Rocketlauncher + Launchbox\Big Box

[Aevans0001]

Hi, 

So I was wondering what the benefits of Rocket Launcher these days.  With Jason currently working on Pause screens, and Startup screens working.  I know that they set controller mappings pretty easily, but don't know what the real benefit of any of it is now.  

[dragon57]

IMO, RocketLauncher's strength is ease of changing front ends if setup properly, the ability to add bezels to emulators that don't natively support them, controller mappings, its pause is probably always going to be superior to what Jason develops (no slight on Jason. This is just a developers decision).

Having said that, I have already removed RocketLauncher from both my setups. It just isn't worth it to keep its complexity in my mix of systems.

[wallmachine]

agreed with @dragon57 about rocketlauncher and also with fades/startups in rocketlauncher you can hide bad startups in certain emulators/games to have a nice transition and in my eyes its a bonus because thats the point of having all the nice features and going through all the endless hours to make it look appealing.

Also rocketlauncher has an endless amount of other options and contrary to everyone complaining that it is hard to use it is definitely not... just with everything you need to use it to understand it and obviously heaps of options will lead to some unease but would you rather less options? I mean look LB/BB has grown and has more options now and I'm finding it hard to find things and understand options such as key automation and others because I can't find any documentation. With rocketlauncher it has tool tips as below and a wiki that covers almost everything. With rocketlauncher everything just works but then again no development on that side and jason is always trying to improve or add features and keep up to date.

With LB/BB I find it hard to import ROMs and keep the naming conventions I have spent endless hours naming and also keeping metadata and keep a list of what I have so I use rocketlauncher for this. However I find the bulk edit feature very handy and probably the best thing if you care about having correct metadata. Probably the most thing that I find frustrating is the theme creation I like to have something display all the hours I have spent and like creating themes but the lack of options or probably my lack of knowledge with coding I can't achieve most things or anything... I try to work it out myself and ask questions but to be honest never really get an answer only from the one and two people that help as much as they can.

So with everything its really what you want from it.

Also not limited to the below options for each game.

Edited May 9, 2019 by wallmachine

[FlightRisk]

I'll agree with the other guys that RL still a good option for some and is not very difficult to use once you spend any time with it. It just has a lot of options. And its bezels and pause screens just work. I think it gets a bad rap in part because it has an ugly user interface and because there are a several menus and lots of screens. That said, I would think a majority of people could get everything they want now with LB/BB. It just depends on how much time you want to spend tweaking things to have the perfect Arcade. I made a document that is basically how to install and setup everything so that if I don't touch it in 6 months, I can figure out exactly how to add or change anything. I also log everything I do by date. So I can see when I updated, changed, edited an XML, etc. When I started the Wiki, it was how to configure HyperSpin and RL. Then I tried GameEx and LaunchBox/BigBox. I haven't looked back. I still use RL with LB/BB, but after I move all my bezels to RetroArch and MAME (I have some of them still there, just put them in RL too as I moved over to that), I'll probably delete RL

That brings up another point, it was nice having bezels in one place with one simple system. RA's bezels are pretty easy, and MAME's can be, but since it allows layers, having all those files (bezel, background, etc. all separate and then a layer file to explain how to display them all) is more work. A am debating pretty much for that reason and controller config to just do everything in RA like I do on my Raspberry Pi setup. Right now I use RA for almost everything except for MAME. I like that I can easily launch games though from whatever emulator I want if I have them set up. So I can run from MAME64 or run RA with a MAME core with almost no effort.

[Aevans0001]

Thanks guys.  Anyone know any way to use servo stiks without using rocket launcher?  I am currently using rocket launcher with no servo stiks so I don't imagine it will be very hard to set it up, but have been contemplating uninstalling RL as I could probably get most of the things I like through BB now (except maybe Servostik, led blinky, hyper Marquee)

 

[Suhrvivor]

I have RocketLauncher on my LB setup working perfectly but only for a small number of games, notably Gamecube games like Resident Evil 2 and 3, using an old Dolphin emulator for audio compatibility and bezel reasons, plus a handful of 3Ds games that use both screen during gameplay requiring bezels and some Daphne titles that can run with bezels.

I guess I could remove it and won't lose much but since it just works and took me years to make it function at the current level, I see no point in removing it.

Edited July 21, 2019 by Suhrvivor

[damageinc86]

Yeah I still have to hang on to Rocketlauncher because of the Bezels that I use on systems I don't use Retroarch with.  I love my collection of bezels, and since I only use Retroarch for handhelds and a few other systems, I have a lot of bezels that are used for other systems through RL. 

Launchbox has pretty good fade screens I've seen, but since I already have a crapload, and some really cool game specific ones in RL, I still use RL for fades, and it handles fades over PC games very well.

Rocketlauncher's PAUSE screen is still the best I've ever used.  Mostly because you can program the keypresses for the emulator's save and load state slots, and it does a great job of sending those keypresses for you.  It also takes a screenshot for each slot and displays it when you select the slot, so you can see where you were when you saved it.  You can also easily look at the manual from the pause screen there, just have to have the pdf in the right folder under the right system.

Lastly, the keymapping function.  A godsend for my old ms-dos platformers (keen, cosmo, bio menace, etc.).  Point RL to the joy2key.exe, and then from within the keymapper tab you can add a new profile, click on the game from the list, and then it opens joy2key for you so you can map the controls right then and there; save the profile and close joy2key, and the entry is now in RL for that specific game.  You can also do platform specific keymapping so for example, on other emulators that I use an original controller on, I can still have a global keymap for that platform that says if I hold the select button down for like 700ms, then it will hit the esc key, so I can exit the emulator without having to reach over to the keyboard. 

i feel that these three things are really the final frontier of having a complete front end experience.  Someday launchbox will have it all covered, I'm confident.  But as of right now, Rocketlauncher has it covered better and more completely.