Media download without ROMs present

[artician]

Hi,

My media center/launchbox system is offline-only.  It's HDD is too large to copy to another machine, and I don't want to transplant the drive just for this.
I have a few hundred games I'm still missing media for.
Are there alternative ways to download media?  Can I copy XML from my offline system to download on another Launchbox installation?  I'm looking for a workaround for the automated solution.

Thank you for any help!

[C-Beats]

You can always manually place files you've acquired into the correct folder. Grab them on another computer then use a thumb drive to place the images appropriately.

[artician]

That may be what I'll have to do.  I guess Launchbox looks for the presence of the actual files and verifies they're legitimate roms? 

There are hundreds.  It may be more time-efficient to buy a new HDD and just mirror them there, to avoid hours of manual effort.

Thank you for your reply!  This is about what I expected, but thank you for helping me understand the system.

[Retro808]

13 hours ago, artician said:

That may be what I'll have to do.  I guess Launchbox looks for the presence of the actual files and verifies they're legitimate roms? 

There are hundreds.  It may be more time-efficient to buy a new HDD and just mirror them there, to avoid hours of manual effort.

Thank you for your reply!  This is about what I expected, but thank you for helping me understand the system.

LB does not care if the rom is legitimate it just looks to see it has a file associated with a game. Any dummy file type will work.

You could likely use the "Fake Rom List" creator utility in the Community Theme Creator.

It will create .txt files for each platform. It does it for a bunch of platforms not just the ones you have. You could then text files in another LB build to import and download the media for the games you need. 

[artician]

@Retro808

This is exactly what I was hoping for. 
It worked!

Is there documentation on how Launchbox associates it's files?  I want to make sure I understand how Media relates to the equivalent ROMS.  I figure there must be some writeups about this but have been unable to find them.  The reason:

Now I need to transplant those images back onto the main machine.  I'm having some trouble doing so.  I made sure the dummy-ROMs were in _mostly_ the same location (drive letter was different), when downloading on the online machine, and had the same paths where possible. 

The problem: Since copying the new images over, I've not been able to get the existing ROMs to recognize they're there.  If I assign the images manually, they show up, but obviously I can't do this for several hundred games.  I've tried reimporting the ROMs, removing and reimporting them, and "Updating Metadata and Media for Selected Games", but nothing seems to associate the images with the games they match up with.  Same filenames, etc.

Thank you for all your help!