Bodine Grunch Posted August 19, 2022 Share Posted August 19, 2022 I love using LaunchBox/BigBox so I don't want this to be perceived as criticism. It's more venting, a request for perspective and maybe a little help. I've been using LaunchBox for years now and have everything running fine [even the NOX Android emu]. There's been some unusual hiccups along the way because my choices in hardware. I play on a 32 inch CRT with S-Video because the softer graphics look more like the arcades I remember in the'70s. I decided today to export my MS-DOS files to Android. I had done this with all the others emulators and just decided to give it a try because it's usually painless. I have to do maintenance on LaunchBox so seldom that it's almost like learning from scratch when I make changes. To make a very long story short, I eventually selected one small innocuous DOS program (Elvira Mistress of the Dark) and exported it. A few hours later I had the Elvira zip file but it was 22.7 GB. All of my ROMs, emulators, media, games and ISO folders are on four hard disks outside of the primary Launchbox folder. Evidently this fooled the exporter because I got a zip file for the one game that included each of the DOS folders for the other 120 MS-DOS games. I like the thought of running retroarch dosbox-pure with zipped files on the Android tablet. My computer runs standard DOSBox v0.74.0.0. I don't want to mess up my LaunchBox because everything's running so well. Is there a way for me to export something the Android is going to be able to use without making huge changes to my Launchbox? The Android has a 1 TB SD card with a couple of hundred gigabytes left on it so I could just leave everything alone because I already have DOSBox on the tablet. It just seemed like an elegant solution to be able to zip each game and it's CDs into a single file. Thank you for sharing any thoughts you might have. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bodine Grunch Posted August 20, 2022 Author Share Posted August 20, 2022 (edited) If I edit a working XML file for each of the zipped packages, it seems like I could blank out or leave alone most of the entries in the <Game> section and change <ApplicationPath>, <ConfigurationPath> and <Title> but I'm not sure what to do about <ID>; blank it or search for each one. Would that be enough information to successfully import the package? Edited August 21, 2022 by Bodine Grunch Underline was mistakenly turned on Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted August 23, 2022 Share Posted August 23, 2022 On 8/19/2022 at 1:55 PM, Bodine Grunch said: I love using LaunchBox/BigBox so I don't want this to be perceived as criticism. It's more venting, a request for perspective and maybe a little help. I've been using LaunchBox for years now and have everything running fine [even the NOX Android emu]. There's been some unusual hiccups along the way because my choices in hardware. I play on a 32 inch CRT with S-Video because the softer graphics look more like the arcades I remember in the'70s. I decided today to export my MS-DOS files to Android. I had done this with all the others emulators and just decided to give it a try because it's usually painless. I have to do maintenance on LaunchBox so seldom that it's almost like learning from scratch when I make changes. To make a very long story short, I eventually selected one small innocuous DOS program (Elvira Mistress of the Dark) and exported it. A few hours later I had the Elvira zip file but it was 22.7 GB. All of my ROMs, emulators, media, games and ISO folders are on four hard disks outside of the primary Launchbox folder. Evidently this fooled the exporter because I got a zip file for the one game that included each of the DOS folders for the other 120 MS-DOS games. I like the thought of running retroarch dosbox-pure with zipped files on the Android tablet. My computer runs standard DOSBox v0.74.0.0. I don't want to mess up my LaunchBox because everything's running so well. Is there a way for me to export something the Android is going to be able to use without making huge changes to my Launchbox? The Android has a 1 TB SD card with a couple of hundred gigabytes left on it so I could just leave everything alone because I already have DOSBox on the tablet. It just seemed like an elegant solution to be able to zip each game and it's CDs into a single file. Thank you for sharing any thoughts you might have. That is interesting that that happened. It mostly just means that there's something about your MS-DOS games setup that we didn't expect. What do you have listed for Root Folder when you edit that game? I suspect that the issue might be related to that field. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bodine Grunch Posted August 26, 2022 Author Share Posted August 26, 2022 All of the LaunchBox and DOSBox folders are on the Arcade1 hard drive ( U: ). U:\Programs\LaunchBox and U:\Programs\DosBox U:\DOSGAMES holds the game folders each with required .bin, .cue or.iso files respectively U:\DOSGAMES\ holds the .conf files Edit Game: Launching, Application path: ..\..\DOSGAMES Edit Game: Launching, DOSBox, custom config files; ..\..\DOSGAMES Edit Game: Launching, Root Folder: ..\..\DOSGAMES My DosBox preceded the installation of LaunchBox. When I first tried it, I didn't know if I would keep it so I was hesitant to move any files inside the LaunchBox folder. As the years passed I just continued to use the external folders for DOSBox and all of the other emulation programs that are now distributed over four hard drives; U:, V:, W: & X:. My mess but it makes sense to me and I'm used to it. Thanks for your help. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bodine Grunch Posted August 26, 2022 Author Share Posted August 26, 2022 Part of the long story that I left out was that I initially tried exporting all of the Dos games. After 12 to 14 hours I canceled and looked to see what was going on. All of the files that processed had the same result as I described for Elvira Mistress of the Dark. That is, each zip file that was created contained 22.7 GB. (zip files for all of the DOSGAMES folders. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted August 26, 2022 Share Posted August 26, 2022 Okay, so the issue with the exporter is that all the games have the same root folder. That folder is intended to only have one game's files in it. Without that, LaunchBox has no idea what files go to what game. So unfortunately the exporter is just not going to work in that scenario. In order to do everything properly, all of a game's files need to be inside their own folder that is specific to that game. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bodine Grunch Posted August 26, 2022 Author Share Posted August 26, 2022 (edited) That sounds perfectly reasonable. I will begin editing each game's root folder description to its actual folder name. It never occurred to me that the all the other games are ROMs collected in one folder while the DOS games are actually collected in subfolders. Thank you for your help! Edited August 26, 2022 by Bodine Grunch 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bodine Grunch Posted August 26, 2022 Author Share Posted August 26, 2022 116 of 120 exported just fine. I'm sure I'll be able to sort out the remaining 4. Thank you again for taking the time to set me in the right direction. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted August 29, 2022 Share Posted August 29, 2022 Good to hear. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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