I've only got 30 games on my cabinet - Is that the lowest?

[Myzopia]

How low can you go?

I only have the arcade games on my system that I used to play as a boy which only amounts to a grand total of 30 (and a couple of them probably need to go as I don't particularly enjoy them anymore). There was an arcade in Stockport (near Manchester in the UK) in the 80s behind the bus station to where myself and best friend Akky would ride our bikes and spend a couple of quid trying to wrestle with Defender and Gorf, there was the Bamford Arms during 6th form college years where games like Dig-Dug and Galaxian were rotated on a semi-regular basis, Sheffield Uni Student Union Bar where Star Wars was discovered and then I remember Time Crisis and Virtua Racing from various bowling alleys which might be scraping into the 90s

I know most people that build themselves a cabinet have thousands of games from all sorts of different platforms but I find, for me, the low game count is the perfect amount for the nostalgia I'm looking for.

[Gimpy]

Definitely not as low as 30, but not far behind, I'd guess I now have between 50-60. I understand why people have these huge collection builds, but for me personally the amount of filler is insane. I used to have around 150, and I found even that was overwhelming for when people came over. Now I have a much more tightly curated list that is a mixture of games from my childhood, games I've discovered, and then 'something for everyone' style classics that people love 

[Fursphere]

I've been considering having multiple launchbox installs (with shared media libraries) to accomplish this.    A simple version of guests, and a monster version for me.

I recently used the BYOAC forum "all killer no filler" game list to create a new Arcade (MAME) list that dropped it to around 650 games,  Which is so much better than the original MAME list with thousand of games of crap. 

[TehCupcakes]

On 8/17/2023 at 4:10 PM, Fursphere said:

I've been considering having multiple launchbox installs (with shared media libraries) to accomplish this.    A simple version of guests, and a monster version for me.

I recently used the BYOAC forum "all killer no filler" game list to create a new Arcade (MAME) list that dropped it to around 650 games,  Which is so much better than the original MAME list with thousand of games of crap. 

I have multiple "Data" folders inside my launchbox install which just serve as separate collections of playlists. Renaming the current "Data" folder to something else and the one you want to use back to "Data" performs the swap. (I have an AutoHotkey script which does the change, and a Stream Deck so it's as easy as a push of a button for me.) It's a little less bloat than a fully separate LB install, where you would have to update the app separately for each install and have duplicated media (unless you redirect everything to one central place.)

[Fursphere]

5 minutes ago, TehCupcakes said:

I have multiple "Data" folders inside my launchbox install which just serve as separate collections of playlists. Renaming the current "Data" folder to something else and the one you want to use back to "Data" performs the swap. (I have an AutoHotkey script which does the change, and a Stream Deck so it's as easy as a push of a button for me.) It's a little less bloat than a fully separate LB install, where you would have to update the app separately for each install and have duplicated media (unless you redirect everything to one central place.)

That's a great idea.   Do you have the AHK script shutdown and relaunch BigBox at the same time?   Like ...  Shutdown BB, rename folders, Launch BB ?

[TehCupcakes]

2 minutes ago, Fursphere said:

That's a great idea.   Do you have the AHK script shutdown and relaunch BigBox at the same time?   Like ...  Shutdown BB, rename folders, Launch BB ?

I do it with the Stream Deck software since you can have multi-action buttons and it was easy to add there. You could definitely do that inside the AHK script, though.  You do need to restart BB for it to take effect, as I'm sure you guessed.

[Fursphere]

Ah, that makes sense.  I just got a stream deck mini myself for the cabinet.  Haven't played with the multi-action buttons yet.  Just hotkeys.