Importing Rom Collections and Preferences

[JayK2K]

Hey all, noob here, just took advantage of the black friday deals.... I have a few questions...

1) I understand that some of the roms that are not loading into launch box is a result of the name of said roms, however, is there an option in the import window to show roms that are not found? The window has a blurb of text saying to edit the name, however the interface is empty with 0 roms to import. In the case below I drag n drop the missing rom after the initial import of that folder, and get the empty dialog.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JcKiz8cN8IhCwyzdcU-h8x1ihRIm1FCl/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iGycz4-4UQ8sdVjyiPXLgebBrRbvxZvj/view?usp=sharing

So far I have been just adding a game without the link to the file, searching for the game and downloading the metadata, then manually linking the file afterwards under the "Launching" section.

2) Is there a way to simply drag n drop an image to replace the image used for a specific "look" of a title? For instance one of my gameboy titles for QIX was showing an import/japanese box art. I found the image I wanted on google, and figured I could just copy the image and paste it back into the launchbox interface. What it seems I have to do, is save the image to my drive, and then browse and find said file, and then add it to the metadata for the specific rom link.  Something more akin to the way mediamonkey works for album images would be far more efficient..

 

[JayK2K]

So far the import of my collection has not gone as well as I had hoped... Several platforms are returning minimal hits in the launchbox database. Is there a master list or mame style name for these roms?  I have meticulously purged and curated some of these folders, and am getting a minimal number of matches. For instance, my Atari 2600 folder of the ~422 North American titles, has matched 39 games...  Just 10%? ? Do i need to go into each collection to add them all 1 by 1?

[JayK2K]

Ok, a little more information...

When I try to add the collection via the Tools/import/rom files, or try to drag and drop any of the missing 2600 rom titles, none of them are found via the database search...  However, if I add a new title via right click under the collection, type in the same exact name as the rom name, and search the database.... it's found!  What gives?  Is this a bug with them not being found via bulk add?

[C-Beats]

I'd have to see your data files to confirm, but it sounds like you may have imported the ROMs to a custom named platform and either didn't set the scrape as of the platform correctly or it didn't save correctly and so the mass metadata scrape fails to function.

[JayK2K]

Below is the romlist...  I understand that content in parenthesis is ignored, but other random characters like ! [ and ~ could cause an issue. But of the list there, only 39 files are found. When I add them via drag and drop 1 at a time, they are also not found....  However if I type in the name, then search, they are found. Obviously I would prefer not to have to handle my entire collection this way...

 

I've also recorded 2 videos showing this at the link below.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mG3Fvz9XBMY4I0xYPsiF85MeocOvaESE?usp=sharing

 

Thanks for the help!

romlist.txt

Edited November 28, 2023 by JayK2K

[faeran]

Like CBeats mentioned, one of the main reasons you'd be seeing this is if you accidentally already imported those ROMs into the wrong Platform, or somewhere you didn't expect to import them to. The system is designed to not import the same file twice. 

One way you can test this is to try and import one of the ROMs that won't import, and when you get to the second to last page giving you some options, check off to "force importing duplicate games", and then press next. If you see the game on the next page with this option checked, it means you've already imported that game and it's somewhere in your library.

[JayK2K]

Looks like the update this afternoon (13.8) solved whatever was wrong...   Opened it up and updated, then my 2600 platform was missing...  re-imported them the same way, and now 410 of them are found!