Import of Windows Games not installed in Programs folder still a pain?

[Firefairy]

I have found a few threads from last year that provide a laborious workaround for this, but I can't find anything recent. Does this still require a kludgy hack?

I have most of my games installed on a removable drive. Launchbox is on the same drive. I can point it at the correct folder for my DOSBox games, and it works fine, but it still seems to only look for games that Windows knows about and has in the Start menu.

I have quite a few games from GOG, and a fair number installed from physical media. They are all nicely stored in specific folders, but DOSBox doesn't know they are there, and there is no option I can find to have it scan those folders for games. 

The hack, as I understand it, is to have LaunchBox scan those folders for either DOSBox games (which only works if the games are .exe files) or any given emulator, then correct the access type to direct run manually on each game. I am still just barely at the point where that might be feasible, but before I do, I would like to confirm that this is this seriously the way this still works; I am really hoping I am just missing a fix that occurred in the meantime.

 

[Lordmonkus]

The problem is that Launchbox has no real way of discerning what is a games exe and what is not and there is no simple solution to do this. (disclaimers: as far as I understand it, I am not a programmer)

What I do is I make a folder which becomes a "roms" folder of sorts, in this folder I put shortcut files for all my games. I them import them like any other rom and at the first screen of the import wizard choose the bottom entry "None of the Above", this will import the shortcut files without asking for an emulator and they will just work once the import process is complete. That old method of assigning an emulator on import and then changing them after to not use an emulator was an old workaround and is now obsolete. 

[Firefairy]

On 5/30/2018 at 4:16 PM, Lordmonkus said:

The problem is that Launchbox has no real way of discerning what is a games exe and what is not and there is no simple solution to do this. (disclaimers: as far as I understand it, I am not a programmer)

What I do is I make a folder which becomes a "roms" folder of sorts, in this folder I put shortcut files for all my games. I them import them like any other rom and at the first screen of the import wizard choose the bottom entry "None of the Above", this will import the shortcut files without asking for an emulator and they will just work once the import process is complete. That old method of assigning an emulator on import and then changing them after to not use an emulator was an old workaround and is now obsolete.

I think it would be feasible to point LaunchBox at a folder and then manually pick out the game executables from what it finds there, but also not a programmer, so it's possible that would be a lot harder than looking for DOSBox games. Also, other users might not be as tolerant of the hand-sorting required as I tend to be.

Very glad to hear that the assigning and clearing emulator tags is obsolete; that was the part I was mostly dreading. Thanks very much for the update. ^.^

Now looking forward to one day being able to track my uninstalled GOG games the way I can the Steam ones. :-J

Edited June 1, 2018 by Firefairy
Adding a clarification.

[Lordmonkus]

Honestly it's not much work to make shortcuts to all your games in a single folder and import the shortcut files. Takes a few minutes depending on the number of games and you get exactly what you want without relying on any sort of guess work.