How to hide duplicates with LaunchBoxTools

[gamerforhire]

Hello everybody! Ok, so with the help of some fellow LaunchBoxers, I came across a wonderful application called LaunchBoxTools (if you're unfamiliar, go download it now! https://www.launchbox-app.com/forum/features/launchboxannotator-tool). This tool has helped me fill in all the necessary meta data needed to sort my ROMs to my personal tastes. Now that I got everything sorted out via region, I want to go through and hide the duplicate versions, but I'm getting a bit hung up on how I do that with this tool. When I go to the "hide duplicates" section and use a built-in field to select the version and set "equals" to "Rev. 1" or "Beta", I get back a long list of ROMs from which I need to pick and choose. It looks like it wants me to pick out which ones I want to keep. This is fine if this is how I have to do it, but I thought the process was automated? I feel like I'm using the tool incorrectly. Basically, I thought I would go to the "hide duplicates" section, select the ones I want to keep, then it would auto-magically hide the rest. Am I doing this wrong? If not, how do I go about doing the above? Should I select what I don't want and put it in the "equals" or "not equals" section? Or should I select what I do want to keep? Haha, sorry for the confusion, I hope I've made my request clear. Thanks in advance. Any and all help will be greatly appreciated!

[mathflair]

You have the logic slightly backwards, and that is probably leading to the problem. In hide duplicates, the fields are used to tell the system how to pick which game should be shown, while the rest are hidden. For example, lets say you have the following game list: Game 1 (version: Beta) Game 1 (version: 1) Game 2 (region: Japan) Game 2 (region: USA) If you were to run the duplicate hider without setting any options, it would make you pick which of both Game 1 and Game 2 you wan't shown in your library. If instead you used a Built-in filed of version = 1, then it would hide Game 1 (version: Beta) automatically, while keeping Game 1 (version: 1) visible. The system would also prompt you to select between the two duplicates for Game 2, because the version string option wasn't sufficient for it to select a single item (i.e., both might be version: 1). Let me know if that helps.

[gamerforhire]

Hey thanks! I got some time this morning to mess around with it for a bit and I think I got it now. So what's selected in Hide Duplicates is what stays visible, hiding everything else, unless conflicts arise. Using this logic, I was able to quickly hide all the revisions and different versions of games within my sets. Looks much cleaner now, thanks!