Who has the largest collection currently standing in Launchbox?

[-McFly-]

I'll throw my hat in the ring... https://youtu.be/Wm54MMTeqTA - 238 platforms, 403,664 titles, 268 playlists. I talk about lag in a thread here; 

 

[cleverest]

3 minutes ago, Mcfly 2019 said:

I'll throw my hat in the ring... https://youtu.be/Wm54MMTeqTA - 238 platforms, 403,664 titles, 268 playlists. I talk about lag in a thread here; 

 

Does your collection include betas, duplicate versions of roms, like a1, a2, beta) and non-English titles (all languages, etc..?)

[-McFly-]

Just now, cleverest said:

Does your collection include betas, duplicate versions of roms, like a1, a2, beta) and non-English titles (all languages, etc..?)

Yes, I've tried to gather as much as possible.

[cleverest]

59 minutes ago, Mcfly 2019 said:

Yes, I've tried to gather as much as possible.

I appreciate that approach, but I'm just trying to get 1 rom only, I mean on all platforms though obviously, no betas, alt versions, and English only, unless Japanese only systems (EX: PCFX), or translated to English roms (over 350), and I'm at around 42k roms, can probably had a few thousand more total...not sure if there IS more than that though...

[fromlostdays]

On 3/29/2020 at 3:33 PM, JohnnyJedi said:

Wos thats insane, how many terrabytes you using for that??  you should make a tutorial video as well. would b great and btw excellent work there.. 

I've got a full 8 terabytes of just games, which is actually kind of small from what I hear other people have. I think the biggest collection I've heard/read about is 22 terabytes. For disk based systems I use a regular 1g1r set because a full ps1 or ps2 set with all regions and revisions is enormous. When I have enough money (or storage gets cheaper) I fully intend to go full lists on those too, but I have to factor in backing all of this up. For systems like snes, you're only talking about adding maybe a couple gigs or less per set to get it all.

I don't really know how to make videos  and the process is all over the place depending on what kind of set it is. Working with no intro is the easiest. The general workflow is:

1. Create a 1g1r set using Clrmamepro and dats from dat-o-matic.
2. Use program file2folder to place each game in the 1g1r set into its own folder named after the rom
3. Use program Bulk Rename Utility to remove all of the regional tags from the folder names - basically tell it to delete everything after the first ( in the folder names and then replace " (" with "".  This basically leaves you with a folder for each game that is named ideally after the correct title of the game with no extra info. Example:

Folder name: Super Mario World

Rom inside named Super Mario World (USA).sfc

Now leave this set alone and go back to your full set. (Also, the below is how you get all of the disks in disk based systems like Amstrad CPC for instance into the same folder named only after the game and no regional tags, disk numbers or revisions.

1. Use program file2folder to place each game in the full set into its own folder named after the rom
2. Use program Bulk Rename Utility to remove all of the regional tags or disk numbers from the folder names - basically tell it to delete everything after the first ( in the folder names and then replace " (" with "". This time, because there will be multiple games with the same name but different region tags and/or disk numbers and revisions, you wind up with folders named like this:

Super Mario World

Super Mario World_1

Super Mario World_2

etc.

Whats in the folder with the _1 at the end might be a revision or a different region or disk.

1. Search the directory for all folders with _1 in the name in windows and move into a separate temporary folder. Do the same for _2, _3 etc.
2. Now go into each one those temporary folders (containing all the _1 items, and then the temp folder containing all the _2 items etc.) and use Bulk Rename Utility to remove the numeric ending to the folder name. So just replace "_1" with "". Now, all you have to do is drag those folders back into the main full set. Since they are folders and they don't have any kind of region tags, or disk numbers etc. they will be named exactly the same as the ones in the main full set and windows will automatically merge them into one folder. At the end you're left with something like this:   

.../Super Mario World

......Super Mario World (USA).sfc

......Super Mario World (Europe).sfc

......Super Mario World (Japan).sfc

I took it a step further and added fan translations and hacks that I like to the folder by amending their names like this

......Super Mario World (Infinite Lives) (Hack).sfc

......Super Mario World (Japan) (Translated English).sfc

I took it a step even further than that and manually changed all of the Japanese and European games to the USA title (obviously excluding the exclusives). Be warned, if you skip this step, when you start merging these folders you can wind up with a different folder for Castlevania and Akumajo Dracula which are regionals of the same game. You can solve this in two ways.

1. what I did was I manually changed the latter to just be Castlevania (Japan), and then by the end of it it was in a folder called Castlevania and it merged fine with the Castlevania folder that held the USA game.
2. When you have your full set that has been completely merged with all the revisions and regions etc. into one folder each, make sure its on a separate drive from the 1g1r set you made initially. Now drag the entire 1g1r set into the full set, but be very careful not to click anything afterward. Because they are on separate drives when they merge all of the items that merge will remain highlighted. Drag those highlighted items back into the first folder. You basically took the 1g1r set and merged it with anything in the full set folder that had the same name and then pulled it back out. You'll get A LOT of the revisions and regions this way, but you'll miss any game that has different titles in different regions, such as the above game Castlevania. These are mostly Japanese games, but also a surprising amount of European games have slightly different titles.

Anyway, that's the general workflow haha. If you're really interested I can do a step by step but basically all we're doing is using Bulk Rename Utility and File2Folder to let us manipulate what Windows already does with folders with the same name, e.g merge them. I've always kept my games in separate folders because I like to tell the emulator to save savestates and saves in with the rom files. So I always had folders named after the entire rom like Super Mario World (USA). This is basically just a couple tricks to delete all of the tags from those folders and merge them, and as a bonus merge them with a 1g1r set.

At the end I'm left with a 1G1R folder set. As in there is a folder for each USA game and then a folder for each regional exclusive. But within those folders is every possible revision, disk, region, and hack (I hand pick hacks.) Though I'm sure its not perfect (for instance, I was surprised to find that No Intro titles are changed over time) its the most satisfactory set I've personally had. 

So once all that's done, I just tell launchbox to prioritize US and when I import the entire folder, I get one instance of Super Mario World (the US one) and all of the rest including the hack and translation are automatically imported as an additional app.

Like I said, it was a lot of work, but I must have enjoyed doing it because I'm done now with over 200 systems.    

Edited March 31, 2020 by fromlostdays

[CriticalCid]

1 hour ago, fromlostdays said:

I took it a step even further than that and manually changed all of the Japanese and European games to the USA title (obviously excluding the exclusives). Be warned, if you skip this step, when you start merging these folders you can wind up with a different folder for Castlevania and Akumajo Dracula which are regionals of the same game. You can solve this in two ways.

what I did was I manually changed the latter to just be Castlevania (Japan), and then by the end of it it was in a folder called Castlevania and it merged fine with the Castlevania folder that held the USA game.

When you have your full set that has been completely merged with all the revisions and regions etc. into one folder each, make sure its on a separate drive from the 1g1r set you made initially. Now drag the entire 1g1r set into the full set, but be very careful not to click anything afterward. Because they are on separate drives when they merge all of the items that merge will remain highlighted. Drag those highlighted items back into the first folder. You basically took the 1g1r set and merged it with anything in the full set folder that had the same name and then pulled it back out. You'll get A LOT of the revisions and regions this way, but you'll miss any game that has different titles in different regions, such as the above game Castlevania. These are mostly Japanese games, but also a surprising amount of European games have slightly different titles.

Wow, that’s a really tedious amount of work you’ve been doing there. Here’s an advice to do that significantly faster:

You‘ll need clrmamepro to rebuild your ROM set with a parent-clone .dat file, similiar like what you‘re already been doing with your 1G1R set. But instead of choosing 1G1R you‘ll have to build a 'merged‘ set. That will leave you with one archive per game with all versions of every game inside said archives. The rebuilder will also take your region priorities into account to determine the parent (the name of the archive file) just like it does when you build a 1G1R set.

For the next step you’ll need to have WinRAR installed. It could possibly be done with 7-Zip as well but I can't tell you the exact menu steps for it right now.

When the rebuild is done you’ll just have to select all archives -> right-click -> WinRAR "extract each archive to separate folder". And you basically get your 1G1F structure with almost non manual and time intensive work + all games with different titles across different regions are correctly combined together without you needing to research them by yourself.

The only thing that still needs to be dragged into the folders manually are hacks and fan-translations.

[fromlostdays]

7 hours ago, CriticalCid said:

Wow, that’s a really tedious amount of work you’ve been doing there. Here’s an advice to do that significantly faster:

You‘ll need clrmamepro to rebuild your ROM set with a parent-clone .dat file, similiar like what you‘re already been doing with your 1G1R set. But instead of choosing 1G1R you‘ll have to build a 'merged‘ set. That will leave you with one archive per game with all versions of every game inside said archives. The rebuilder will also take your region priorities into account to determine the parent (the name of the archive file) just like it does when you build a 1G1R set.

For the next step you’ll need to have WinRAR installed. It could possibly be done with 7-Zip as well but I can't tell you the exact menu steps for it right now.

When the rebuild is done you’ll just have to select all archives -> right-click -> WinRAR "extract each archive to separate folder". And you basically get your 1G1F structure with almost non manual and time intensive work + all games with different titles across different regions are correctly combined together without you needing to research them by yourself.

The only thing that still needs to be dragged into the folders manually are hacks and fan-translations.

Oh my word. This stings after all the time I put in! haha. But I'm glad there's an easier way! Let me ask, when you build the merged set and prioritize USA, will it automatically rename other regional roms according to the USA name? The other stuff takes about 10 minutes but doing that renaming by hand can take a whole evening unless you're fluent in Japanese which I am not. I did start picking up a few words after all that renaming haha.

And,  it should be noted that the above will only work for sets with no intro dats. Can still use my method to merge multidisk systems into single folders.  

7z does have the ability to extract to a folder named after the compressed file. Just right click, and in the context menu select 7z and then "
extract to [filename]/", in case anyone comes behind us.

Thanks for the heads up!

 

[CriticalCid]

5 hours ago, fromlostdays said:

Oh my word. This stings after all the time I put in! haha. But I'm glad there's an easier way! Let me ask, when you build the merged set and prioritize USA, will it automatically rename other regional roms according to the USA name? The other stuff takes about 10 minutes but doing that renaming by hand can take a whole evening unless you're fluent in Japanese which I am not. I did start picking up a few words after all that renaming haha.

Nope, the file names will be named like they are supposed to in a No-Intro set. All what the parent setting does is to determine the file names of the archives and therefore also the name of the folders in which you are extracting them. But with this method there shouldn't be any reason for you to have to rename them anyway as you have the option in LaunchBox to import the ROMs by folder name and not file name.

If you really want to rename them for whatever reason it would be fairly easy to write a batch script which renames all files according to the folder name.

[fromlostdays]

You make a compelling point about importing games via folder name instead of game name. I wasn't ever completely comfortable with manually renaming as its about preservation first for me. I'm going to test importing like this to see what launchbox does with the additional apps if the file names are different and if it works like it should, I'm probably going to start all over with this method with No Intro sets.

It never ends.

Thanks again for all the info! 

[vahacris]

On 3/31/2020 at 8:55 PM, fromlostdays said:

I've got a full 8 terabytes of just games, which is actually kind of small from what I hear other people have. I think the biggest collection I've heard/read about is 22 terabytes. For disk based systems I use a regular 1g1r set because a full ps1 or ps2 set with all regions and revisions is enormous. When I have enough money (or storage gets cheaper) I fully intend to go full lists on those too, but I have to factor in backing all of this up. For systems like snes, you're only talking about adding maybe a couple gigs or less per set to get it all.

I don't really know how to make videos  and the process is all over the place depending on what kind of set it is. Working with no intro is the easiest. The general workflow is:

1. Create a 1g1r set using Clrmamepro and dats from dat-o-matic.
2. Use program file2folder to place each game in the 1g1r set into its own folder named after the rom
3. Use program Bulk Rename Utility to remove all of the regional tags from the folder names - basically tell it to delete everything after the first ( in the folder names and then replace " (" with "".  This basically leaves you with a folder for each game that is named ideally after the correct title of the game with no extra info. Example:

Folder name: Super Mario World

Rom inside named Super Mario World (USA).sfc

Now leave this set alone and go back to your full set. (Also, the below is how you get all of the disks in disk based systems like Amstrad CPC for instance into the same folder named only after the game and no regional tags, disk numbers or revisions.

1. Use program file2folder to place each game in the full set into its own folder named after the rom
2. Use program Bulk Rename Utility to remove all of the regional tags or disk numbers from the folder names - basically tell it to delete everything after the first ( in the folder names and then replace " (" with "". This time, because there will be multiple games with the same name but different region tags and/or disk numbers and revisions, you wind up with folders named like this:

Super Mario World

Super Mario World_1

Super Mario World_2

etc.

Whats in the folder with the _1 at the end might be a revision or a different region or disk.

1. Search the directory for all folders with _1 in the name in windows and move into a separate temporary folder. Do the same for _2, _3 etc.
2. Now go into each one those temporary folders (containing all the _1 items, and then the temp folder containing all the _2 items etc.) and use Bulk Rename Utility to remove the numeric ending to the folder name. So just replace "_1" with "". Now, all you have to do is drag those folders back into the main full set. Since they are folders and they don't have any kind of region tags, or disk numbers etc. they will be named exactly the same as the ones in the main full set and windows will automatically merge them into one folder. At the end you're left with something like this:   

.../Super Mario World

......Super Mario World (USA).sfc

......Super Mario World (Europe).sfc

......Super Mario World (Japan).sfc

I took it a step further and added fan translations and hacks that I like to the folder by amending their names like this

......Super Mario World (Infinite Lives) (Hack).sfc

......Super Mario World (Japan) (Translated English).sfc

I took it a step even further than that and manually changed all of the Japanese and European games to the USA title (obviously excluding the exclusives). Be warned, if you skip this step, when you start merging these folders you can wind up with a different folder for Castlevania and Akumajo Dracula which are regionals of the same game. You can solve this in two ways.

1. what I did was I manually changed the latter to just be Castlevania (Japan), and then by the end of it it was in a folder called Castlevania and it merged fine with the Castlevania folder that held the USA game.
2. When you have your full set that has been completely merged with all the revisions and regions etc. into one folder each, make sure its on a separate drive from the 1g1r set you made initially. Now drag the entire 1g1r set into the full set, but be very careful not to click anything afterward. Because they are on separate drives when they merge all of the items that merge will remain highlighted. Drag those highlighted items back into the first folder. You basically took the 1g1r set and merged it with anything in the full set folder that had the same name and then pulled it back out. You'll get A LOT of the revisions and regions this way, but you'll miss any game that has different titles in different regions, such as the above game Castlevania. These are mostly Japanese games, but also a surprising amount of European games have slightly different titles.

Anyway, that's the general workflow haha. If you're really interested I can do a step by step but basically all we're doing is using Bulk Rename Utility and File2Folder to let us manipulate what Windows already does with folders with the same name, e.g merge them. I've always kept my games in separate folders because I like to tell the emulator to save savestates and saves in with the rom files. So I always had folders named after the entire rom like Super Mario World (USA). This is basically just a couple tricks to delete all of the tags from those folders and merge them, and as a bonus merge them with a 1g1r set.

At the end I'm left with a 1G1R folder set. As in there is a folder for each USA game and then a folder for each regional exclusive. But within those folders is every possible revision, disk, region, and hack (I hand pick hacks.) Though I'm sure its not perfect (for instance, I was surprised to find that No Intro titles are changed over time) its the most satisfactory set I've personally had. 

So once all that's done, I just tell launchbox to prioritize US and when I import the entire folder, I get one instance of Super Mario World (the US one) and all of the rest including the hack and translation are automatically imported as an additional app.

Like I said, it was a lot of work, but I must have enjoyed doing it because I'm done now with over 200 systems.    

I'm working with the same pattern. I could speed up a little Your work. Times ago I made file2folder alternative called files2folder. By using it You will get one folder with all the roms that varies by what is after (.

So basically it will put in one folder called for example: Metroid all below roms:

Metroid (USA)..

Metroid (EUR)..

Metroid (Hack)...

Metroid (Beta)...

I add this program as attachment. feel free to check it and good luck with Your collection.

 

Files2folder.bat

[Andyman]

Just totaled up my collection, out of curiosity induced by this thread. It's not the biggest posted here, but I think 238,277 is pretty solid! I have room to make it quite a bit bigger, but I'm really not interested in the systems I don't already have. ?

[SonicFan53]

238,277 games!? J E E Z .

[fromlostdays]

On 4/6/2020 at 6:56 AM, vahacris said:

I'm working with the same pattern. I could speed up a little Your work. Times ago I made file2folder alternative called files2folder. By using it You will get one folder with all the roms that varies by what is after (.

So basically it will put in one folder called for example: Metroid all below roms:

Metroid (USA)..

Metroid (EUR)..

Metroid (Hack)...

Metroid (Beta)...

I add this program as attachment. feel free to check it and good luck with Your collection.

 

Files2folder.bat 98 B · 1 download

Dude that is awesome! It's too late for me though haha. I already went through the entire process the long way haha. However, I encourage you to upload this to the downloads section of launchbox for people coming after as it will be a huge time saver and perfect for multi disc systems. Does it work for same name different extension as well?

Like

Chrono Cross.bin

Chrono Cross.cue

 

[vahacris]

13 hours ago, fromlostdays said:

Dude that is awesome! It's too late for me though haha. I already went through the entire process the long way haha. However, I encourage you to upload this to the downloads section of launchbox for people coming after as it will be a huge time saver and perfect for multi disc systems. Does it work for same name different extension as well?

Like

Chrono Cross.bin

Chrono Cross.cue

 

Yes. Program do not look at extension at all. If there is no "(" in name folder name is the same as filename.

If I know before that you work like that i would send you this program earlier. I thought im the only one stupid enough to spend so much time working with files before addin them to LB

[dnm]

My personal MSX Platform

with Clear logo/Box 3d/Cart, most of them original; the others custom made.

MSX2, 2+, Turbo R, V9900 and a small collection of MSX1 titles.

If you like I'll do more videos with my systems

[cleverest]

On 4/9/2020 at 7:57 AM, dnm said:

My personal MSX Platform

with Clear logo/Box 3d/Cart, most of them original; the others custom made.

MSX2, 2+, Turbo R, V9900 and a small collection of MSX1 titles.

If you like I'll do more videos with my systems

Cool. Anyway I can get your images ?

[fuzzlefluff]

Gog Galaxy with everything I can import gives me 1145, but thats missing a few of my accounts and doesn't include any of my emulated stuff. I was sitting at around 400 or so games I've owned physical copies of over the course of my life. After importing my steam and gog into launchbox the count is 1482, but thats missing most of my ps4 and psvita library, and a good chunk of my pc library that is on other things like uplay and the like.

 

So I'd round my number to a clean 1700 of games I've bought over the course of 20 years.

 

I'm already feeling like I have played/own too many games and I haven't even hit 10k, I can't imagine 100k that some of you guys have. I already feel like my steam library is full of raw sewage.

I also don't understand owning ALL the versions of a game but I guess if I was made of storage space and wanted to be the master archive I'd go for that. I'm just proud of the number of games I can say I actually bought and have played.

[kadrra]

I just ran a scan on a drive that i have been working on with some other people and we are at 77,214 games with 110 emulators running hyperspin

[PaulC]

it doesn't bug you that you haven't tested them all to see if they work? and it seems silly to take time getting something to work you will never want to play just so you can look at the box art in a menu.

[Retrofrogg]

You sound like my wife lol.