Games will not start in 12.4

[CapoCrunch04]

I'm trying to get some arcade games going. Got Retroarch installed. Got the box art showing after importing the games and when I click on them double click on them nothing happens. I thought it was supposed to be easy and fast.

[C-Beats]

12 minutes ago, CapoCrunch04 said:

I'm trying to get some arcade games going. Got Retroarch installed. Got the box art showing after importing the games and when I click on them double click on them nothing happens. I thought it was supposed to be easy and fast.

RetroArch isn't the default emulator for Arcade. MAME is. You can use RetroArch for Arcade but it requires a few manual steps to do so. You will need to go to Tools > Manage > Manage Emulators and then edit your RetroArch emulator and add the Arcade platform to the associated platforms tab as well as select which core you want to use for it.

[CapoCrunch04]

Ok. MAME  is not on the list of associated platforms.

[CapoCrunch04]

I can play a few of the games now, but I have to right click the box art, load retroarch find the file in the folder on my hard drive load it and hope it works. Not all of them do. So basically Launch box is doing nothing for me, and I paid 30 bucks.

[Your Friendly A.I Overlord]

First rule of LaunchBox, setup your emulators and check if your games are running BEFORE adding them to LaunchBox.

1 hour ago, CapoCrunch04 said:

I can play a few of the games now, but I have to right click the box art, load retroarch find the file in the folder on my hard drive load it

If you use RetroArch for arcade emulation, go to Tools > Manage > Emulators > RetroArch. In the Details tab make sure "Extract ROM archives before running" is unticked. Then go to the Associated Platforms tab. If the platform name you used when importing the roms is not in the list, scroll down to an empty field, double click and select the name of your platform. Then in the Core column double click and select the appropriate RetroArch core.

1 hour ago, CapoCrunch04 said:

and hope it works. Not all of them do.

You should not download some random roms and expect them to work in RetroArch or Mame. Like C-Beats mentioned, Mame is the default emulator for arcade roms. Mame roms come in sets and the set versions corresponds with the versions of the Mame emulator. A rom from an old romset might not work with a newer version of Mame and vice versa, let alone if you don't know from which romset version your roms come from.

6 hours ago, CapoCrunch04 said:

I thought it was supposed to be easy and fast.

 As a general rule, emulation has a learning curve. Learn how to set up emulators and how frontends work. LaunchBox has a YouTube with tutorials and there are plenty of threads on this forum that could be of help to you.

[CapoCrunch04]

So I have to make a note of what runs every single Rom. Then what is the actual purpose of this program? To show box art of games? I did watch some youtube videos. ETA Prime basically shows just putting roms in a folder and clicking the game and it starts up. How about some not so vague instructions.

[neil9000]

9 minutes ago, CapoCrunch04 said:

So I have to make a note of what runs every single Rom. Then what is the actual purpose of this program?

This is nothing to do with Launchbox, it is just how MAME is, even if just using the MAME emulator by itself, You cannot just download random MAME roms and expect them to work, that's just not how it is. MAME roms come in packs that are numbered, 0.233, 0.234, 0.235 etc and the emulator itself is also versioned with the same numbers, you match your romset to the emulator, got a 0.232 romset, use the 0.232 version of the emulator, roms are only ever guaranteed to work with the matching version of the emulator, they may work in other versions, but they likely will not a lot of the time.

[CapoCrunch04]

So what do you do when you download one and it doesn't specify what version it needs? I assumed that the most recent version of MAME could run everything. And I can't even open retroarch in launchbox to do anything with it. And when I try to import roms I browse to the folder on my external hard drive where they are and the wizard shows nothing there.