there and you can search, vote and request. Try not to cram too much in to one ticket because then it will just get jumbled and lost. Suggested emulators will be on the Software side primarily. As far as other OSes we would go to? Android seems to honestly be the next logical place like you are talking about. It would still need to be a device with decent power, but Android is becoming more and more outstanding. Linux and Mac are our other goals for Desktop PC's but to be honest we have one coder and a long list of features and requests for what we already do have. If we ever get to a point where we think we can start porting code to other systems we'll let the community know. I can say that chances are we will not be making our own Linux Distro, we would probably target Ubuntu and Debian as they're the most common distros.

[Lordmonkus]

Replacing Retroarch or any other emulator as a middle layer would be a massive undertaking. Emulation coding is an entirely different beast all together compared to a front end. Retroarch itself really is not all that bad once you get used to it and the reason it has so many options within it is because of how many systems it covers and how many different end users systems it has to run on.

[SentaiBrad]

Oh I missed that. No we more than likely won't develop an emulator, like Monkus said that is way bigger. We also don't ship or won't update the emulators in app because that may break their general terms of service or licenses and we can get in trouble if we break them. What we do distribute we are allowed to because their license allows for it. The confusion is why I started the tutorial series. There may be other things we can do to certainly enhance or make the general users job a lot easier, but in the end LaunchBox was already that answer to other more confusing front end's and the tutorial series we believed was one of the best ways at this time that we can help further. We choose RetroArch because it is one of the better all-in-one solutions with a general feature set and setting arrangements for everything they emulate and run.