My collection - 200 systems

[-McFly-]

7 hours ago, Retrofrogg said:

Probably useless for most, though the region clones are often slightly different in addition to the language difference. And then you have the region exclusive games, which are probably with having. 

I'm not most  My initial and still current need is to collect everything. The question of only having the games i'll play is a moot point as no-one will ever play even 20,000 games. That's not the point of my collection.

[-McFly-]

On 1/2/2020 at 3:18 PM, Arkeid said:

Great work dude but you need to clean the clones 

I want all the clones

[-McFly-]

Thank you everyone for the feedback - it's great and humbling to know that there's others who feel as passionately about this as I do. My main aim at the beginning was to find out exactly how many games COULD be collected for as many platforms with emulators I could find that were out there. I'm over 400,000 now with around 230 platforms and will continue to add more as time allows. I can live with the lag and LB is and will remain my front-end of choice.

[DOS76]

Have you considered doing separate builds per region to cut down on the number of games in each build that may assist with performance.

[Arkeid]

As I said, if that's your goal, I totally agree and encourage you to just continue ! Lot of people told me that my own goal was already too much so I won't bother anyone for that ! So go get that clones ! ✌️

For me LB is truly THE perfect software for that, and I'm not sure others frontends could handle that kind of collection without the same types of issues... 

27 minutes ago, DOS76 said:

Have you considered doing separate builds per region to cut down on the number of games in each build that may assist with performance.

That should be helpful, but did you try to navigate in your Bigbox without any themes to see if the response is better ?

However, did the SSD offers you a true gain in the fluidity ? That's the next tweak I'm about to do for my system.

[wallmachine]

7 hours ago, Mcfly 2019 said:

Have you tried all of these other front ends with this many platforms and games?

yes, however my setup is different as I have just over 120k ish games (1 game per region) and 230 platforms, also my theme does not really ask for much just 4k clear logos, backgrounds, gifs and platform/game videos.

Skip to 3:31 for platform/game view

Edited January 6, 2020 by wallmachine

[-McFly-]

9 minutes ago, wallmachine said:

yes, however my setup is different as I have just over 120k ish games (1 game per region) and 230 platforms, also my theme does not really ask for much just 4k clear logos, backgrounds, gifs and platform/game videos.

Skip to 3:31 for platform/game view

 

I could take a look at scaling back on the themes, etc. to make it less visually appealing but I like how I have it now, just my personal preference. I do know that when i was sitting around 150k games it was pretty instant. My issue is with lag on videos for each platform, which you're not showing here, you're only showing the video for Sega Genesis? I only started having noticeable issues with BigBox platform videos around the 200k game mark as well.  I have no issues with videos for the games themselves.

[-McFly-]

7 hours ago, Arkeid said:

As I said, if that's your goal, I totally agree and encourage you to just continue ! Lot of people told me that my own goal was already too much so I won't bother anyone for that ! So go get that clones ! ✌️

For me LB is truly THE perfect software for that, and I'm not sure others frontends could handle that kind of collection without the same types of issues... 

That should be helpful, but did you try to navigate in your Bigbox without any themes to see if the response is better ?

However, did the SSD offers you a true gain in the fluidity ? That's the next tweak I'm about to do for my system.

I did notice a slight increase in speed by moving my cache folders to my SSD using junctions, but it wasn't significant. Navigating in BigBox without video themes is flawless and fantastic.

[-McFly-]

7 hours ago, DOS76 said:

Have you considered doing separate builds per region to cut down on the number of games in each build that may assist with performance.

I have considered that and may go down that path. I think if I leave the max games to around 150k it'll fly.

[wallmachine]

12 minutes ago, Mcfly 2019 said:

I have considered that and may go down that path. I think if I leave the max games to around 150k it'll fly.

but other regions might have different levels/unlocks etc ?

[Arkeid]

Well I'll try to move my entire system (without the games) on a SSD...

Wallmachine's set seems fluent, but it will be interresting to know his specs and yours

[-McFly-]

4 hours ago, Arkeid said:

Well I'll try to move my entire system (without the games) on a SSD...

Wallmachine's set seems fluent, but it will be interresting to know his specs and yours

Here's my specs. I'm also running 2 graphics cards, NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1060 6GB and AMD Radeon HD 6570. It's home built by myself.

[Arkeid]

Seems great to me as i'm runnign my collection on a Optiplex 780 with GTX 730 

So it's may be possible that your speed issue reveals a kind of "limit" in Bigbox with video theme... the video from WallMachine is good but his collection not heavy as yours...

[fromlostdays]

I'm with you McFly! If I wanted to collect just the games I'd play I'd have stopped years ago!

My solution has been to have 2 LB/BB builds. One, small with just the games I play, the second is a monster with over 100k, and yes I import regional clones and games that don't work. Depending on what mood I'm in I either fire up the smaller build and play games, or just spend the evening tinkering with the monster. ?

My latest obsession has been to redo my rom sets in such a way that:

Each Unique Rom has its own folder (USA preferred, which is actually the hard part) and of course regional exclusives

Within each of those folders, all of the regional clones, translations hacks, etc. all named identically to the rom with the exception of whats in the parathesis

 

Hypothetical Example:

Super Nintendo Entertainment System/Super Mario World/ Super Mario World (USA).sfc

Super Nintendo Entertainment System/Super Mario World/ Super Mario World (USA) (Rev 1).sfc

Super Nintendo Entertainment System/Super Mario World/ Super Mario World (Japan).sfc

Super Nintendo Entertainment System/Super Mario World/ Super Mario World (Japan) (Translated English).sfc

Super Nintendo Entertainment System/Super Mario World/ Super Mario World (Extra Levels) (Hack).sfc

 

Theres no real reason to keep all of these versions, especially a translation of a Japanese version back to English, but I do. Redoing the rom sets like this makes it an absolute dream to import sets into Launchbox as every version but the USA version will automatically be saved as an additional app, and for games like Contra, which is VERY different in the European version for instance, make for a great showcase to friends. However, renaming all the hacks, and finding and renaming Japanese titles to the USA titles has been quite a challenge.

Anyway, keep on keeping on homie! You're certainly not alone in the Pokemon approach to retrogaming haha

 

Edited January 6, 2020 by fromlostdays

[Arkeid]

I'm glad to see there are others crazy people like me 

My collection is way short than yours, but I've spend a lot of time on it mainly because of the epuration of clones and the naming / illustrating part.

By now it's about 21 300 games, but I've rename them all and find the most covers by myself (or even create for the hacks)

However, i got all the clones on my disk, in case I want to play some specific, but they're not inside the launchbox collection

 

I totally agree about the region titles challenge 

[sinistron]

Where did you get the Apple II GS roms!?

[-McFly-]

On 1/18/2020 at 7:33 PM, sinistron said:

Where did you get the Apple II GS roms!?

Can't remember... but It might have been from archive.org, i got a few of my older systems from there.

[-McFly-]

So, I've found the fix.

I decided to go back through a few platforms... remove, re-download, re-add. I did this with all my Sony titles as when I did them originally I was too quick and added by 'folder' rather than by 'file'. I did this with a few others as well, odd platforms that weren't as tidy as I'd like. Anyway, after doing this my videos in BigBox now show in less than 5 seconds. Every. Single. One.

It seems that LB/BB was struggling going through a platform (or several) looking for games as opposed to other files that were added but not actual game files. In the beginning I added platforms by folder which also added other files that shouldn't have been added - I'm pretty sure that LB didn't show these files as actual games but at this point I'm not 100% as further tests of this have been inconclusive.

I also noticed that my BB intro video went down from 15 minutes to around 6.

If anyone else has success doing this, please let me know. At this point, I'm happy with less that 5 seconds per platform        

[fromlostdays]

Were the other files loaded as additional apps?

Edit: Also I'm about to do this on my big build as well as all the paths of my games have changed slightly. How did you go about re-adding without re-downloading art? Just delete entries in Launchbox, re-add games and don't click on any art to download? 

Edited January 20, 2020 by fromlostdays

[-McFly-]

On 1/20/2020 at 9:27 AM, fromlostdays said:

Were the other files loaded as additional apps?

Edit: Also I'm about to do this on my big build as well as all the paths of my games have changed slightly. How did you go about re-adding without re-downloading art? Just delete entries in Launchbox, re-add games and don't click on any art to download? 

I haven't played with any additional apps yet. When I was re-adding the games I unchecked the options to download artwork I already had. I'm going to go through and remove duplicates with the updated media check tool.