Seek advice to get started the right way

[Daskepeder]

Hey, I bought Launchbox a while back after a pretty thorough research on what frontend to use on my arcade. BigBox was just released and when I saw how far Unbroken had come with it after such a short time, I just couldn't help being mighty impressed. I do not regret this at all. I only wish I had more time to fiddle with it.

However after seeing all this software can do, my thoughts on using it have expanded a bit and I haven't really had the time to customize things as I had hoped. Therefore I am seeking your council before I start all-over.

I currently have a pretty weak Arcade cabinet which will not be able to run the newest platforms and never really was intended too.
I also have a pretty decent media PC which primary use is Kodi, but it also got a 780GTX installed and were intended for games. I therefore wish to expand the library with newer stuff on this machine.
I also have an office/gamer PC which I use for "everything else". Although I probably wount use Launchbox/BigBox much on this computer, I would very much like to use this for configuration and adding stuff to the library.

Up until now I have used Teamviewer and configured the Arcade and the MediaPC as two different installations, but I'm getting sick of setting up everything twice. I could of course just copy the Launchbox around as it is designed to be able to run from everywhere with all files in the original folder, but I wanted to know if there were a smoother way to do it. Another problem with my old approach, is that the Arcade have limited space (128 SSD), and the video folder is growing very big (got a subscription from Emumovies as well). As I have some experience with Kodi in more than one room, I've made a pretty smooth setup here with MySQL for a shared database across all clients. I was wondering if there is something similar I can do with Launchbox? I tried running it directly from my NAS, but it was so slow I couldn't take it, and besides I don't wish for everything to be available from everywhere.

I have a few thoughts on how to manages this, but it all feels a bit old fashioned. Do you have any advice for a n00b?

Edited January 26, 2017 by Daskepeder

[DOS76]

I have some experience with running LB using network locations for various ROM files and such but not really what you are talking about If you use Steam you can use in home streaming to play BigBox on all you computers from the host as long as your controls support xinput so that may be an issue with the arcade setup. You could also direct LB to a video folder on a network location but I don't know if there would be any performance issues as I've never tested that to change where a platform looks for its videos go into Tools>Manage Platforms double click the platform you want to edit and when the new form opens up go to the folders tab and there you can change the paths unfortunately you will have to change all the paths individually per platform as there is no way to change where LB looks for the root video folder

[Daskepeder]

2 hours ago, DOS76 said:

I have some experience with running LB using network locations for various ROM files and such but not really what you are talking about If you use Steam you can use in home streaming to play BigBox on all you computers from the host as long as your controls support xinput so that may be an issue with the arcade setup. You could also direct LB to a video folder on a network location but I don't know if there would be any performance issues as I've never tested that to change where a platform looks for its videos go into Tools>Manage Platforms double click the platform you want to edit and when the new form opens up go to the folders tab and there you can change the paths unfortunately you will have to change all the paths individually per platform as there is no way to change where LB looks for the root video folder

Thank you for your answer.

Well the way you mentioned with the vidoes is a good start. I've been looking for a way like that without any success. It's a good start. And I'm almost relived that there are not any real easy way of doing this that I haven't been able to figure out. It works great this way for the roms themselves, so it'll be fun to try. Just gotta make sure that paths are the same on all 3 computers, which should not really be a problem. Would be great if they would let us change the default path for videos at least. Incredible amount of work if I have to through all the games and change them one by one.

I don't see any easy solution to the whole program but if I can sort the videoes and then find an elegant way to sync the libraries I would be satisfied.

I was thinking of trying to set up folder sync with Resilio Sync and then sort out Library sharing this way. I think that might work so I don't have to take copy each folder every time.

Happy for more tips if anyone have any!

[Daskepeder]

I tried now to get many videos at once, and sadly there were no way to redirect the folder for every video. I had to take one and and one. Really can't be arsed with that on 5000 games...

[ckp]

i didn't read through all of this, but you might find mklink a good solution to changing default LB paths to actually look somewhere else if you need or want to do that, using symbolic links.

[Daskepeder]

9 hours ago, ckp said:

i didn't read through all of this, but you might find mklink a good solution to changing default LB paths to actually look somewhere else if you need or want to do that, using symbolic links.

Thanks for that. I haven't really considered that as I'm not familiar with the use of mklink. I do, however understand it's use after reading up a bit. I am not quite sure I understand what you get after a making a symbolic link? What will be the output of say:
MKLlink /D Col C:\GOG Games\Colonization\ ?

I'm getting syntax errors however I write it...

[ckp]

"symbolic links" just allow you to redirect the contents of a folder to some other folder or drive, but an application looking at the original folder has no idea anything changed.

Here is an example of how to do this. The below example was used to move the LB image cache folder from a usb drive to a ssd drive, but you can just replace the paths with the ones you want (below the C path is the folder you want to change to, like your SSD):

mklink /J R:\LaunchBox\Images\Cache C:\LaunchBox\LaunchBoxLinks\Images\Cache

so, the above command creates a link (like a shortcut) here R:\LaunchBox\Images\Cache , which means you first move anything inside that folder to your new destination folder and then delete R:\LaunchBox\Images\Cache before running the command because the command will create R:\LaunchBox\Images\Cache , which will actually point to C:\LaunchBox\LaunchBoxLinks\Images\Cache . in windows explorer it will still look like all the original files are still inside R:\LaunchBox\Images\Cache , but they really are not.

hope that help.

[Daskepeder]

I ended up reading through all of this once more realized that DOS76 was actually speaking bout video files on all games in a platform that can be changed at once. I wasn't to happy with the performance from my NAS so I'll probably end up with buying more space. Thank you very much for answers both of you.