8.6-beta-1 Released

[Jason Carr]

5 minutes ago, ZeSystem said:

I have hundreds of MAME games with customized genres (that better explain the game), replaced/removed/added customized new clear logos, etc.

How do I keep them and update to the new meta list? Please don't tell me there is no way...

There is no way. Just kidding, but I really have no idea what that means or what your collection actually looks like. Regardless though, if you can't update the metadata, then the playlists and most of the new features are not going to work.

[ZeSystem]

3 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

There is no way. Just kidding, but I really have no idea what that means or what your collection actually looks like. Regardless though, if you can't update the metadata, then the playlists and most of the new features are not going to work.

Well for images, I think unchecking the media files would do the trick, but my collection has modified titles (still has Launchbox database ID linked though) and some game's genre has changed (from simply "Shooter" to "Vertical Scrolling Shooter", for example). I also added some useful information on the notes for some games.

Is there any way to keep all that and just update the meta data? It would be a shame to not be able to use new feature.

[Jason Carr]

1 minute ago, ZeSystem said:

Well for images, I think unchecking the media files would do the trick, but my collection has modified titles (still has Launchbox database ID linked though) and some game's genre has changed (from simply "Shooter" to "Vertical Scrolling Shooter", for example). I also added some useful information on the notes for some games.

Is there any way to keep all that and just update the meta data? It would be a shame to not be able to use new feature.

The new MAME metadata is very specific for genres and such; it's much better than the old data, so you might find that it's better anyways. I would recommend creating a temporary, new instance of LaunchBox and trying out the full set importer to see if it's what you want or not. You may find that it's what you were hoping for from the beginning. Otherwise, there's not much use for the new metadata if you don't want any of it changed, and if you're happy with what you've got, then there's nothing to worry about anyways.

[RULLUR]

Hopefully we can soon see an Updated MAME LaunchBox Tutorial on YouTube soon. It might help much of us out on how to do this correctly, especially those of us who get a ROM here and there instead of sets of games that we mostly aren't ever gonna play.

[Lordmonkus]

The new Mame importer is meant to be used on full sets, hand picked sets you would use the old import system.

 

[FistyDollars]

So for the full set importer, since it lets you skip certain categories to import such as mechanical, unplayable, casino etc. (and there is a LOT of bloat in a standard MAME full romset nowadays), would it be possible to either let us delete the roms that are skipped (since I'm only filtering them because I don't want them) or at least let us move the roms that are imported to somewhere separate so I can delete the rest of the roms that I choose to filter? I hate the idea of just keeping around a bunch of broken/unplayable/gambling games for the sake of a "full romset."

 

EDIT: Also, an option to detect which games don't have the required .chd files and either filter them or notify the user of the missing file?

Edited August 28, 2018 by FistyDollars

[Retrofrogg]

Just a small thing regarding the MAME importer - it would be great if there were some way for Launchbox to display this "history" and "info" that comes with the MAME games!

[Jason Carr]

10 hours ago, RULLUR said:

Hopefully we can soon see an Updated MAME LaunchBox Tutorial on YouTube soon. It might help much of us out on how to do this correctly, especially those of us who get a ROM here and there instead of sets of games that we mostly aren't ever gonna play.

ETA will have a tutorial out shortly after the official release, which should be soon.

10 hours ago, FistyDollars said:

So for the full set importer, since it lets you skip certain categories to import such as mechanical, unplayable, casino etc. (and there is a LOT of bloat in a standard MAME full romset nowadays), would it be possible to either let us delete the roms that are skipped (since I'm only filtering them because I don't want them) or at least let us move the roms that are imported to somewhere separate so I can delete the rest of the roms that I choose to filter? I hate the idea of just keeping around a bunch of broken/unplayable/gambling games for the sake of a "full romset."

 

EDIT: Also, an option to detect which games don't have the required .chd files and either filter them or notify the user of the missing file?

I'm not 100% an expert on MAME ROMs (even after spending so many hours researching and programming this stuff), but I don't believe it would be safe to go in and delete files that don't appear to be used, because many of the games would stop functioning. I believe figuring out which files are needed for each game is a rather complicated process. I'm guessing that the auto-generated MAME data would provide the necessary information, but parsing all that out is way beyond what I've built so far. If that's what you're looking for, though, I would recommend using an external tool of some sort (I know they exist but I'm not familiar with them) to whittle down the set, and then importing it via the drag and drop importer (this has now been updated to use the new metadata).

7 hours ago, Dan said:

Just a small thing regarding the MAME importer - it would be great if there were some way for Launchbox to display this "history" and "info" that comes with the MAME games!

We may add this in the future, but as for now it's not planned for the official release.

[wallmachine]

not sure if the correct thread... just imported the following systems below, got no errors however it did not import all games.

mame - 16892/16936
nec turbografx-16 - 88/94
nec turbografx-cd - 45/46 (didn't import Fantasy Star Soldier (USA))

Edited August 28, 2018 by wallmachine

[Jason Carr]

3 minutes ago, wallmachine said:

not sure if the correct thread... just imported the following systems below, got no errors however it did not import all games.

mame - 16892/16936
nec turbografx-16 - 88/94
nec turbografx-cd - 45/46

Did you use the new full set importer for MAME?

I haven't touched TurboGrafx; what format are the ROM files in?

[wallmachine]

6 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

Did you use the new full set importer for MAME?

I haven't touched TurboGrafx; what format are the ROM files in?

for all systems file extensions that i imported are .zip and .7z

mame - .zip (nope, just imported the folder)
nec turbografx-16 - .7z
nec turbografx-cd - .7z

Edited August 28, 2018 by wallmachine

[Jason Carr]

1 minute ago, wallmachine said:

for all systems file extensions that i imported are .zip and .7z

mame - .zip (nope, just imported the folder)
nec turbografx-16 - .7z
nec turbografx-cd - .7z

You'll want to use the new MAME full-set importer if you're importing a full set, as it was built specifically to solve the problem of missing games. MAME is very tricky since not all games even have ROM files associated with them. The new importer solves that problem.

Per TurboGrafx, I would need more information in order to determine why they didn't import, such as the full file names. If you want to troubleshoot it further, let's please put it in another thread.

[Jason Carr]

Beta 9 is out now with the following:

- Fixed: LaunchBox (.Next) was missing plugin support for the Tools menu

- Fixed: LaunchBox (.Next) was missing LEDBlinky support

- Stripped out the voice recognition stuff, which seems to be horribly broken in Windows 10 anyways. I don't know why, but it seems like MS has ruined the voice recognition engine, and it seems to be completely worthless these days unfortunately (no matter what I try it just never picks up the correct words). If requested (which I doubt), we may add voice recognition back in at some point, but it never seemed to be a very popular feature anyways. It was also very finicky since it's implementation back in the day.

I'm hoping this beta will be the release candidate for the official release.

[dbalcar]

Hello I am on LB 8.6 beta 6 and it will not run.  I get 2 errors in the windows app evt logs.

 

Application: LaunchBox.exe
Framework Version: v4.0.30319
Description: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception.
Exception Info: System.NullReferenceException
   at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Desktop.Program.Main(System.String[])

 

Faulting application name: LaunchBox.exe, version: 8.6.0.6, time stamp: 0x5b807d1c
Faulting module name: unknown, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x00000000
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00007ff8a3c6add8
Faulting process id: 0x33fc
Faulting application start time: 0x01d43f3248f5bdf5
Faulting application path: D:\Launchbox\LaunchBox.exe
Faulting module path: unknown
Report Id: bec6adca-6de4-4925-a87e-d8684e033389
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

 

Where can I download beta 9 to try that one?

 

Thanks

[dbalcar]

Ok I got it updated to 8.6 beta 9 and it seems to be working now.

Thanks  ?

[Suhrvivor]

How come the new generic playlists only contain arcade games? You would expect that a playlist in LaunchBox titled "2-Players Games" would include all multiplayer games, not just for one platform. If they're only for Arcade, they should be named "2-players Arcade games", don't they?

[dragon57]

Hmm, has beta 9 been taken down? Neither of my installations here is updating from beta 6, and I verified all the Update settings in the Options panel are still correct and unchanged.

[Lordmonkus]

17 minutes ago, Suhrvivor said:

How come the new generic playlists only contain arcade games? You would expect that a playlist in LaunchBox titled "2-Players Games" would include all multiplayer games, not just for one platform. If they're only for Arcade, they should be named "2-players Arcade games", don't they?

They are in the Arcade platform and you can rename em to whatever you want, I even moved mine to their own platform category for my organizational reasons.

[dragon57]

I just noticed I have a number of duplicate Playlists after upgrading to Beta 9 and redoing my MAME metadata and Platform import. The lists that are duplicates also have different amounts of games in them, so they aren't true duplicates across the board, but they exist and if you edit one and try to hit OK without changing anything, LaunchBox tells you that you can't have duplicate Playlist names.

Any suggestions as to how to clean this up without getting into worse trouble?

[Lordmonkus]

Try closing LB and going to your Launchbox\Data\Playlists folder and renaming them.