Importing Windows Games that have no Menu Shortcut

[hansqpeter]

Evening, I just downloaded the software for the first time and like it so far, importing Steam games and ROMS works fine. The big bother is non Steam Windows games though that I have set to not create a menu shortcut when installing. I never do. I can still add every game manually of course, but that is really tedious. (minor annoyance: It defaults to the launchbox directory for every new game I want to add, not the games one I use) Do you think you could implement a batch import like that for DOS games where you just drag all folders into the program and it looks for the .exe in those and adds them? I don't understand why it needs a menu shortcut for that tbh. Kind Regards (ps while I'm at it without creating a new thread, is there any possibility to use the hash of rom files to look up data online? Most roms aren't named correctly and thus are ignored when auto importing. =)

[jamesheartsyoumore]

Hi hansqpeter, I'm new to the software as well, but so far it's pretty nice. Dragging and dropping of game folders does sound like a good idea. When adding some Windows games I copy the .exe and pasted a shortcut and put all the shortcuts in a folder and and imported them one at a time. I didn't have a lot of games to add so it wasn't very time consuming. I was curious to whether this would work for you if you imported the shortcut .lnk files in bulk as roms and then moved them all over to the PC Games or whatever platform. I'm not sure if this would work, but its worth a try. I'm organizing covers and screens shots, but I plan on trying it when I get time. Let me know if you have any luck with it. I think someone mentioned the subject of crc rom hashes or whatnot in a different threat, so you might have some luck searching for that. I cannot remember what was said about it. -James Also, if you have a game that doesn't startup full screen create a shortcut of the exe and right click and go to properties and on "run" changed to maximized. I just learned that little trick earlier and thought I would pass it on.

[Jason Carr]

Welcome @hansqpeter. Importing Windows games is unfortunately more of a challenge than it seems. I haven't seen it done before elsewhere, and for good reason, unfortunately. Games often have more than one EXE, so it's often not straightforward, and hunting for only games in Program Files is pretty much impossible, which is why we chose to go with the Start menu solution. That said, I can see a drag and drop option making sense, with the understanding that it'll get the EXE wrong sometimes. I'll add that to my list. :)

[SentaiBrad]

Well if you Drag the exe on to the right category? Normally I open per system categories. I can only assume LB knows I have PC open, or GOG etc. Just automatically import with that platform selected?

[hansqpeter]

jamesheartsyoumore said if you imported the shortcut .lnk files in bulk as roms and then moved them all over to the PC Games or whatever platform.

I think if you import as roms you have to say which emulator will be used and that didn't work for me. I'm not 100% sure if I just missed something though. The other discussion regarding crcs/hashs I found was this one from July. I don't know how Dolphin does it but it shows the right names and banners for games where LB only uses the file name. I swear I saw a french site which had all the md5 checksums and stuff online but it seems to be either down or I just can't find it anymore.

[SentaiBrad]

If you import roms it expects an emulator. You can do a regular "Add", it just will be 1 by 1. At least you can do your few favorite games at first, and do more later or how ever you want to handle it.

[Jason Carr]

At least for emulators like MAME where the ROMs have to have specific file names, I plan to fix this issue going forward. However, not sure there's a good enough database of ROM CRCs for LaunchBox to be effective at determining the game from a CRC. If anyone finds one, let me know. I suppose you could probably hack the ROM import to work with Windows games. Might take a bit of extra effort, but it's no problem to select a bogus emulator in the wizard and then batch edit all the games to remove the emulator after the wizard has finished. It's not exactly cut and dry, there will be issues. But if you can use the browse dialog to search for all the EXEs you want to import, it would probably work. The only other issue is you're likely to have to edit the names of the games on the final page of the wizard in order to import good metadata.