CXBX Reloaded - Help using "Extract ROM from Archive" feature

[steve25469]

I'm hoping someone can help me here. I have a large archive of xbox games that I keep compressed with 7-Zip (when uncompressed they use up an EXTREMELY larger amount of hard drive space of course). Most emulators work great using the "Extract ROM from archive" feature within launchbox, but I'm having trouble getting CXBX Reloaded to work this way. It requires loading the game from an extracted folder, and loading the "default.xbe". Now from a command line prompt I can execute: cxbxr-ldr.exe /load "path to rom\default.xbe" and load the backup successfully. So my first work around was to try using this method as an addon command line in my emulator settings, and point the path to the game folder within Thirdparty\7-Zip\Temp, where launchbox stores its temporary extracted roms. That didn't work, so then thinking maybe it was a problem using the temp folder path, just to test, I tried the same command line but pointed it to an existing extracted folder of the game. Which also didn't work for me.

There is ONE functional work around that I've found however. I read elsewhere in the forums that Launchbox, by default when loading from an extracted ROM archive, will look for and load a *.cue file. Funny enough, I can make a copy of the "default.xbe" file and change its file extension to "default.cue", the zip it back up into an archive. If I launch this newly created archive from within Launchbox, it will extract it into the temp folder and then load the default.cue file into CXBX and work!!  The huge downside to this, is I would have to go through and extract all of my game backups, copy and create default.cue files for each one, and then pack them all back up into new archives. So I'm hoping to find a more basic solution, rather than using this .cue work around. lol   **Is there a way to define what file extension Launchbox looks for, and launches after extracting an archive??**  If I could tell launchbox to launch *.xbe files the same way it does for *.cue files, that would also solve my problem.

Now I'm not a total stranger to command lines, but I don't have a massive amount of experience setting up command line arguments within Launchbox either, so I'm wondering if or what I might be doing wrong. I'm wondering if there are any plans to add .iso boot support to CXBX Reloaded, where an iso could simply be extracted and launched then?, similar to PSX and PS2 games?

[neil9000]

26 minutes ago, steve25469 said:

**Is there a way to define what file extension Launchbox looks for, and launches after extracting an archive??**

Unfortunately not, no.

[ultrez]

On 7/15/2020 at 12:33 PM, steve25469 said:

So my first work around was to try using this method as an addon command line in my emulator settings, and point the path to the game folder within Thirdparty\7-Zip\Temp, where launchbox stores its temporary extracted roms. That didn't work, so then thinking maybe it was a problem using the temp folder path, just to test, I tried the same command line but pointed it to an existing extracted folder of the game. Which also didn't work for me.

I'm wondering if or what I might be doing wrong. I'm wondering if there are any plans to add .iso boot support to CXBX Reloaded, where an iso could simply be extracted and launched then?, similar to PSX and PS2 games?

Had the same idea about a year ago but I found no solution.

As far as I know they won't support Isos in the near future. This was discussed on their discord.

[fraganator]

Hi @steve25469, @ultrez

I've recently restarted development of my Archive Cache Manager plugin, which supports loading specific extension types (xbe in this case) from within an archive. I've not tried it with CXBX Reloaded, but I imagine it should work.

[ultrez]

@fraganator
thanks, good to know. However I swichted to xemu some time ago

Edited March 11, 2021 by ultrez

[danpow]

FYI the Archive Cache Manager almost works for CXBX Reloaded.

When extracting and playing, you invariably get an xbe header error on emulator launch. However, if then you choose 'select rom in archive', and choose the 'default.xbe' file, it all runs fine.

when setting the plugin up and adding CXBXR to the list of supported platforms, I tried adding 'default.xbe', rather than simply '.xbe' as a priority file extension. Reason being there are other .xbe files extracted from the archive, I wondered if it was simply picking the first one and failing. This hasn't helped.

Thanks @fraganator  for the plugin - do you have any idea what might be going on here?

Edited August 12, 2021 by danpow

[fraganator]

On 8/12/2021 at 9:02 PM, danpow said:

when setting the plugin up and adding CXBXR to the list of supported platforms, I tried adding 'default.xbe', rather than simply '.xbe' as a priority file extension. Reason being there are other .xbe files extracted from the archive, I wondered if it was simply picking the first one and failing. This hasn't helped.

Thanks @fraganator  for the plugin - do you have any idea what might be going on here?

The file extension match will only check for matches after the final period in the filename, so default.xbe won't match as it only ever checks against xbe. I saw your suggestion over on github about matching a filename which seems like a good solution.