How do I get muliple clones/etc. of an arcade game to combine?

[Dinierto]

Currently I have a Finalburn Neo set that I'd like to put in its own catagory.  I started a platform and named it Finalburn Neo.  To test out the settings I grabbed about 15 files, all different variations of Street FIghter Alpha 3- the US version, Japanese, Hispanic, etc. and drug them over to Launchbox.  What I would LIKE to happen would be to prioritize the North American version but have all clones accessible as additonal apps or in some way accessible from the game listing in Launchbox.  However, no matter what setting I put in the ROMs import section or the MAME metadata section it only imports one game- Street Fighter Alpha 3 Hispanic.  I have it set to prefer North America and to add duplicates and to add clones but it still only imports that one file.  What am I doing wrong?

Edit: I've discovered if I don't associate the platform with MAME or scraping as arcade, it will indeed import every game, but not every game will have the name properly identified for scraping.  This is quite a puzzle and seems broken.  It is doing the same thing for my MAME2003 games I'm trying to import into Arcade.

Edited April 16, 2021 by Dinierto

[neil9000]

7 hours ago, Dinierto said:

: I've discovered if I don't associate the platform with MAME or scraping as arcade, it will indeed import every game, but not every game will have the name properly identified for scraping.  This is quite a puzzle and seems broken.  It is doing the same thing for my MAME2003 games I'm trying to import into Arcade.

This is because FBA sets are simply not supported by the Arcade importer, thats for MAME only. FBA uses "mostly" the same naming as MAME so left as a "normal" import Launchbox will not be able to match the roms for most games as those names are not in our database, which is exactly the reason we have a option to "force import using MAME metadata for emulators other than MAME that use MAME data" in the import wizard, you would need to check that box during the import wizard. As i said though FBA isnt actually supported, so im not sure how well that is going to work for you. 

AS for MAME2003 thats also not officially supported as that is not a official MAME romset. The MAME importer currently needs you to point it to your mame.exe so that it can extract the games list, as far as i know there isnt a standalone version of MAME2003, only Retroarch cores, and those are not suitable as we cant pull the game lists from retroarch cores.

If you are dead set about getting a MAME set into Launchbox (which you absolutely should be, as there are hundreds of great exclusive games there) id recommend a actual MAME romset, not a third part source variation of it. Grab a actual versioned MAME romset and the matching version emulator, and all this will work without a hitch.

[Dinierto]

1 hour ago, neil9000 said:

This is because FBA sets are simply not supported by the Arcade importer, thats for MAME only. FBA uses "mostly" the same naming as MAME so left as a "normal" import Launchbox will not be able to match the roms for most games as those names are not in our database, which is exactly the reason we have a option to "force import using MAME metadata for emulators other than MAME that use MAME data" in the import wizard, you would need to check that box during the import wizard. As i said though FBA isnt actually supported, so im not sure how well that is going to work for you. 

AS for MAME2003 thats also not officially supported as that is not a official MAME romset. The MAME importer currently needs you to point it to your mame.exe so that it can extract the games list, as far as i know there isnt a standalone version of MAME2003, only Retroarch cores, and those are not suitable as we cant pull the game lists from retroarch cores.

If you are dead set about getting a MAME set into Launchbox (which you absolutely should be, as there are hundreds of great exclusive games there) id recommend a actual MAME romset, not a third part source variation of it. Grab a actual versioned MAME romset and the matching version emulator, and all this will work without a hitch.

Well the problem doesn't seem to be in naming and identifying the games, it's in importing them all instead of just one.  For example if I drag all the Simpsons games over it only imports one.  However if I drag over an individual game, it will import it no matter which one it is.  But all of them together and it will ignore all the files but one.  "force import using MAME metadata for emulators other than MAME that use MAME data" is the precise setting that causes this behavior.  If I uncheck this then all the files import but it only recognizes some.  If I could use a DAT file for reference that would be perfectly acceptable as those are available.  Is there no way for it to import multiple MAME files of the same name and compile them together, as it does with console games?  I don't understand why it would disregard all but one file no matter what options I have checked.