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New LaunchBox User: Issues with importing Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 Roms


ajfrable

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Hello!  I started setting up LB for the first time this week, and all but two of my systems have imported as expected. After I import Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum the copying of files and scanning for metadata goes as expected, but the platform is never created. I don't see them on my platform list or when I go to Manage Platforms. All the games are in my LaunchBox/Games folder for the respective platforms but there is no evidence of the platform in LB's UI. I have not allowed all of the metadata and images to download completely as I am importing several platforms and don't want to wait that long, could that be what is causing the issue? Like I said, these are the only two platforms I am having issues with, but I have not allowed any platform to fully download metadata and images yet. 

In my source folder for the ZX Spectrum roms each game has a folder of 5-6 individual flies but when I import to LB all files seem to get mixed up into a single folder. Does this mean that each file for each game is being recognized as it's own game?

Do I need to convert each game folder to a single file of some sort before I import? Is there a way to tell LB to recognize each folder as a single game instead of each file? I have several filetypes in my Sinclair ZX Spectrum Games folder in the LB Games folder.

.$b .asm .dsk .fdi .jsw .mgt .rom .scl .sna .tap .trd .tzx .z80 .zxs

All of my C64 files are .tap.

I have already ensured that I have a core loaded in Retroarch as the emulator for both of these platforms.

Any help you can offer would be extremely appreciated!

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5 hours ago, ajfrable said:

Hello!  I started setting up LB for the first time this week, and all but two of my systems have imported as expected. After I import Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum the copying of files and scanning for metadata goes as expected, but the platform is never created. I don't see them on my platform list or when I go to Manage Platforms. All the games are in my LaunchBox/Games folder for the respective platforms but there is no evidence of the platform in LB's UI. I have not allowed all of the metadata and images to download completely as I am importing several platforms and don't want to wait that long, could that be what is causing the issue? Like I said, these are the only two platforms I am having issues with, but I have not allowed any platform to fully download metadata and images yet. 

In my source folder for the ZX Spectrum roms each game has a folder of 5-6 individual flies but when I import to LB all files seem to get mixed up into a single folder. Does this mean that each file for each game is being recognized as it's own game?

Do I need to convert each game folder to a single file of some sort before I import? Is there a way to tell LB to recognize each folder as a single game instead of each file? I have several filetypes in my Sinclair ZX Spectrum Games folder in the LB Games folder.

.$b .asm .dsk .fdi .jsw .mgt .rom .scl .sna .tap .trd .tzx .z80 .zxs

All of my C64 files are .tap.

I have already ensured that I have a core loaded in Retroarch as the emulator for both of these platforms.

Any help you can offer would be extremely appreciated!

First things first if you imported them then they are likely there, but hidden, so first thing i would do is go to the view dropdown at the top of Launchbox and make sure you don't have any of the "Hide Games Missing....." checked. Also look in Launchbox/Data/Platforms folder and see if there is a .xml file for those systems, if there is then they are imported and the issue i mentioned is the likely culprit, if there is no .xml there then the games/platform are not imported at all.

5 hours ago, ajfrable said:

In my source folder for the ZX Spectrum roms each game has a folder of 5-6 individual flies

Thats not ideal, but "should" still work for importing, personally all my spectrum games are loose in a spectrum folder.

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Hello neil9000, thanks for your reply!

As I got the notification that you replied, I finally got the C64 games to work. I simply imported them again, and they are showing properly now. 

After I saw that work, I tried spectrum again and it worked just fine too. I don't understand what the difference is between when I tried this time and before other than not needing to copy them, but I guess the third time really is the charm, lol.

Thanks for you help all the same!

If you could help me with one more thing, I have 26k games imported with many more to come, and the metadata and image file downloads are going very slow. It seems to do a single file every 2-6 seconds. is there anyway to have that go faster? I have plenty of bandwidth to spare. It will take quite some time to download 200k+ files at the current speed.

I am looking forward to getting everything organized and working, so far LB is the simplest setup for Roms I have tried. I've done just Retroarch which works, but is a pain and not polished, and I've tried using RocketLauncher and Hyperspin and they are extremely difficult so I always give up on them. I am really Impressed with LaunchBox so far.

Have a great day!

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2 minutes ago, ajfrable said:

If you could help me with one more thing, I have 26k games imported with many more to come, and the metadata and image file downloads are going very slow. It seems to do a single file every 2-6 seconds. is there anyway to have that go faster? I have plenty of bandwidth to spare. It will take quite some time to download 200k+ files at the current speed.

You probably left the "remove roughly matched images" option checked in the wizard, this drastically slows down imports as we use AI to compare images to see if they are similar (this is useful when downloading the same image types from both our database and emumovies simultaneously as both databases may have a lot of the same images), and then remove the lower quality one, this takes a long time and uses a lot of CPU power, i always have it off for imports as you can manually "clean up media" from the tools menu at any point.

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Not once it's started i'm afraid. As of version 11.12 Launchbox will resume media downloads if you close the app, but it will simply resume from where it left off and wont give you the wizard again. Your only option would be to actually cancel what is currently running, then highlight all the games in a platform with a left click and CTRL-A, then head to tools/download metadata/images and run through the wizard and this time uncheck that box.

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