How to add Additional Apps per Platform

[syntax_X]

Quick tutorial on how to add additional apps for every game across an entire platform.

Currently you have to add the new apps one by one but if you have notepad++ there's a faster way.

Backup your Data folder before going any further.

Open launchbox and browse to a game on the platform you want to have additional apps on.
Right click any game and edit.

Go to the additional apps tab and Add Application

 

Make a name for your app and find its path ect

Close Launchbox after your done and navigate to the data folder, find your platform and open it in notepad++

Highlight <ID> and press ctrl+f

choose mark, bookmark line, mark all

scroll to the bottom of the xml file and unmark the bottom bookmark( or else well make a dupe of the app for our game we chose at the start)

Copy all the bookmarked lines and paste them into a new text document.

In the new text highlight <ID> and ctrl+f . Match whole word and case then Replace all with <GAMEID>

Go back to the platform xml and scroll to the bottom, we want to find the whole string for the additional app we made earlier. 
Highlight it from start to end, and copy paste it into a new text twice.

 

Highlight from </GAMEID> to </Playcount> and copy.

click on the bottom right of the the game id text file then scroll to the top and hold alt+shift and select the entire right hand side </ID>

Hold your breath and press ctrl+v

Most of the hard part is done we just need to clean up the start and end of the file and copy paste it into the original platform xml.
 

Highlight the last 3 rows of text, cut and paste them to the top of the file, be sure there are no blank lines or odd spaces ect.

Copy this entire file ctrl+a ctrl+c and paste it OVER your additional app settings in the platform xml.

Save and load Launchbox, right click on any game in the platform and it should have the option to load the additional app.

FLASH-MONITOR-FLASH-EXIT.bat

FLASH-MONITOR-FLASH-EXIT.zip

 

Here's the addition app I use, its a small batch file that starts minimised and performs whatever code you choose to add, then monitors the emulator/task of choice and on exit runs another code then closes itself.
I use it to flash a keyboard encoder on emulator start, monitor the emulator, then on exit flash the encoder to BigBox.
Works perfectly but can be a resource hog if the delay is too low.

Edited June 3, 2017 by syntax_X

[Lordmonkus]

This will come in handy for some people I am sure and I added it to the Guides & Tutorials thread.

 

[syntax_X]

Using this method you could potentially bulk edit a lot of the fields that are currently not available. 

[Kondorito]

Thank you @syntax_X for the tuto! Saved me a lot of time.

[Andrew8Kavanagh]

 i cant get this to work 99.9% sure i did everything perfect tryed it 4 times every time database corrputed any1 eles having this problem

[harryoke]

working thanks

[djwar]

I never understood this feature.

What are the additional apps for ?

[DOS76]

Additional apps are for a multitude of things depending on what you want to do with them. In the past I used them in conjunction with the Sega Saturn emulator SSF in order to mount a disk in Dameon tools before the emulator ran and then to dismount the disk when the emulator closed. They are used to link multiple games to one game like say in the instance of a MAME game like Street Fighter II which seems to have about 25 different version in MAME when adding the ROMs to LB it will combine the parent and the clone of these games into one entry the parent will be the facing game in LB but the clones will all be added to the additional apps feature. There are even other things you could do like link strategy guides to the game making the reader the application and then from the menu you could open the guide or maps or whatever additional things you wanted to call that were relevant to the game.

[fettsvett201]

I made PDFs for around 200 MAME games from the history.db file. They are named after the MAME rom name and are located in one directory named “history”. What would be the best way to add this info using the method described in this thread?

 

Thanks.