Micro sd card permissions not set.

[redboyke]

installed the app  my roms are on micro sd. i wanted to change the launchbox folder from main device to micro sd card.

closed the app as suggested and used FX file explorer to copy the folder and put in in root of micro sd. i relaunched the app and try to data folder

to micro sd/Launchbox but it wouldnt let me saying that it didnt have read and write access to that folder.

i tried a couple of times i was able to make a folder inside launchbox folder on micro sd card with FX file explorer so it does have read and write?

i deleted the lauchbox folder from main device and uninstalled the app. reinstalled the app and tried to select the lauchbox folder on micro sd card again

but it wouldnt let me yet again same error message saying read and write. 

im guessing the app only asks permissions on install for device and not micro sd card? cause other apps can access the micro sd card just fine.

im using a SM T835 android 10 (samsung galaxy tab s4)

[Jason Carr]

Hi @redboyke, I wish I had a good, concrete solution for this, but for whatever reason that device is just not allowing us to write to the SD card. Storage permissions on Android are a complete mess, because Google is switching everything over to a new storage security model, but it's a complete wreck because it's a very poorly designed solution on Google's part. Unfortunately, the new storage security model completely breaks all emulation frontends on Android and pretty much makes them impossible.

The good news though is that in most cases, the old storage security model still works. Unfortunately, though, for whatever reason that device is still restricting write access to the SD card. I don't have that device available to play with, so I'm not sure if there's a setting to change for that or not. If we switched to the new security model, it would not likely be an issue, but it would also break launching games completely, so we can't do that either.

Just to explain this dilemma further, we *can* write to the /Android/data/com.unbrokensoftware.launchbox folder on the SD card. But if we do anything with that folder, then none of the emulators will be able to access any files in that folder, which of course causes other issues. It's really a mess, and unfortunately there's nothing we can do about it.

So, anyways, unless you can find a setting to change on your tablet, unfortunately the best thing you can do right now is to just leave the LaunchBox folder on internal storage (hopefully it's not too big with just some media) and keep your ROMs on your SD card.

You could try putting the LaunchBox folder inside of /Android/data/com.unbrokensoftware.launchbox/files. That might work to keep it on the SD card, but I believe it will break the zip file extraction features, because games won't be able to launch from the temporary folder. Might be worth a shot though.

Sorry for the book.

[Cheetos]

I just had the same problem but maybe I can make it work with having the games in the SD card. I will try that method you mentioned at the end.

edit: I tried that. It can't find the ROM. I thought maybe if the game was unzipped it would work. I unzipped it. It didn't work.

edit#2: it worked with the zipped game. it didn't work previously because the folder name was wrong.

Edited September 2, 2021 by Cheetos

[Lexie60]

Hi Jason, any update on this problem?

I have a new RG552, latest (paid) version of Launchbox, and a lot of ROM files. When I try to select External (SD) storage in Options, I get the "launchbox android is not granting read and write permissions....." error....

Also have an Odin Pro on the way, so really want to use Launchbox on Android.

Thanks

\Greg

[Jason Carr]

1 minute ago, Lexie60 said:

Hi Jason, any update on this problem?

I have a new RG552, latest (paid) version of Launchbox, and a lot of ROM files. When I try to select External (SD) storage in Options, I get the "launchbox android is not granting read and write permissions....." error....

Also have an Odin Pro on the way, so really want to use Launchbox on Android.

Thanks

\Greg

Hi Greg, make sure you've updated to the latest official release, as that will fix all known issues with storage access on Android 11 and 12. However, I'm not sure what version of Android that the RG552 is running. Unfortunately there are some devices out there that just will not work to do what LaunchBox needs to be able to do in order to function properly as a frontend. In our experience, the devices that have these issues are lower-end devices that run older versions of Android, and unfortunately there are a lot of those types of devices that just don't implement Android properly.

I don't have access to either an RG552 or an Odin Pro, but for what it's worth, I do have confirmation that this is not an issue on the Odin Pro.

[Lexie60]

Thanks Jason,,,, the RG552 has version 7 of Android.. not sure about Odin, but probably a later version,

[GingernutsPrime]

I updated RG552 to Android 9 and still have the issue. 

On 2/23/2022 at 1:27 AM, Lexie60 said:

Thanks Jason,,,, the RG552 has version 7 of Android.. not sure about Odin, but probably a later version,

 

[esmith13]

Hi All,

 

I'm having this same exact issue on an Odin Pro which has Android 10. My SD card is in portable storage mode and everything can access it fine except Launchbox for Android.

I built my library on Windows and followed the instructions of copying the "Launchbox" folder from the Android Export folder to the root of my SD card and it cannot be accessed for the same permission reasons mentioned here. I am on the latest release of the android app (set to check for updates and install beta releases). My current Launchbox Android version is 1.0-beta-9

Please help with this issue.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: The solution was to reformat the card as "Internal Storage" and then re-copy over the Launchbox folder to the root of the card. Unfortunately once formatted as internal storage, this has to be done via USB or ethernet from your PC to your Odin - you can't remove the card and mount it on a WIndows PC and copy that way. For me, a ~350GB Launchbox folder took about 4hrs to copy.

Eric

Edited March 22, 2022 by esmith13

[Jason Carr]

On 3/16/2022 at 6:08 PM, esmith13 said:

Hi All,

 

I'm having this same exact issue on an Odin Pro which has Android 10. My SD card is in portable storage mode and everything can access it fine except Launchbox for Android.

I built my library on Windows and followed the instructions of copying the "Launchbox" folder from the Android Export folder to the root of my SD card and it cannot be accessed for the same permission reasons mentioned here. I am on the latest release of the android app (set to check for updates and install beta releases). My current Launchbox Android version is 1.0-beta-9

Please help with this issue.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: The solution was to reformat the card as "Internal Storage" and then re-copy over the Launchbox folder to the root of the card. Unfortunately once formatted as internal storage, this has to be done via USB or ethernet from your PC to your Odin - you can't remove the card and mount it on a WIndows PC and copy that way. For me, a ~350GB Launchbox folder took about 4hrs to copy.

Eric

Good to hear that you were able to get it working on the Odin.

[Jason Carr]

Per the RG552, I'm kind of stuck on that. I tried installing Android on my Anbernic 351M, but that doesn't seem to be working at all, so I ended up giving up on that. Regardless, it was running Android 11, so it probably wouldn't even be similar anyways.

I've also tried using an emulator with Android 7 to see if I could reproduce anything, but there's no real way to test SD card issues with the emulator, so I'm stuck there too.

The only other option would be to buy an RG552, but they're around $250 and I might have to wait for it to be shipped from China, so I'm not likely to do that either. For what it's worth, the Android implementations on these devices are kind of junk, which I'm guessing is what's going on here. So until I can get a hold of one of these devices, I can't do much of anything about it, unfortunately.

[lovewiibrew]

I'm having this issue on Fire TV 4k Max with the dialog mentioned in the original post. My media is on a USB stick. Any suggestions? Using it as internal storage still puts all the metadata on the device, rather than the USB. Amazon hardly gives us any free space on the fire sticks, so the space goes very quickly. Surely other fire tv users are experiencing this?

Edited March 28, 2022 by lovewiibrew

[viking]

Hi @Jason Carr,
Is it possible to skirt the problem?

For exemple, if I used Launchbox export for Android tool : 
- Export on my local windows drive.
- Place  "Games + Images + Videos"   on the SD card.
- Place  "Data"   on internal memory.

But before moving the DATA folder, change the paths by hand? (with a simple find and replace function)

It's possible ?
If yes, what format path would take?

here is an example of current path in a Data.xml file :

	<ApplicationPath>Games/Nintendo 64/F-Zero X (Europe).n64</ApplicationPath>

	<AndroidBoxFrontThumbPath>Images/Nintendo 64/Box - Front - Thumb/Worms Armageddon-01.jpg</AndroidBoxFrontThumbPath>
	<AndroidBoxFrontFullPath>Images/Nintendo 64/Box - Front - Full/Worms Armageddon-01.jpg</AndroidBoxFrontFullPath>
	<AndroidClearLogoThumbPath>Images/Nintendo 64/Clear Logo - Thumb/Worms Armageddon-01.png</AndroidClearLogoThumbPath>
	<AndroidClearLogoFullPath>Images/Nintendo 64/Clear Logo - Full/Worms Armageddon-01.png</AndroidClearLogoFullPath>
	<AndroidBackgroundPath>Images/Nintendo 64/Background/Worms Armageddon-01.png</AndroidBackgroundPath>
	<AndroidGameTitleScreenshotPath>Images/Nintendo 64/Screenshot - Game Title/Worms Armageddon-01.png</AndroidGameTitleScreenshotPath>
	<AndroidGameplayScreenshotPath>Images/Nintendo 64/Screenshot - Gameplay/Worms Armageddon-01.png</AndroidGameplayScreenshotPath>
	<AndroidVideoPath>Videos/Nintendo 64/Worms Armageddon-01.mp4</AndroidVideoPath>

 

[viking]

I found this post on reddit .
I haven't received my device to test, but if someone can, that would be great!

The idea is to replace the relative path generated by LaunchBox. (See previous post)

 

From :

• <ApplicationPath>Games/Nintendo 64/F-Zero X.n64</ApplicationPath>

To this (approximately) : 

• <ApplicationPath>storage/xxxx-xxxx/Android/data/Launchbox/Games/Nintendo 64/F-Zero X.n64</ApplicationPath>
  or
• <ApplicationPath>storage/xxxx-xxxx/Launchbox/Games/Nintendo 64/F-Zero X.n64</ApplicationPath>

 

@Jason Carr Do you think it can work?

[Jason Carr]

On 4/1/2022 at 3:30 AM, viking said:

I found this post on reddit .
I haven't received my device to test, but if someone can, that would be great!

The idea is to replace the relative path generated by LaunchBox. (See previous post)

 

From :

• <ApplicationPath>Games/Nintendo 64/F-Zero X.n64</ApplicationPath>

To this (approximately) : 

• <ApplicationPath>storage/xxxx-xxxx/Android/data/Launchbox/Games/Nintendo 64/F-Zero X.n64</ApplicationPath>
  or
• <ApplicationPath>storage/xxxx-xxxx/Launchbox/Games/Nintendo 64/F-Zero X.n64</ApplicationPath>

 

@Jason Carr Do you think it can work?

It's possible that something like that could work on one of these devices that I don't have. The devices that I do have suggest that it's not likely, but who knows. It's actually really hard to know without having one on-hand. Still, thanks for the effort and the points, @viking.

[DanCue]

I'm having the same issue with Odin Pro. I tried formatting as internal memory and then connecting it to my computer via USB-C but it only copied 30gb of the 941gb before it stopped. As you can imagine... 941gb is going to take a long time and I would really rather not format it as internal. Is there any progress on fixing this issue for Android 10 and earlier?

[Jason Carr]

3 minutes ago, DanCue said:

I'm having the same issue with Odin Pro. I tried formatting as internal memory and then connecting it to my computer via USB-C but it only copied 30gb of the 941gb before it stopped. As you can imagine... 941gb is going to take a long time and I would really rather not format it as internal. Is there any progress on fixing this issue for Android 10 and earlier?

I don't know that there's any way possible for us to improve that situation. As great as LaunchBox for Android is, it's still victim to Android's terrible design decisions from time to time (and even worse, the terrible design decisions of one-off devices). Everything is *supposed* to work correctly the way we've coded it for Android 10. But sadly, it doesn't always, depending on the device. Unfortunately we can't make progress on issues like this if there are no available solutions.

[DanCue]

Understood. I will try to connect through USB again. I’m also having issues with my card now so I’ll have to wait for a new one anyways but I will report back if I get it up and running. I imagine many others will be coming here as they start to receive their Odin devices.

[GingernutsPrime]

I reduced the games I use LB for on my Odin. 

About 75 to 150 on mainline consoles upto PS1. 

Others I am using in the emulators directly anyway such as Dreamcast, PS2 etc. 

Having full Rom sets was too much to focus playing on so in some ways it's helpful to have this issue. 

Now I have more games on my Steam Deck using Emudeck on a 1tb SD card with no issues. 😂 

[slydog43]

I just ran into this issue, has anyone had luck editing the xml files in the DATA folder to point to the external Storage? (Trying Odin now)

why is the launchbox data directory setting not stored in the settings.xml file?  where is data folder location stored?

Edited July 13, 2022 by slydog43

[Jason Carr]

On 7/13/2022 at 2:01 AM, slydog43 said:

I just ran into this issue, has anyone had luck editing the xml files in the DATA folder to point to the external Storage? (Trying Odin now)

why is the launchbox data directory setting not stored in the settings.xml file?  where is data folder location stored?

You can't store the setting for where the data folder is located inside of the data folder. How would it know where the data folder is located then? It's stored as a standard Android application setting.