Is it possible to get a list of all the games that have full details in the Launchbox Database?

[Johnny T]

I would like to put together a "definitive" list of games for the Atari 2600. I have the no-intro dat file but there's games missing from that (specifically homebrew games like Alien Greed etc).

All the games seem to be in the Launchbox Database but there doesn't seem to be a way to add them all to a 'list'.

Ideally - I would like to add all the ones with full details available to a 'list' (so ignoring the Unknown Activision #1 game etc).

Is this something that can be done? Or, if not, would be something that could go on the 'wish list' to be implemented in a future update perhaps?

Or is there another way of getting that data from the LB database - maybe some form of API or some way of using Launchbox itself to grab the data or a plugin or something along those lines etc?

Any help much appreciated ?

[Your Friendly A.I Overlord]

Maybe a good place to start would be the LaunchBox audit function? In LaunchBox go to your Atari 2600 platform > Tools > Audit Atari 2600. You can sort on any field you like.

[Johnny T]

3 hours ago, Koroth said:

Maybe a good place to start would be the LaunchBox audit function? In LaunchBox go to your Atari 2600 platform > Tools > Audit Atari 2600. You can sort on any field you like.

Thanks (again!!) - much appreciated. I really want to be able to 'export' the list into a 'dat' file and then I could import into a rom manager and (in theory) have quick visibility of all the roms that I haven't got that have full details available for them in the database.

However, I'll have a play around with the audit tool and see what I can come up with. 

Thanks ?

[CriticalCid]

LaunchBox actually stores the whole database metadata content on your PC in XML format. You’ll find it in your LaunchBox folder under “\Metadata\Metadata.xml”

I can personally verify that you can just take the file and import it into Microsoft Excel with the XML data import tool in the "Data" tab. If you’re familiar with Excel it’s really easy to filter for all the data fields like you wish. Besides Excel there are possibly a lot of other tools out there that allow you to easily access and filter XML data but i have no experience with that.

Unfortunately, I’ll also have to tell you that the LaunchBox database does not provide any kind of ROM info, so you’ll have to work with solely the game titles. There’s no way to convert the LB data into a DAT file for ROM managers as there’s no useful data for that kind of thing, like files hashes, to begin with.

[Johnny T]

1 hour ago, CriticalCid said:

LaunchBox actually stores the whole database metadata content on your PC in XML format. You’ll find it in your LaunchBox folder under “\Metadata\Metadata.xml”

I can personally verify that you can just take the file and import it into Microsoft Excel with the XML data import tool in the "Data" tab. If you’re familiar with Excel it’s really easy to filter for all the data fields like you wish. Besides Excel there are possibly a lot of other tools out there that allow you to easily access and filter XML data but i have no experience with that.

Unfortunately, I’ll also have to tell you that the LaunchBox database does not provide any kind of ROM info, so you’ll have to work with solely the game titles. There’s no way to convert the LB data into a DAT file for ROM managers as there’s no useful data for that kind of thing, like files hashes, to begin with.

That's great info!! Thanks for that. I'll see if I can maybe write something in PHP to do some magic on that XML and compare it against the games I have in LB.

Thanks again for your help

[Johnny T]

On 6/2/2021 at 12:32 PM, CriticalCid said:

LaunchBox actually stores the whole database metadata content on your PC in XML format. You’ll find it in your LaunchBox folder under “\Metadata\Metadata.xml”

I can personally verify that you can just take the file and import it into Microsoft Excel with the XML data import tool in the "Data" tab. If you’re familiar with Excel it’s really easy to filter for all the data fields like you wish. Besides Excel there are possibly a lot of other tools out there that allow you to easily access and filter XML data but i have no experience with that.

Unfortunately, I’ll also have to tell you that the LaunchBox database does not provide any kind of ROM info, so you’ll have to work with solely the game titles. There’s no way to convert the LB data into a DAT file for ROM managers as there’s no useful data for that kind of thing, like files hashes, to begin with.

Just to feedback... thanks to your brilliant advice I've now knocked together what I want - a bit of software that will let me know which games I'm missing from each system....

VERY rough and ready.... and still needs a bit more work but seems to be very useful even in it's current state.

Just wanted to thank you again for letting me know about that database.

[Light Sock]

On 6/5/2021 at 6:55 AM, Johnny T said:

Just to feedback... thanks to your brilliant advice I've now knocked together what I want - a bit of software that will let me know which games I'm missing from each system....

VERY rough and ready.... and still needs a bit more work but seems to be very useful even in it's current state.

Just wanted to thank you again for letting me know about that database.

Any chance in releasing this on Github? I would really like to be able to find the top Star Rated games from the community and get those games. Right now the only way is to add in a full set and sort by Star Ratings and then get rid of the crap. This is quite a challenge for systems like PS2/PS2/Wii/Gamecube, etc.

[Johnny T]

On 1/29/2024 at 1:44 AM, Light Sock said:

Any chance in releasing this on Github? I would really like to be able to find the top Star Rated games from the community and get those games. Right now the only way is to add in a full set and sort by Star Ratings and then get rid of the crap. This is quite a challenge for systems like PS2/PS2/Wii/Gamecube, etc.

Hi there, unfortunately the software is nowhere near polished enough for any kind of release. And I wouldn't have a clue what to do with GitHub. It's extremely amateurish and I did used to have ambitions to polish it up and release it but I don't think it will ever get to that stage I'm afraid. Perhaps one of the plugin writers would be able to knock something up for you though to achieve your needs. I'm sure you're not the only one who would just want the 'cream of the crop' from the various systems. Good luck in your search

[Big Bang Blitz]

A bit late, but what I do is I change to list view, remove all the column categories so its just names, select a game, ctrl+a, then ctrl+c, then go to notepad and ctrl+v.