Hide platforms

[rana]

might as well put my name down as well, would be a great feature.

[rana]

wow just noticed, the thread was started more than four years ago😦, not gonna hold my breath for this feature to implemented..

[Elhora]

i add my voice for this feature.

As we all know , making the perfect working build is a long and tedious work so I duplicate my main LB hard drive on my 3 arcade cabinets so i'm sure in case of crash,  i have some saving of my build. but one cabinet is dedicated for arcade/consoles, one for racing games and one for computer games.

This function would be super helpful so each cabinet would have their own view while all the hidden platform would still be installed and configured if needed.

There is already a hide game option, i dont know what can makes a hide platform so more difficult that it's not implemented

Edited September 24, 2021 by Elhora

[Jason Carr]

On 9/24/2021 at 4:03 PM, Elhora said:

i add my voice for this feature.

As we all know , making the perfect working build is a long and tedious work so I duplicate my main LB hard drive on my 3 arcade cabinets so i'm sure in case of crash,  i have some saving of my build. but one cabinet is dedicated for arcade/consoles, one for racing games and one for computer games.

This function would be super helpful so each cabinet would have their own view while all the hidden platform would still be installed and configured if needed.

There is already a hide game option, i dont know what can makes a hide platform so more difficult that it's not implemented

It's not that it would be hard to implement; it's that there's really not a great reason to implement it. Hiding games already allows you to hide platforms just the same...

[Whistler NL]

I could hide all my windows games and it would get rid of the windows platform right, the problem I see in this is that I am hiding the game and therefor it will also disappear in the custom playlists I've created.

I would like to hide curtain platforms from showing but not the games as they are added to various playlists.

The only way it can be done now is by (I guess?) changing the platform of the game to one of the other platforms, so I would have to add a windows game to like the arcade platform and not the windows platform, which ideally is not something you want to do.

Edited October 7, 2021 by Whistler NL

[Whistler NL]

I just removed all games from windows to other platform but even though Windows platform is now empty is still shows up in BB with the message it doesn't have any games. So to get rid of windows I have to actually delete the platform from LB. 

[Jason Carr]

On 10/7/2021 at 4:24 AM, Whistler NL said:

I just removed all games from windows to other platform but even though Windows platform is now empty is still shows up in BB with the message it doesn't have any games. So to get rid of windows I have to actually delete the platform from LB. 

I see; I think it will show up still if you have playlists under that platform. This is still on our list, so either way we will get to it here at some point.

[vaderag]

I'd like this as well.

For example, my big box setup runs an arcade machine, I only want it to show arcade (and pinball) categories in big box.

However, if I'm using Launchbox I can use a keyboard and mouse, so I would like my windows games in Launchbox but not in big box

[Juzzotec]

Would love this feature as well... For example...

All the Arcade emulators games (e.g. Mame, Demul etc) can be consolidated into one Arcade Playlist and then you can promote that into the platform list. Now you dont want those individual platforms/emulators to be visible as well. This would really clean up the arcade category... can we please get this feature across the line 😙

[JesseBlue]

Please add this feature! Let us hide entire platforms in BigBox.

[Dan Patrick]

Yes! this would actually be used by me

[launchretrogirl2562]

Please add this feature

[ericcannon]

Spoiler

 

Yes, please add this feature. Sometimes I would like to show only completed systems rather than showing systems that I may still be working on.

[tkssitch]

My workout is this, in regular Launchbox Right-Click on the platform you want to hide in BigBox and go to edit. Should bring up the edit screen with platform details, should be 3 tabs you can click on, and i believe it's the Parent tab.  It would bring up check boxes with Root.  Just uncheck any checks in those boxes. 

Go into BigBox and set the view as Platform Categories.  When you go to consoles any platforms that you unchecked with the previous method should not be shown, but they will still show up for you in regular Launchbox.  

It's not a perfect method but it's a decent work around. Hope that helps someone out there. 

[LordMcSoth]

You can also just select all CTRL-A in a specific platform, right-click Open Bulk Edit Wizard, then Next, in Field select Hide, and check the box for Value of Hide, then click Next, select No More Changes and then you are done.  Everything in the platform is hidden and the platform disappears if you change your View to not show Hidden and all games are hidden.  Does what I wanted at least. 

[dreasgrech]

I recently needed this functionality to hide some of my platforms in LaunchBox without wanting to remove them entirely.  I set up an arcade cabinet at home running on LaunchBox and I only wanted to keep the MAME platform visible, but I really didn't want to have to delete all my other platforms just in case I want to play them again.

So I ended up writing it in my little homebrew ROMs manager application, and it looks something like this;

If anyone else needs this functionality (full source code is available), you can download the DROMsM setup.exe from https://github.com/dreasgrech/DROMsM/releases
The tool is accessible from Tools -> LaunchBox -> Manage Platforms

---

To keep track of your platforms, LaunchBox keeps a set of XML files in the Data/Platforms directory and it seems like LaunchBox ignores platform files that do not have the XML extension, so what the tool does is change the extension of the platform you want hidden to .hidden instead of .xml.
From the tool itself, you can both show or hide platforms where one option would set the file extension to .xml and the other to .hidden.
You can also bulk show/hide all your platforms in one operation.

This will allow you to hide entire LaunchBox platforms without losing the functionality of hiding specific games.

[Hamburglin]

Same.

While big box is great for power users, it's simply not good enough for an average user who does not own the arcade cabinet and wants to interact with it.

Someone should be able to walk up to your arcade cabinet with big box installed and be able to easily find games they want. Like combining tags such as "4 player" + "Genre: beat em up" + "Released: 1993" + "Stars: 4".

Today, the closest thing you can do is to make a playlist for each tag and only have it go one level deep.

Secondly, kiosk/lock mode needs to ACTUALLY be a kiosk mode. NO menu possible. No keyboard. If someone tries to go to the menu nothing should show up but the pin unlock box.

These two things combined would make the user experience simpler and "set and forget".

[klepp0906]

On 5/24/2022 at 8:49 PM, dreasgrech said:

I recently needed this functionality to hide some of my platforms in LaunchBox without wanting to remove them entirely.  I set up an arcade cabinet at home running on LaunchBox and I only wanted to keep the MAME platform visible, but I really didn't want to have to delete all my other platforms just in case I want to play them again.

So I ended up writing it in my little homebrew ROMs manager application, and it looks something like this;

If anyone else needs this functionality (full source code is available), you can download the DROMsM setup.exe from https://github.com/dreasgrech/DROMsM/releases
The tool is accessible from Tools -> LaunchBox -> Manage Platforms

---

To keep track of your platforms, LaunchBox keeps a set of XML files in the Data/Platforms directory and it seems like LaunchBox ignores platform files that do not have the XML extension, so what the tool does is change the extension of the platform you want hidden to .hidden instead of .xml.
From the tool itself, you can both show or hide platforms where one option would set the file extension to .xml and the other to .hidden.
You can also bulk show/hide all your platforms in one operation.

This will allow you to hide entire LaunchBox platforms without losing the functionality of hiding specific games.

possible to make this portable?  looks more convenient/useful than my method at current (moving the xml to a different folder for the express purpose of hiding platforms) but im not the biggest fan of installing things for a niche use.  plus i tend to keep all my emulation tools together on a separate disk that i run a backup script against.

if my house burned down, these are the things id want in the cloud  go figure. 

[5thWolf]

I just want to see my two categories "Arcade" & "Racing" as the initial start, then when you choose one, I do not want to see any platform options to choose from..... I just all the games together from every platform to show under that one category.

Edited May 17, 2023 by 5thWolf

[faeran]

15 hours ago, 5thWolf said:

I just want to see my two categories "Arcade" & "Racing" as the initial start, then when you choose one, I do not want to see any platform options to choose from..... I just all the games together from every platform to show under that one category.

You can do this by creating two Playlists. One called Arcade and one called Racing. Then bulk add all the games you want to see under Arcade, and do the same for Racing. Place each playlist within the root of the Platform Categories filter section. You'll also want to remove all other items from the platform categories filter as well.