Discussion: multiple libraries

[3dlollo]

I am sure you are accustomed to other applications that have the ability to switch on the fly the library used; or to applications that can create "playlists" so you can save your relax playlist on your phone, or your "pump me up" mix in your USB stick for your car and so on.

I would like to have something like that for Launchbox and was wondering if there was anyone else that had this desire, or it is just me (I submitted a feature request BTW).

The concept is simple: I have 3 retro devices, and each one can play different games, since they have different power levels; plus I have 2 retro-computers (one running dos and W95, another W98 and XP), which I dual boot basically if I need to play a specific game. At the current state of things I would love to have different libraries, so I can save my games that run on my low power handheld in a library I can access from Launchbox main interface. Basically I can do something like right click on a game or on multiple games, and say "send to cheap handheld library". That will result in a new library holding only these games I add on it, so I can switch to it and move that content on my cheap handheld.

Same goes for windows games: one computer may have only certain DOS games, while another computer may be using other games running only on XP (I know that Launchbox does not run on these platforms; but I can copy files and folders from my computer to the other computer if needed, for some games to play on old systems, like dosbox games for example or GOG games). I can move games in these libraries easily and copy those at will.

Currently you can't really do that: the interface show ALL the games and all follow one single library; unless you install again Launchbox somewhere else and make it "portable" so to speak... So you can have different version of Launchbox with different games. This works fine until you try to figure out which games among the thousands you have, need to be copied over to the other Launchbox install You need to copy each file individually from the window manager, since Launchbox have no clue about what you are trying to do, and this is quite time consuming.

So far I made the same mame list 3 times to fit on my phone, on my main PC and on my PS vita, and it took forever as I had to copy only the specific files that would run on that specific platform, and since you cannot see what is on each Launchbox instance until you open it; you can imagine the amount of churning.

Having instead multiple libraries would be great; I could have a PS vita library with just mame games that can run there; and a library for just my DOS and old win games running on W98 or Xp for example, while maintaining the main library updated.

Am I the only one that have this desire? Or there is anyone interested in having support for multiple libraries and copy games over different libraries easily from the UI of Launchbox? I opened a feature request submission just in case, but I am sure that it would get more eyes on it if there is any interest here probably. So I am curious to hear what this community think. Thanks.

[3dlollo]

Looks like I am the only one with interest in such things, considering that there was no reply on this post.

I guess I will have to figure out how to handle this outside the app then, which means separate installations for each platform 🤷‍♂️