Problem with two games and images/screenshots

[Emi]

Hello,

So I am having problems with two games, Catacomb and Catacomb II, I started to get gameplay images from mobygames, but everytime I add images to Catacomb they display on Catacomb II. is there a way to avoid that without changing the name of the game? why is it even happening? when I click on "save image" I get Catacomb-01.png and Catacomb II-01.png so apparently it should work but it keeps displaying the same images on both games, and if I delete the images on either game it of course deletes from the other game.

I was thinking about even setting up ShareX or something to make new screenshots with better resolution and my gameplay (if only Launchbox had a screenshot function) but now I am thinking that it might not even work fine on some games just like Catacomb and Catacomb II and then I will end up with different games "sharing" images.

But I also wonder if it is a small bug or just the way Launchbox is meant to do things.

[Zombeaver]

How are the game files themselves (what you have listed in the application/rom path) named? The reason I ask is that it LB looks for a number of different possibilities for the purposes of matching media - the standard is by your library title (this is how it will name any media that you download via the LB DB or Emumovies) but it will also match based on the application/rom name. I remember having this particular issue when I was adding in media for two games - Blood and Captain Blood. Obviously the library titles are different for these, but it just so happened that they both launch via a file named BLOOD.BAT (or .exe, I can't remember) and as result it was cross-associating the media. I believe what I ended up doing was just renaming one of them.

You may want to take a look at the below post where I provide some more detailed information on what LB looks for to auto-associate media.

 

[Emi]

Oh thanks to much Zombeaver it worked, now I understand it. yeah the EXE I chose for the catacomb II game was named "catacomb.exe" and that's why that happened, the I chose the "start.bat" and it worked again. so I guess it can't just have the name of the game. like you did, rename BLOOD.BAT on Captain Blood and it stopped grabbing the images from the other Blood game.

I guess this answers my question about how it is a launchbox way of working things. which sucks. but I don't mind getting now an "instructions" screen rather than go directly to game, it gives a nicer DOS feeling I had years ago anyway

Thanks so much!

Edited September 19, 2016 by Emi

[Zombeaver]

36 minutes ago, Emi said:

Oh thanks to much Zombeaver it worked, now I understand it. yeah the EXE I chose for the catacomb II game was named "catacomb.exe" and that's why that happened, the I chose the "start.bat" and it worked again. so I guess it can't just have the name of the game. like you did, rename BLOOD.BAT on Captain Blood and it stopped grabbing the images from the other Blood game.

No problem! Happy to help

36 minutes ago, Emi said:

I don't mind getting now an "instructions" screen rather than go directly to game, it gives a nicer DOS feeling I had years ago anyway

Wait what? Is this because you're using "start.bat" instead of Catacombs.exe? You have a number of different options outside of using start.bat. You could

1) probably just rename Catacombs.exe to CatacombsII.exe and it'd probably be fine (though success with this will vary depending on any other files having a dependency on that specific name, like in .ini files)

2) open up the start.bat in notepad and remove the part that contains the instructions

3) remove the game from the application path in LB and then just add it into the autoexec section of the dosbox.conf. For this you would just go to the DOSBox tab, and where it says to browse to/use a custom .conf file, press "create" then scroll down to the bottom until you see the section for [autoexec] and then add in the following:

Quote

Mount C "Full\Path\To\Catacombs\" (obviously this is going to be whatever your actual path to it is; make sure you include the quotation marks)

C:

Catacombs

The autoexec section is only used if your application path in your LB library entry is blank.

[Emi]

Oh I know, but then if I modify the BAT file then it will have different dates than the other files.

If I modify the Catacomb.exe file, if I ever have to download games again, I hope only to have to rename some folders but not even the Exe names. because I do not want to backup games, only launchbox.if I need too.

So using start.bat it is the easiest way it's like the fastest easiest way not to create conflict with images.

I could have used the conf autoexec one, but I only want to create confs for couple games, I am grabbing the setting from D-Fender Reloaded, and if the game is not there or is not part a series of the games (like there is Catacomb Abyss so I can use it on the other catacomb 3-D games) then I can just leave the default DosBox conf launchbox has and hope it works on the other games.

Not a big deal using start.bat, I had to use it for other games as well. but the main reason is I don't want to touch much the structure of folders and its filenames.

 

Thanks anyway! it was really helpful knowing how Launchbox finds the way to use images. I thought it only used "title" from the xml. Hope this system doesn't cause many conflicts in future, but if nothing can be done, I would create a bat, or use the autoexec option. ??

[Zombeaver]

7 minutes ago, Emi said:

Oh I know, but then if I modify the BAT file then it will have different dates than the other files.

Huh? I'm not sure what the significance of this would be.

7 minutes ago, Emi said:

If I modify the Catacomb.exe file, if I ever have to download games again, I hope only to have to rename some folders but not even the Exe names. because I do not want to backup games, only launchbox.if I need too.

Yeah I guess I could see that.

8 minutes ago, Emi said:

I could have used the conf autoexec one, but I only want to create confs for couple games, I am grabbing the setting from D-Fender Reloaded, and if the game is not there or is not part a series of the games (like there is Catacomb Abyss so I can use it on the other catacomb 3-D games) then I can just leave the default DosBox conf launchbox has and hope it works on the other games.

Honestly, this is a bad way to go. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to .conf files - DOS covers a good 20 years of games so there's no way to just throw a configuration in and it'll work for all (or even the majority) of them. The default is designed to be a starting point not a catch-all. I highly highly encourage people to create individual .confs for every game. In some cases you might be able to just leave it with some default settings but in many cases you won't - not if you want them to run the way they should anyway; and honestly starting that process earlier rather than later will make it less painful in the long run. There will be cases where you can just create one and leave it with the default settings and it'll work okay, so you won't necessarily have to tweak anything for every single one but creating them allows you to A) tweak things for that game if necessary and B) keep yourself from accidentally breaking something you imported and tested previously but you've changed your default settings since then.

If D-Fend has it's own built-in confs for stuff and you can make use of them, great (I haven't used D-Fend in years); though I'm fairly dubious about relying on such things. Hell, I don't even use GOG's .confs most of the time - sometimes they'll be using weird video or audio settings that really aren't ideal. Sometimes settings that might work well on one PC might not necessarily work well on another too. I'm just too OCD to leave things alone and hope for the best