rsn5746 Posted November 25, 2015 Author Share Posted November 25, 2015 Can I manually add media to my games in Launchbox? Which filenames should I use for screenshots, boxart, and videofiles? What I would like to do, ideally: Have a screenshots folder and put all my games screenshots in that folder. If a rom name matches the screenshot filename (minus extension), Launchbox should display the screenshot. Same for videos and boxart. E.g. one folder for videos, one for boxart. This is how all the emulators on xbox classic work as well as a bunch of PC emulators (Final Burn Alpha, etc.), and I think it would be great to have this as a feature in Launchbox. It could be switchable on/off. I am asking for this because manually clicking on each of the thousands of games and adding screenshots manually is just not feasible. Scraping using the rom names turns out almost completely useless, because the metadata is too sparsely populated and/or the online database game names do not match the rom names. EDIT: It looks like this is already working in latest Launchbox. If I go to the images folder, to my platform, and then put my boxart into the "front" folder, it shows up correctly in Launchbox! Also if I put my screenshots into the screenshot folder, they also show up. This is perfect! I still have to try the videos. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted November 26, 2015 Share Posted November 26, 2015 You have to add them into the game directly by using the edit Window it doesn't matter what they are named once you add them to the game they will be renamed the whatever the games title is and placed in the folder for what ever category that you placed it under. You can place them in the folders yourself but if they are not named the same as the title then they won't be recognized as linked to the game, also you may have to open the edit window any way before you see the images (at least from my experience). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted November 26, 2015 Share Posted November 26, 2015 Yes, simply putting files in the right folders with the right names will make them show up in LaunchBox, for images, manuals, music, and videos. You can name them either by the ROM file name or by the title of the game. For front cover art images, you'll need to use Refresh All Images under the Tools menu in order to refresh the cache (hence your observation of needing to edit the games, @DOS76). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rsn5746 Posted November 28, 2015 Author Share Posted November 28, 2015 Just to give a quick update: Adding the box art and screenshots worked, but the performance of launchbox when browsing through 4000 games (mame and others) is extremely slow both in windowed and also in big box mode. It takes seconds for the screenshot and box art to appear after scrolling to a game name. I doubt this can be easily fixed without switching to a different programming language (.net is slow) In order to circumvent the performance issues, and since I only want to start emulators and no pc games, I switched to a different front end. It is called Attract Mode. It is blazingly fast filtering and displaying videos and box art for more than 10,000 games. It has less features then launchbox, but it does everything I want. I made two custom layouts based on emuxtras and coinops preview videos fromthe Xbox for Attract Mode: The layouts can be downloaded here http://www.emuxtras.net/forum/download/file.php?id=2415 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted November 28, 2015 Share Posted November 28, 2015 Hi @rsn5746, just FYI, performance should not be poor with 4,000 games. LaunchBox usually handles that kind of load with ease. Also, this day and age, the notion that .NET is slow is outdated and incorrect. So much so that Microsoft is building large portions of Windows itself with it. I'm constantly improving the performance of LaunchBox, but it sounds like there might be some other kind of issue going on, because LaunchBox is much more performant than that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted November 28, 2015 Share Posted November 28, 2015 Agreed I have 19K games on my i7 4770 16gb of RAM and it works very quickly. Same for an i5 3330 8GB of RAM and around 8k games. I also have it on a few other PC's ranging from a Pentium chip, a i3, a few mobile i3's, a mobile i5 and an older core 2 duo and they work good with 1000s of games on them. The only issue I've had with speed is on a Atom with only 1GB of RAM and turning off caching in the settings fixes he issue and in that case LaunchBox isn't to blame the PC's low end specs are at fault. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
polygonslayer Posted November 29, 2015 Share Posted November 29, 2015 Running about 15k games here and Launchbox is by far the fastest frontend I've used in terms of performance. Virtually no lag or slowdown when scrolling through the games list. Also launching stuff (even with RocketLauncher in the background) it's super fast. What kind of specs are you running? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rsn5746 Posted November 29, 2015 Author Share Posted November 29, 2015 That is good news it means then something else must be wrong on my end. I experienced this long >1 second lag before my box art appeared both when I used big box mode and scrolled to the game, and in desktop mode when scrolling through the list of games. I turned off all the transition effects trying to make it faster. I also noticed that my hard disc is constantly working as I scroll through my games, more than I would expect. I plan to have approx. 10,000 games. My system specs: Pentium D 2.8 Ghz 3 GB of Ram Windows 10 It is an old computer, but as I mentioned, Attract Mode will scroll through my list of now >5000 games instantly and display video and artwork with no visible delay. I understand the two programs do very different things (for example attract mode can not be configured on a per game basis, only per emulator). I paid for launchbox and absolutely love it as a launcher for my windows games. Especially because steam is really bad as a launcher (it does not even display a screenshot). I might try launchbox for emulation again when I get a faster computer :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted November 30, 2015 Share Posted November 30, 2015 Thanks @rsn5746. Looking at those system specs, unfortunately it is possible that LaunchBox won't run smoothy with a large collection on that machine. If my research is correct, that Pentium D CPU is 10 years old, and I know performance has come a long way since then. 3 gigs of RAM might be pushing it as well, unfortunately. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Egobyte83 Posted August 5, 2017 Share Posted August 5, 2017 (edited) Another question that is relevant to this topic... when it comes to the SNES, is there any way to change from the default North American cover art to the PAL covers quickly? If you have, let's say 200+ games and you wanted them all to be displayed with the european covers instead... it would be very tedious work to do it manually one by one. I tried removing the folders for the respective region in the images directory, but that didn't work. And some games... annoyingly... respawn images that I have already removed from the detail information, quite spontaneously... Goof Troop even refused to change when I had removed everything, like every single image... I pushed OK and it just reverted back to the original cover anyway. Frustrating. Edited August 5, 2017 by Egobyte83 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neil9000 Posted August 5, 2017 Share Posted August 5, 2017 5 minutes ago, Egobyte83 said: Another question that is relevant to this topic... when it comes to the SNES, is there any way to change from the default North American cover art to the PAL covers quickly? If you have, let's say 200+ games and you wanted them all to be displayed with the european covers instead... it would be very tedious work to do it manually one by one. I tried removing the folders for the respective region in the images directory, but that didn't work. And some games... annoyingly... respawn images that I have already removed from the detail information, quite spontaneously... Goof Troop even refused to change when I had removed everything, like every single image... I pushed OK and it just reverted back to the original cover anyway. Frustrating. There is a region priorities setting in launchbox, but it may be premium only, i'm not sure. To check it's in tools/options/region priorities, you just check the regions you wan't then move your preferred region to the top of the list. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Egobyte83 Posted August 5, 2017 Share Posted August 5, 2017 6 minutes ago, Egobyte83 said: Another question that is relevant to this topic... when it comes to the SNES, is there any way to change from the default North American cover art to the PAL covers quickly? If you have, let's say 200+ games and you wanted them all to be displayed with the european covers instead... it would be very tedious work to do it manually one by one. I tried removing the folders for the respective region in the images directory, but that didn't work. And some games... annoyingly... respawn images that I have already removed from the detail information, quite spontaneously... Goof Troop even refused to change when I had removed everything, like every single image... I pushed OK and it just reverted back to the original cover anyway. Frustrating. Never mind... it just took a while for the covers to update in LB. And switching off the metadata ID did help in unlocking the coverart. I seem to be helping myself a lot today. ^^ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Egobyte83 Posted August 5, 2017 Share Posted August 5, 2017 (edited) 2 minutes ago, neil9000 said: There is a region priorities setting in launchbox, but it may be premium only, i'm not sure. To check it's in tools/options/region priorities, you just check the regions you wan't then move your preferred region to the top of the list. Perfect, that did it! Thank you for your help ^^ It was not a premium feature. Edited August 5, 2017 by Egobyte83 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neil9000 Posted August 5, 2017 Share Posted August 5, 2017 1 minute ago, Egobyte83 said: Perfect, that did it! Thank you for your help ^^ It was not a premium feature. Cool, it's hard to remember what's premium and what isn't sometimes when you are only running the premium version. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jmwilkes76 Posted December 8, 2017 Share Posted December 8, 2017 On 11/25/2015 at 6:32 PM, DOS76 said: You have to add them into the game directly by using the edit Window it doesn't matter what they are named once you add them to the game they will be renamed the whatever the games title is and placed in the folder for what ever category that you placed it under. You can place them in the folders yourself but if they are not named the same as the title then they won't be recognized as linked to the game, also you may have to open the edit window any way before you see the images (at least from my experience). i tried to add my own artwork / boxart using the edit menu. i have my own 3d boxes. it added the boxart to the launchbox folder it should be in but for some reason the new box doesn't show up in launchbox. i tried a few things but nothing fixed this problem. any help will be greatly appreciated. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neil9000 Posted December 8, 2017 Share Posted December 8, 2017 6 hours ago, jmwilkes76 said: i tried to add my own artwork / boxart using the edit menu. i have my own 3d boxes. it added the boxart to the launchbox folder it should be in but for some reason the new box doesn't show up in launchbox. i tried a few things but nothing fixed this problem. any help will be greatly appreciated. I am assuming that they were added to the "Box - 3D" platform folder as they are 3d boxes if they are in there then you may need to switch the image type. Just click on the platform on the left, then at the top right of the launchbox window is a image type dropdown, just switch to 3D Boxes there. This is platform dependent also so you may need to change it on multiple platforms. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted December 8, 2017 Share Posted December 8, 2017 12 hours ago, jmwilkes76 said: i tried to add my own artwork / boxart using the edit menu. i have my own 3d boxes. it added the boxart to the launchbox folder it should be in but for some reason the new box doesn't show up in launchbox. i tried a few things but nothing fixed this problem. any help will be greatly appreciated. You may also need to refresh the image cache using Tools > Refresh All Images or select the games and right click > Refresh Images. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jmwilkes76 Posted December 10, 2017 Share Posted December 10, 2017 the refresh fixes the issue if i'm using the boxart i downloaded through launchbox. if i add it manually the picture will show up in the edit menu. once i click ok to use the selected image it won't stick or change in launchbox. i go back into the edit menu and the image i previously added doesn't show up and i have to add it again. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted December 11, 2017 Share Posted December 11, 2017 On 12/9/2017 at 8:55 PM, jmwilkes76 said: the refresh fixes the issue if i'm using the boxart i downloaded through launchbox. if i add it manually the picture will show up in the edit menu. once i click ok to use the selected image it won't stick or change in launchbox. i go back into the edit menu and the image i previously added doesn't show up and i have to add it again. @jmwilkes76 I'm not exactly following. When you say "add it manually", what do you mean? Do you mean just putting the file in the folder, or adding it via the add/edit window? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jmwilkes76 Posted December 12, 2017 Share Posted December 12, 2017 i tried adding it to the folder and via the add/edit window.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.