What is rocket launcher? Should I be using it?

[bundangdon]

18 minutes ago, mothergoose729 said:

Found this tutorial online. It isn't as detailed as I would like, but it is helping me get started

 

That's an excellent tutorial and after watching it, launchbox (with rocketlauncher) became my frontend of choice  

[Lordmonkus]

39 minutes ago, mothergoose729 said:

and it is difficult to tell where RL begins and the front end HS ends

Essentially Hyperspin is the graphical part of it, kind of like BigBox mode of Launchbox and RocketLauncher is the backend management part like the normal "desktop" mode of Launchbox.

[Lordmonkus]

48 minutes ago, mothergoose729 said:

I was under the impression that you needed a new module for every release of the emulator

Not necessarily for every release but if there is a release that has something that changes and breaks the module you will need a new one. Also if you for whatever reason needed to use an old version of an emulator and the current module didn't work you would need an older module that worked with the older version of the emulator. And with new emulators you will have to wait for a module for it, like how when Mednafen implemented its Saturn core, RL needed to have a module made for it before it would work with it for Saturn.

[kmoney]

10 hours ago, mothergoose729 said:

I would personally find something like that very helpful. All the videos online talk about hyper spin, and it is difficult to tell where RL begins and the front end HS ends. 

Yes what @lordmonkus said and another way to look at it is basically as soon as you choose a game to play and hit that button within your frontend rather it be BigBox or HS to play that said game is when RL takes over. Then when you exit back out of the game back into your frontend RL is no longer in control.

[mothergoose729]

I took another shot at RL last night and I got retroarch working. I haven't added any fancy effects, but I have gotten LB and RL talking to each other, and a bunch of cores to run. 

So far I like having the extra layer of separation between the launching of the games and the presentation of the games in LB. Changing emulators on a per game basis in LB is a little more menu intensive than RL. RL also separates emulators based on platform, while in LB everything is global, so it feels a bit more organized on that front. The ability to set command line arguments in menus through the modules is also nice. 

I wish that RL would silently fail instead of presenting an error message to you. I also noticed that it takes a good 10 seconds to get a game to start the first time, because RL has to load itself into memory first. I wish RL would just load itself into memory automatically on startup instead, that way there isn't that abrupt pause.

I am hoping I can smooth that part out a little with a hardware upgrade though. 

 

 

[Lordmonkus]

5 minutes ago, mothergoose729 said:

Changing emulators on a per game basis in LB is a little more menu intensive than RL.

Not exactly sure how much more simple it can be than in Launchbox, right click a game and edit, then in the emulation tab pick an emulator and you are done. I can see how something can be equally simple but not more.

7 minutes ago, mothergoose729 said:

RL also separates emulators based on platform, while in LB everything is global, so it feels a bit more organized on that front.

Can you clarify this statement for me ? What do you mean but by in LB everything is global ?

 

[mothergoose729]

7 minutes ago, lordmonkus said:

Not exactly sure how much more simple it can be than in Launchbox, right click a game and edit, then in the emulation tab pick an emulator and you are done. I can see how something can be equally simple but not more.

Can you clarify this statement for me ? What do you mean but by in LB everything is global ?

 

If I want to change the default emulator for a platform in LB I have to update each rom in my collection. I may just be ignorant, but the only way I know to mass assign emulators in LB is to go through the import wizard. The audit grid only let me update each game one at a time. In RL, I can change the default emulator and it will update each rom that isn't set to an alternate emulator. 

Setting an alternate emulator for a particular rom is probably more steps in RL than LB, but the drop down list in RL is shorter because it only has the emulators I associate for that platform, rather than all of my emulators I have for every system like in LB.

[Lordmonkus]

In Launchbox to change the emulator for all games you select all your games (Control + A) right click and edit and change the emulator in the bulk wizard. RocketLauncher is probably simpler than this once you know where to look in the RL UI.

3 minutes ago, mothergoose729 said:

Setting an alternate emulator for a particular rom is probably more steps in RL than LB, but the drop down list in RL is shorter because it only has the emulators I associate for that platform, rather than all of my emulators I have for every system like in LB.

Ok, I see what you mean and it makes sense but at the same time is such a small and minor thing in the grand scheme.

[mothergoose729]

Just now, lordmonkus said:

In Launchbox to change the emulator for all games you select all your games (Control + A) right click and edit and change the emulator in the bulk wizard. RocketLauncher is probably simpler than this once you know where to look in the RL UI.

Ok, I see what you mean and it makes sense but at the same time is such a small and minor thing in the grand scheme.

Yeah it's not a huge deal, but I do like the extra context for organization. 

Just now, DOS76 said:

If you have a whole platform up and you use ctrl+a you can select all games then right click and select edit this starts the bulk edit wizard and you can change them all at once there.

 I learn stuff on this forum constantly. Thank for the tips guys. I guess in that sense LB is probably a little easier to bulk assign emulators than RL. 

Edited June 18, 2017 by mothergoose729

[Lordmonkus]

5 minutes ago, mothergoose729 said:

 I learn stuff on this forum constantly.

At the end of the day all of this emulation and front end stuff is relatively complicated to most people, it's just which is relatively more intuitive for the beginner.

[ninja2bceen]

For the rl delay and such I think you can even turn off fade in and fade out if you don't want the loading screens at all

[SentaiBrad]

If you start removing the features RL has, then why use it all though? If you don't want the features, then don't use RL, it will make things even more complicated in the long run. The list of features people list off is very small, so removing any seems like you're landing back at just LB anyways. Not to mention, some of these features can and probably will make their way in to LB in some form.

[mothergoose729]

I am thinking I am going to end up not using rocket launcher after all. 

There are so many cool features, but the basic stuff is so unnecessarily difficult. Rocket launcher doesn't seem to recognize any of my files if they are more than one directory deep. So for my CD games which are organized into folders by game, and folders by disc, I have to go and add dozens of rom paths so the audit will work. Frustrating. 

Another problem is I can't seem to find an option to just let me pass my own command line parameters for a particular game to a particular emulator. I just want to bang out the command myself and have RL use it. Why is this not a part of the rom audit dialog or the rom settings tab? I am sure this option must exist somewhere, but for the life of me I can't find it. Something basic like that shouldn't be so difficult...grrr

Edited June 23, 2017 by mothergoose729

[Mute64]

3 hours ago, mothergoose729 said:

I am thinking I am going to end up not using rocket launcher after all. 

There are so many cool features, but the basic stuff is so unnecessarily difficult. Rocket launcher doesn't seem to recognize any of my files if they are more than one directory deep. So for my CD games which are organized into folders by game, and folders by disc, I have to go and add dozens of rom paths so the audit will work. Frustrating. 

Another problem is I can't seem to find an option to just let me pass my own command line parameters for a particular game to a particular emulator. I just want to bang out the command myself and have RL use it. Why is this not a part of the rom audit dialog or the rom settings tab? I am sure this option must exist somewhere, but for the life of me I can't find it. Something basic like that shouldn't be so difficult...grrr

I know how to fix the 1 directory deep issue if you are still interested 

[Porl Hendy]

I am please

[Mute64]

2 hours ago, Porl Hendy said:

I am please

Short awsner is use symbolic links, for example, i am in the same situation as you but instead of making multiple directories in RL i only make one per platform now...... so for each platform i just do a search for that platforms file type like .pbp and then i symlink all those roms and put them in one Roms directory folder.

 

Make sense????

 

 Its like 230am.... 

 

Here is the link to the symlink tool i use

 

http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html

[SentaiBrad]

Wait, sym linking is the solution here? Seriously... that's actually ridiculous.

[Mute64]

Tell me bout it... ive brought this issue up before on the RL forums with no response.... its an aplication that really needs to look more than 1 directory deep if it wants to deal with emulators... it infuriates me.

Edited June 23, 2017 by Mute64

[SentaiBrad]

Add this to the literal pile of reasons to not use RL. Seriously, 2 features are not worth that amount of trouble. X_X

[Mute64]

Im just glad i got my RL setup the way i like it while i had the time todo it...... before i got so busy that the only time to respond to the odd forum post is at 230am when i wake up thinking about shit i forgot todo at work and can not get back to sleep. 

 

I read so many problems and issues on here that i could help out with but never have the time to write up an explanation.

 

Edited June 23, 2017 by Mute64