Importing all Arcade Games from the LaunchBox Games DB w/out using the MAME Importer Tool?

[Beatlemaniac19]

So before I explain my post, just want to say that I'm a huge fan of the MiSTer project and prefer to use FPGA or hardware emulation as opposed to software emulation. As such, I still love LaunchBox and, since I have a lifetime license, I decided to repurpose my LaunchBox setup as more of a gaming museum and media database as opposed to a front end for gaming. It works great with my current setup!

Anyways, the long and short of it is that since I use MiSTer, I don't want to use MAME, nor do I want to get the latest version of MAME to simply import a bunch of arcade games.

My question is, is there a way to add all the Arcade games from the Launchbox Games DB directly from the website to my Launchbox instance w/out having to download a huge MAME collection from the internet? I want to just have all the artwork and create playlists for the arcade games since there are no playlists in MiSTer.

Is something like this possible in LaunchBox or is my only option to download a giant MAME file and import the games directly from that list?

Edited February 6, 2022 by Beatlemaniac19

[neil9000]

5 minutes ago, Beatlemaniac19 said:

My question is, is there a way to add all the Arcade games from the Launchbox Games DB directly from the website to my Launchbox instance w/out having to download a huge MAME collection from the internet?

Just run the fullset importer and point it at any folder when the wizard asks for your rom folder, we dont actually scan your rom folder for roms with the mame importer, as we get the working games list, as well as the short names from mame itself, and just tell mame to load the shortname, we dont physically pass the rom file. So any folder will "import" the working games and scrape metadata and media. 

[Beatlemaniac19]

Nice! Thanks for the explanation @neil9000!

What about the games that don't work such as the discrete logic games or the Laserdisc games? Is there a way to bulk import those games so I have all the arcade games available? I see there's a tickbox to uncheck that allows you to import games that don't work in MAME, so I assume this is the box I need to uncheck?

Edit: I'm also running into this error when pointing it to the Arcade games folder in my Launchbox setup (the Arcade folder is empty fyi)
It won't let me import a MAME 240 set because of this:

Edited February 6, 2022 by Beatlemaniac19
MAME Import Error

[Beatlemaniac19]

Update: So I got around this issue by hitting the recommended option of downloading the latest version of MAME and then doing the same import process. I've bypassed the error message, but ran into another issue:

As you can see, it's trying to parse MAME to find the full set, but I've received the blue loading icon death loop, and it states that it's (Not Responding) and I left it for an hour to see if anything would change by then with no luck.

Anyone know a workaround for this? Can I just use an XML file or something like that that has all the MAME games and use that for the import process?