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Dropping Rocketlauncher?


Boomerps2

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I happily dropped it.  Enough time invested between controllers,  media,  metadata,  updating emulators,  taming windows, and keeping up with launchbox updates. Besides, retroarch keeps getting better.  Just switched all my Scummvm games!  

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I can't drop it because of amazing bezel implementation, superior pause menu, and perfect keymapping setup.  I don't use the .lay bezels in mame, but a really awesome set made by metalzoic for RL, and it looks amazing.  I only use retroarch for like 5 systems, so for the rest, in order to have a uniform look I have to have rocketlauncher put bezels over mednafen and other stuff.

Edited by damageinc86
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I'm in the process of dropping it now, not completely, but for most systems. It's an amazing program, but as mentioned before, with the lack of updates, its no longer staying ahead of the curve and launchbox has caught up in most areas. There's only two things I can't replace: the way RL handles dosbox allows me to keep my exodos set zipped, and the only way I can get the MESS 2015 core in Retroarch to work is through RL (which is no great loss as I'm using MAME proper now anyway, but its worth noting). Its taking me a lot longer than I thought to move my systems over to launchbox because I have a ton of systems and setting the command lines for MAME is time consuming, mostly because of that damned MAME naming convention haha. I actually had to use the RL Module to get many of the systems names matched to the MAME names. Beyond that, as noted, the bezel support is great, but I use RA and MAME for most things so that isn't as important to me.

I will say using MAME for non-arcade systems is actually easier in RL because the work has been done for you in the module, but troubleshooting in most cases is much easier without RL and the extra layer to sift through. 

One other thing I noticed that RL doesn't actually capture all of the systems Retroarch can actually emulate. I haven't been keeping up with the latest module/news, but I was surprised to learn of a few systems that had dedicated cores that aren't an option in Rocketlauncher at least with my version of the module. I know you can just add the system yourself, but thats essentially the same as adding to launchbox and at this point just double working.

OH and speaking of Retroarch, keeping up with the massive amount of config files I need is much simpler without rocketlauncher altering the config directories.

Just my two cents.

 

 

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On 7/22/2019 at 8:14 PM, damageinc86 said:

I can't drop it because of amazing bezel implementation, superior pause menu, and perfect keymapping setup.  I don't use the .lay bezels in mame, but a really awesome set made by metalzoic for RL, and it looks amazing.  I only use retroarch for like 5 systems, so for the rest, in order to have a uniform look I have to have rocketlauncher put bezels over mednafen and other stuff.

I'm in the same boat. For me at this point is all about the bezels. If LB can include some kind of bezel support, I would drop RL ASAP.

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 7/22/2019 at 7:10 PM, DOS76 said:

If you want bezels for every system you still will have to keep using RL anyway LB isn't getting bezel support

True, and RL is far from a perfect solution as well.

Since RL relies on running emulators in windowed mode and hiding window decorations, if your emulator doesn't support all its features in windowed mode, you'll lose out. An example of this is the m2emulator. You'll gain the bezel alright, but you'll be running in low resolution mode as well. Depending on the game, it may or may not be acceptable for some, but it's another issue to be aware of.

 

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6 hours ago, Headrush69 said:

True, and RL is far from a perfect solution as well.

Since RL relies on running emulators in windowed mode and hiding window decorations, if your emulator doesn't support all its features in windowed mode, you'll lose out. An example of this is the m2emulator. You'll gain the bezel alright, but you'll be running in low resolution mode as well. Depending on the game, it may or may not be acceptable for some, but it's another issue to be aware of.

 

yeah good point.  I think for most people though they will probably just be running the major consoles and stuff, which RL can pretty much handle. 

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11 hours ago, damageinc86 said:

yeah good point.  I think for most people though they will probably just be running the major consoles and stuff, which RL can pretty much handle. 

I don't know, I think Daytona CHampionship, Dead or Alive and Virtual Cop are pretty major if you want arcade titles. ?

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Drop it? No way! Rocketlauncher is much more than just bezels and loading screens. As far as I know Launchbox doesn't support iso files or Deamon tools. Rocketlauncher has full support for different control configurations per game (very useful for older systems like the ZX Spectrum and othe rcomputer systems), different window coordinates per game so you can line up up your games perfectly with bezels, especially for old Atari games where games don't fill the screen. Some systems have widescreen and 4:3 games so you can configure bezels for specific games only. You can apply shaders to systems that don't support shaders. Also, I'm not aware of a way to switch discs in Launchbox. This is easily done with Rocketlauncher. I do like the new pause screens in Launchbox but I found that they don't work with most PC games, wile the Rocketlauncher pause screens do work. Also the startup screens for Rockerlauncher look a lot nicer and you can specify how long you want them up on a per system basis. Very useful for systems that take longer to load like the Commodore Amiga. 

Edited by Styphelus
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