kritvichu Posted March 5, 2020 Share Posted March 5, 2020 Greeting, I'm new to Launchbox. I previously had some hand on experiences on MAMEUI and Retroarch on PC. Launchbox is my very first front end to use, so I have no experience to compare with any. I heard lots of people highly recommended this and here I come. I plan to upgrade to Bigbox once I am able to figure out what it is capable of and whether it really suit my need or not. I'm not sure how this forum operates. Some places they not friendly open to a newbie to ask general questions and always point to do research before posting. I choose to ask in this NOOB forum. I hope my questions not irritate or bother anyone. If it does, please let me know. Currently, I have 0.218 non-merged romsets at 120GB. If I know the exact roms I like to play, it should be easy to trim the size down big time, but the problem is I don't know yet. So, I need to try out one-by-one. Because of this huge size, my hard drive is almost at limit. There is not much room for CHD and any software list for me. Deciding to switch to either merged or split set is a dilemma for me. I don't know which clones I should keep or delete. I guess I should keep them all for now and figure out later on which one to keep. I guess doing merged set should be easy to manage because all the clones are kept in the parent rom. I read the previous posts in this forum. Look like merged romset was not compatible with Launchbox, but that posts mentioned in 2018. Now is 2020. I am not quite sure if it is still the same. I would be appreciate if someone could enlighten me by answering these questions; 1. Between merged or split romsets, which works best and most comparability? 2.Can Launchbox fully support a merged romsets? If yes, how can I add the clone games? (The only way I figured out was to rename the parent file name to the clone name. That is too hectic and redundant. It is not different from using a non-merged set, but even worse, if I go this route. Also, people said to do a right click on games to choose either the parent or clones to load. I don't see any option. My merged test game is Puckman. I not see pacman or any other clone names to choose. My Launchbox should be the latest version as I just downloaded 10 days ago) 3.Another thing off topic but I really want to understand how Launchbox works and the logic behind. I imported the roms under "Arcade" platform and associated it with MAME64. I was curious to see the game still launched or not if I intentionally moved it to other platform. So, I tested moving the game to associated with "Super Nintendo" platform instead. I could see the game moved from Arcade to Super Nintendo platform as expected. The game still used MAME for emulator and emulator application path pointed to MAME64.exe, but the only game Associated Platform was "Arcade" (I didn't add Super Nintendo in here). How come I could still launch the game when there was no associated platform pointing to Super Nintendo? Does it means Launchbox not care about associate platform and leave the job to the emulator to run? If so, when I used Retroarch and pointed associated platform "Super Nintendo" to other core on purpose, not snes9x_libreto, it would not run. Why? I thought Launchbox not care and leave Retroarch to figure what core to use. But in this scenario, it looked like Launchbox tell Retroarch to use a specific core. Sorry if my question sounds confusing. I try to elaborate as much possible. I just want to understand the logic why Launchbox not care about MAME when no platform is associated with but it is so picky on Retroarch? Thank you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lordmonkus Posted March 5, 2020 Share Posted March 5, 2020 All 3 rom sets are now fully compatible with Launchbox when using the Mame FullSet Import tool. Take a look at the tutorial video here: As for question #3 I really can't give you an answer to that one because Associated Platforms do matter for Launchbox. Now as for your decision on what rom set to use I can only say this. If you are planning on having all the games just use a Split or Merged set because it is smaller. If you want to have a much smaller hand picked selection of games the I would use (I actually do use for this purpose) the Non Merged set and pick out the games I want. The reason for this is because each zip file is a fully self contained working game with all the necessary bios / parent files which you would also have to pull out if you used a Split or Merged set in this way. Also welcomes to the forums and feel free to ask questions but we do have lots of written guides here and video guides on the YouTube channel. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kritvichu Posted March 5, 2020 Author Share Posted March 5, 2020 Thank you, Lordmonkus I'll check out the video and follow along. I have another question if you not mind. The game won't load if I not put roms inside the 'rom' folder under MAME. I like to create a rom folder at a specific location. Is it possible to point where to look for roms? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lordmonkus Posted March 5, 2020 Share Posted March 5, 2020 You can put your roms wherever you like but you need to tell Mame where they are located. Also when you do your import into LB if it asks to copy or move tell LB to leave them where they are. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kritvichu Posted March 5, 2020 Author Share Posted March 5, 2020 Look like it is mame.ini is the place to configure the rom path. I got more NOOB questions if you not mind. As I recall, some roms not worked correctly in the past but worked fine on the later version. When I tried to import the arcade rom files, I did not provide the dat file of the complete rom set I used. Then, there was checkbox options to filter fruits, casino, mature content, and many others. I am curious how it is possible. 1.Without providing the dat file, does Launchbox have a built-in database to detect the version of romset I use and apply filters accordingly? 2.Would this be possible if I use this filter option to help me get the rom set I need and move them to a specific folder I want to keep later on? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lordmonkus Posted March 5, 2020 Share Posted March 5, 2020 43 minutes ago, kritvichu said: 1.Without providing the dat file, does Launchbox have a built-in database to detect the version of romset I use and apply filters accordingly? Yes, Jason updates (he's supposed to at least) the database file every month, it gets downloaded when you do an import and it says updating metadata. 45 minutes ago, kritvichu said: 2.Would this be possible if I use this filter option to help me get the rom set I need and move them to a specific folder I want to keep later on? In theory maybe, though I can't say for certain because I never tried it and the Mame Full Set Importer does not directly import rom files like other platforms. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kritvichu Posted March 5, 2020 Author Share Posted March 5, 2020 Thank you very much, Lordmonkus, for answering my questions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lordmonkus Posted March 5, 2020 Share Posted March 5, 2020 No problems, we also have a discord server where you can come and ask questions as well. https://discord.gg/AFxfhnv Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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