Who has the largest collection currently standing in Launchbox?

[cleverest]

Just thought it would be fun...I know it's not the size that counts...errr, well maybe that's what small sizes say, but....

I'm currently at somewhere around a couple hundred from 18,000 games total (not counting about 430 steam games I need to add) and over 6,000 Exodos/Win3x games to be added once officially supported by LB... [Picture coming later], and I'm still building mine...

Anyone's library way more massive?  I'm looking forward to the nested feature, may make organizing this way more fun ?

* Edit, 09-18-2017 - I'm now at just under 33,000 games (no dupes, only English and Japanese translated to English and a few Japanese only (mostly japanese only platforms), and other japanese, but English playable titles (mostly shooters or old platformers/fighters.)

* 01-30-21 - I'm now at 44,888 titles, but 2,800 are video game magazines & comics. 8TB is chock full, now expanding to a 12-14TB build next....

Edited January 30, 2021 by cleverest
added more stuff

[Lordmonkus]

There is a person with approx 50,000, can't remember who it is off the top of my head though.

[cleverest]

^ That is my dream...how much space that take up?  I wonder if they are compressing when possible...CSO for PSP and GZ or CSO for PS2, gamecube games, WII-U games compressed, etc...

[Lordmonkus]

No clue but I know it's all stored on a NAS setup.

Personally I am fine with my 10,000 or so games. Even with only that many there is far too much shit in my collection.

[StuDentBR]

i only have 2.000, i've already thought about what i am doing with my collection, because i already added too much things, i got some fullsets lately but i did not added yet because i really don't want to add at my collection games that i have zero interest and probably won't even open, maybe when we have a profile option in LB i will make a complete one with the fullsets.

[CriticalCid]

If I remember correctly than was @cammelspit the one with this huge collection. His data folder was also used as reference when Jason worked on performance improvements for huge collections a couple weeks ago.

[cammelspit]

Currently up to 57,784 games and counting. This is not including most of my OLD 8-bit computer stuff except it does include the Tandy CoCo, Commodore64 but only the tapes and I also have the amiga imported even though I haven't gotten those to work yet. I did find an awesome way to get eXoDOS and win3Xo fully imported into LB with the artwork all at once so that is a good 6K+ games right there. My PS2 collection is only about 60 games large but I don't have enough HDD space for the whole set, about 5-6TB worth. I am also missing the EUR and JAP Gamecube collections, even though I do have a good chunck of those games not released here. At least this is the largest collection here so far in the thread. I am curious to see how many people have such large collections.

Now all I need to do is put a NAS together, too much hassle all being local. lol

[SentaiBrad]

Is that with all the proper disc / disk merging?

[cammelspit]

@SentaiBrad If you are referring to the eXoDOS and win3Xo packs then yeah, I guess. I am not sure what you mean by merging because that is not how I thought those packs worked. Either way, I have them all setup so that if you run one that has not been installed yet, it installs just like normal, if it has been installed it just runs like normal. The problem with LB is that it expects to do the install itself so you can't just import exes or bats right in there in bulk, only one at a time. If you import them as roms, you can't remove the emulator because it is not available in bulk edit. So I ended up using a third paty app as the emulator to launch the normal eXo BAT files.

The Artwork, now that was a bit of a challenge. A buddy of mine actually ended up writing a renamer that used the directory name of the game and applied it to all of the images in the Maegre folder and then copied it out to a work directory. At that point, it was just a matter of deciding what art type I wanted to go into what folder in LB for it to show up nice and purdy.

I actually intend to write a guide on how I did it, precisely, and include a copy of the renamer app but my friend said he wanted to include the source and clean up some rough spots first before I could release it to the community here. THis is why I haven't said anything till now and it was just a passing mention.

If this is not what you meant, let me know. When it comes to C64, the only ones that LB can handle are the tapes and carts. The disks, like amiga, commonly have two disks. Same buddy from the DOS expedition above is writing a new kind of middleware to handle all of that itself with scripts. Somewhat of a spritual successor to Proxy DETAILED HERE. Imagine it being able to do most of what Rocket launcher can do only with a focus on user experience and extreme ease of setup and use. THis, however, is only in the beginning stages of development so it will prolly be a few more weeks at least before anything approaching usable happens.

Unfortunately, for the time being, I simply have to manually start the emulators and load the disks myself for systems that use multiple disks since LB simple can't handle them yet. So I leave those out of my imports entirely ATM. You CAN, however get WHDload to work via LB because those are modified version of the games so they no longer even have disks to swap out. It's complicated and I know a guy who has done it but I just haven't figured it out personally yet.

 

Did any of this answer your question? Not too sure about that so if not let me know.

[SentaiBrad]

I'm not talking about DOS at all actually, sorry for that confusion. When importing games in LaunchBox now (for several months now actually), any multi-disc or disk game gets automatically combined under certain rules, and the rules are being expanded in the future. So for example, if you have an 8 Disk Amiga game, instead of 8 entries for 1 game now, it's just 1 entry with the rest being filed under the additional applications feature automatically. I used to have 50k + games, but ever since i did some major duplication reduction, and the automatic combining became a thing (re-importing a library is easy, just uncheck all of the image downloads and the existing images will re-attach automatically, but then you lose favorites and stats which sucks) and I re-imported several of the problem systems and it severely reduced the amount of games entries. So technically, the amount of games hadn't really changed, but rather the count is severely more accurate because a single disc or disk doesn't count as 1 game, even when they all really only belong to 1. The only games not getting combined right now, are games with Tape in the title, but Jason is going to expand the rules of auto combining at some point.

Also, LaunchBox doesn't inherently handle multiple disc or disk swapping, but in some cases the emulators have swap buttons, and in the rest of the emulators cases, making a save state, loading up the next disc and loading the save state usually works. PS1 for example, I've taken a completely different route and put all my games in to the PBP format, and discs switch automatically as they're combined in to one file.

As for the eXo stuff, there has been a recent post by him about the status of the project. LaunchBox will have native support for his DOS, 3x and 9x packages (his downloads will ship with LB, at least that's currently the plan), and the details are going to be worked out, things are moving forward there if a little slower than we all would have liked.

So while you're not wrong about a lot of that stuff, I think you might be going about some stuff the hard way, which is also not necessarily a bad thing. Your image rename tool for example is certainly the hard way, but it sure as hell works and that's awesome.

[cammelspit]

Oh, then yes, they are all merged into one entry per game and not per disk yeah.

As far as multi disk stuff goes, yeah I know about the way LB doesn't handle multiple disks. Some emulators do have formats that have more than one disk in one file and those do work but others do not. To work they need to have all of the disks in the command line at startup, somehting like this...

Emulator.exe -l -floppy -disk1 "disk1.img" -disk2 "disk2.img"

Or they won't work at all. I will ask you, however, PBP, is this for Amiga specifically? Do you happen to have a link somewhere that I can get some more info? I am at this point unwilling to modify my entire set seeing as they are a complete and untouched no-into set ATM. BUT, that might just be convenient enough to be worth fiddling with.

I also read the post you mentioned about hoe eXo is going to use LB instead of Meagre. I am super happy this is happening but TBH, I just couldn't wait! It could be a month or two or it could be another year and I wanted my stuff to work and work right now so I MADE it work. I mean, had to get some SimCity2000 action going on, right? lol

In reality, I only went to my friend with my problem asking his help if he knew of a renamer that could base the rename off of a directory that was two steps back. Same directory they are all over the place but not basing off the name of another directory. Took him maybe 15 minutes to write it up for me and i didn't have to do much of anything so i would certainly consider that the easy way, at least for me it was easy!

Edited January 7, 2017 by cammelspit

[cleverest]

11 hours ago, lordmonkus said:

No clue but I know it's all stored on a NAS setup.

Personally I am fine with my 10,000 or so games. Even with only that many there is far too much shit in my collection.

I basically want both...a massive comprehensive EVERYTHING AND ALL THE CRAP POSSIBLE (within English playable parameters) collection....and my own fine-tuned way more practical PLAY collection... :-)

[cleverest]

Cammelspit (nice name btw, lol),

what is the total disk space required by your collection as it currently curently stands? I'm anal about using compressed formats when possible (for wii-U, GameCube, PS2, PSP especially), at 18k games I'm using about 5.5TB currently. That includes 6k games from eXodos and win3x games not in LB in addition to the 18k games in LB, with maybe 10 games installed (aka uncompressed) on it....Was just curious if you break it down for me at all :-)

Edited January 7, 2017 by cleverest

[Phox]

I probably have the smallest collection lol, only 342 games as of the date of this post  I usually add a few games at a time, its usually the good stuff and the games I like

Edited January 7, 2017 by LukeArio

[SentaiBrad]

PBP File formats is for PS1 specifically. There is a tutorial for Unconventional Compression that I made, that covers most of the stuff I use. I am working on other forms of compression for a part 2, and I hate using Archives, so it's all 100% archive free (except for MAME or systems where they need to be).

 

[cammelspit]

@cleverest ATM I am at about the same size as your collection right now. Kissing the 5TB range. I feel like I must have all the regional variations because they can be interesting to try out from time to time. My PS2 collection is not very large because of a few reasons. Mainly, because they are HUGE 4 to 5 TB for the US set alone. I only get those game that I intend to actually play at some point. Currently, my PS2 games number 63 and I am more or less happy with that. I have two 4TB HGST NAS hard drives, one is exclusively for emulation and the other one pulls double duty as my steam library and even more emulation. I have room for another 2 drives in my machine without any hassle but I have to mirror my setup to my brothers PC and my sons PC so that is just plain wasteful. So all of our 4TB drives will go into a NAS later this year after I financially can afford to put a nice server together.

@SentaiBrad Thanks for the info there. I did watch that one but I must have missed it. I have all of my PS1 games in 7z archives to save a rather substantial amount of space. PS1 games are rather fast to decompress so waiting that few 10 seconds for launch doesn't bother me. The ones that are a little annoying are GameCube and PS2. They can take a goodly long time to unpack but the space savings is well over the hundreds of GBs range and that leaves me more space for more games. This way they also can be used from my OS SSD which is tons faster so for me this works out. It's funny, I have as much compressed as I possibly can so I am literally the opposite you are. I used to decompress them manually and load them by hand but with LB it makes that whole process so easy. Anyways, thanks again!

@LukeArio Keep telling you that you need to be slightly less anal about it. There is nothing like hitting the select random game and launching it without even a care in the world. Dunno why it tickles me so much to randomly play something I have never played before.

[SentaiBrad]

So as far as my collection goes, all of my games, patches and emulators take up 5.6TB. I can break it down per console or per company (like Nintendo and Sega) if you all are curious. I also have my GameCube and Wii games on it's own hard drive for my modded Wii U. I also have a ton of Xbox games as well in the same location for my modded Xbox. My library is just over 29k games, and I am working on getting every other system in as well.

[xena990]

30k but some not all are merged and i have not added my Gameboy Collection and more.

I wanna get @200 games/system for my arcade build. So there is a lot of work to be made.

 

P.S. Amiga is WHQload

Edited January 7, 2017 by xena990

[SentaiBrad]

I also don't have every system, I've also pruned out a lot from sets, like most sports games. Also, debating on importing Steam games to get the most accurate amount.

[xena990]

I hate the steam import thing... i dont want 600 + games in LB. So i manually add the .exe in LB for the games i like.

Maybe someday we can add a playlist from steam instead of all games.