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Launch Box software losing all my games. Pls help.


WInzen

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Win10 / intel 5 internal gpu / 8 gb ram / ssd 500gb / 2 tb support drive

latest drivers (I think).  Off line brand new dedicated EMULATOR PC for an arcade cab.

Hey

So having a rough day as after a week of setting up LAUNCH BOX , the software has started to lose all my games platform by platform, randomly with no reason or rhyme.

I have set up many platforms using different emulators and everything works perfectly but...1 by 1 my days of work is being deleted and when I used system restore it does nothing.

I am losing entire games and all their images.  But only in LB not on the drive.

I keep reinstalling entire sets which take like an hour or more to install but then they vanish after ive installed something else or restarted.  And not always all the games...it's all so random.  I think it is even deleting in real time while im using the software.

I have no idea why any of this is happening but it is ruining my plan to build an arcade machine for my family haha

Please help if you can as this is very serious to me after so much hard work and effort.

Thank you for your help in advance :)

 

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Just now, WInzen said:

Win10 / intel 5 internal gpu / 8 gb ram / ssd 500gb / 2 tb support drive

latest drivers (I think).  Off line brand new dedicated EMULATOR PC for an arcade cab.

Hey

So having a rough day as after a week of setting up LAUNCH BOX , the software has started to lose all my games platform by platform, randomly with no reason or rhyme.

I have set up many platforms using different emulators and everything works perfectly but...1 by 1 my days of work is being deleted and when I used system restore it does nothing.

I am losing entire games and all their images.

I have no idea why any of this is happening but it is ruining my plan to build an arcade machine for my family haha

Please help if you can as this is very serious to me after so much hard work and effort.

Thank you for your help in advance :)

 

Well, what you are saying makes no sense at all, Launchbox doesnt just randomly delete stuff. When you say missing i assume you are referring to the UI? If you go and look at the actual image folders i assume the media is still there? Launchbo/Images/Name Of Platform/Name of Image Type. Also you say actual Platforms disappear, again is this just in the UI or from your PC completely? You can look in Launchbox/Data/Platforms for the platform .xml files.

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4 minutes ago, neil9000 said:

Well, what you are saying makes no sense at all, Launchbox doesnt just randomly delete stuff. When you say missing i assume you are referring to the UI? If you go and look at the actual image folders i assume the media is still there? Launchbo/Images/Name Of Platform/Name of Image Type. Also you say actual Platforms disappear, again is this just in the UI or from your PC completely? You can look in Launchbox/Data/Platforms for the platform .xml files.

Hello thanks for help. I am aware it makes no sense as ive spent some time trouble shooting and searching online as always rather than waste time. 

So I have some more info.  Just now I had lost all my dreamcast / some of my mega / all of my pc engine.  So I restarted and it was still gone.  But then it all appeared again while I was swapping between platforms.  So that is what is happening.  It is not so much deleting anything but losing location maybe ?  So one minute its all there but then it cant find it and its not.

Maybe there are settings files countering each other? maybe some thing ive done twice and theyre conflicting....?

Edited by WInzen
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Just now, WInzen said:

Hello thanks for help. I am aware it makes no sense as ive spent some time trouble shooting and searching online as always rather than waste time. 

So I have some more info.  Just now I had lost all my dreamcast / some of my mega / all of my pc engine.  So I restarted and it was still gone.  But then it all appeared again while I was swapping between platforms.  So that is what is happening.  It is not so much deleting anything but losing location maybe ?  So one minute its all there but then it cant find it and its not. So maybe there are files countering each other? maybe some thing ive done twice and theyre conflicting....?

Can i see a image of your Launchbox/Data/Platforms folder please?

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10 minutes ago, neil9000 said:

Can i see a image of your Launchbox/Data/Platforms folder please?

here it is,

i just lost pc engine but will reinstall it later.

I feel something in here is competing and causing it to screw up and 100% my fault but i still need to know what ive done lol so i can correct it and stop the panic. 

Also I have many custom settings in all these platforms so its not just a case of re importing them or it is but then added hours of custom images etc.

 

question.png

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OK, that looks fine. Pc-Engine isn't in your image though, though TurboGrafx-16 is, those are really the same systems just the US Vs Jap name, so what are you actually importing that system as name wise? Also you can check under the view dropdown at the top of Launchbox, that you are not "hiding games missing Insert Media Type".

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1 minute ago, neil9000 said:

OK, that looks fine. Pc-Engine isn't in your image though, though TurboGrafx-16 is, those are really the same systems just the US Vs Jap name, so what are you actually importing that system as name wise? Also you can check under the view dropdown at the top of Launchbox, that you are not "hiding games missing Insert Media Type".

I have pc engine and turbo as I have Jap and US full sets as I grew up with both etc.

I import some systems with custom names and then set them up in the emu with that custom name and custom core.

But with pc engine i use NEC PC Engine and scrape as turbo 16 , as for some reason LB wont find the roms under just pc engine. 

Is scraping the issue ?

But with other systems which have also vanished they have the default names.

Sega DC has 2 platforms, as they use 2 different emus because some wont run on retroarch so i use redream.

Ive clicked on HIDDEN GAMES AND BROKEN GAMES.  They were both unclicked.  Will that fix this?

What could be causing this genuinely huge problem for my arcade dream plans haha :?

thanks for help

 

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1 minute ago, WInzen said:

Sega DC has 2 platforms, as they use 2 different emus because some wont run on retroarch so i use redream.

Are you calling both platforms the same name? That wont work for obvious reasons, you would end up with just one platform. You also dont have to import two different platforms to use two different emulators, you can right click any game and edit the emulator it uses, you can also do this in bulk by holding CTRL and clicking multiple games first.

 

3 minutes ago, WInzen said:

Ive clicked on HIDDEN GAMES AND BROKEN GAMES.  They were both unclicked.  Will that fix this?

Those are not the options i said, i meant these in my below image.

 

2021_02_13_15_07_57_.png

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6 hours ago, neil9000 said:

Are you calling both platforms the same name? That wont work for obvious reasons, you would end up with just one platform. You also dont have to import two different platforms to use two different emulators, you can right click any game and edit the emulator it uses, you can also do this in bulk by holding CTRL and clicking multiple games first.

 

Those are not the options i said, i meant these in my below image.

 

2021_02_13_15_07_57_.png

No , each platform has it's own name.  And it's own folder and it's own emulator.

But ive spent some time and they all share a folder with 2 emus and work.

But while doing that some other games on other platforms have lost their images.

 

I have not clicked on any of those settings.  The are not clicked.  But its almost as if it is hiding them by auto selecting them?

I have like 5000 + roms...is that an issue?

thanks for help

 

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The problem after repeated testing is the platform name.  If I give the platforms any name which isnt auto genrated ..like a custome name like SNES , then over time that fudges up and the entire thing starts to courrpt. This seems like a pretty big bug but i can easily test it just by messing with the names.  This even ahppens if i manually changed all the settings to reflect that name.  No idea why but i fixed it by using the defaults names.  A week later and no more issues.

Thanks for help.

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1 minute ago, WInzen said:

This seems like a pretty big bug but i can easily test it just by messing with the names.

If this was actually a bug we would have thousands of people screaming at us about it, but we don't, you are the only person i have seen with this issue. I myself have seven platforms where i am not using the default naming, (most of these are PC platforms that default to "Windows" but i have renamed to Steam, Origin, Ubisoft connect, etc, i also have a platform called Arcade PC which is not a platform in our database) and i have never had any issues at all with corruption of my .xml files. I think you may have a more serious underlying issue here somewhere.

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3 hours ago, neil9000 said:

If this was actually a bug we would have thousands of people screaming at us about it, but we don't, you are the only person i have seen with this issue. I myself have seven platforms where i am not using the default naming, (most of these are PC platforms that default to "Windows" but i have renamed to Steam, Origin, Ubisoft connect, etc, i also have a platform called Arcade PC which is not a platform in our database) and i have never had any issues at all with corruption of my .xml files. I think you may have a more serious underlying issue here somewhere.

 ive installed it all from scratch and everytime same issue and its all brand new hardware with no other issues. 

BUT i agree if it was a known bug many would be screaming haha

So just a bug for me with my setup maybe... 

who do i report this too so they can look deeper or does it not matter as its not a problem if i dont change the names? 

Im just relieved its no longer hiding or moving or losing 4000 roms every few hours haha

Def an underlying issue somewhere but its only happneing with this software and when i change the names so :?

thanks for help all the same :)

 

ps while youre being helpful...i have 66gb of images.  When you remove roms does it remove old images ? as ive removed 3000 roms but worry there info is all still there taking up space...

 

 

 

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13 minutes ago, Pixelpiper said:

IME, this can only become an issue when you later make changes to the name. If you don't touch the name or anything to do with platform settings that might affect the name, LB will happily run forever with whatever name you originally call the platform. This applies to all versions of LB I've used over the past 13 months. About half my platforms were using varying custom names until yesterday evening. Coincidentally, I just standardized last night to make sure all platforms show up properly on the Pegasus Frontend when using Launchbox integration.

On the latest version (11.9) if you rename a platform, internal pointers are migrated and everything continues to work. It just doesn't do anything with the game files on disk and you'll end up with two game folders for that platform, the original one with all your games, and the new named one, empty, until you import more games and it starts to get populated. Then you'll have your platform split among two folders (PITA).

Can't say I've ever seen a platform completely disappear from the UI or xml from disk while doing any importing, Emu setup or even renaming platforms.

thanks for reply.  Yes that was the issue.  If i changed the name after setting it up it caused a cascade effect of faults.  Beyond that I dont know. But if I dont change the names post import then i dont get the problem.  As said earlier it could be it was hiding the images and not actually deleting them.  I was so paniced when it started happening I could be wrong.  I too had not seen this issue until it started to happen.

Thanks for further info.  I will build this arcade machine if it kills me haha

 

 

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the issue was when you changed the name of the platform it didn't move the media or change the name of the folders the media was originally stored in. I believe in the latest version this has been changed and it will automatically change the folder names for the platform but I feel like I read that in passing so don't hold me to it being true.

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In the past long before this feature was ever thought of I  used to just go into the Image, manuals, and video folders and make the appropriate changes manually. Another option that has always been available would be to go to manage platforms and manually set the folders to the older folder location to the old folders I will say however that option is extremely tedious

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