Solved Bezel Project Issues With Retroarch

[Akaoni_Black]

This took entirely too long of pushing off to fix and entirely too long once i decided to look into it before I finally stumbled upon what was the cause of my issue and wanted to share so others experiencing it might be able to use this to help.

So bezel project worked wonderfully for mame, and I loved it. However it didn't even prompt for bezels when importing roms or triggering it to import media files for games using retroarch. This was on a new setup and it worked flawlessly before, even with the rom file names not matching exactly due to launchbox just kinda making everything better so I couldnt figure out why it wasn't working now. I even went through and tested fixing the rom names and reimporting one of the consoles to no avail.

The issue? Steam intergration. I had installed the steam version, and then directed launchbox to target that exe, then had it update retroarch, so i would get the benefit of both worlds, and have it easily update it. If I left it there, there wouldn't have been an issue. However I wanted full intergration so that when I launched a rom through Launchbox it would launch it through the steam game id (if you just launch the exe file manually or through launchbox, steam overlay and steam play together wouldn't work), otherwise when i wanted to play with friends via steam play together i would have to launch the steam version of retroarch outside of launchbox. That was not seamless enough for me and so i set up a .bat inside the folder with the retroarch.exe file and set launchbox to target it instead. With that it would launch with full steam intergration, and when it would update on steam, by having the .bat file in the same folder as the retroarch.exe, the prompt to update through launchbox would still work flawlessly, placing the files where they needed to go. 

Which is why it took so long for me to figure it out, if the updates work, why wouldn't the bezel project prompts? So I didn't think about it till after spending entirely too much time on it. The update just dumps the files in the same folder as whatever file launchbox is targeting, however for some reason the prompt for Bezel Project only launches when it detects Retroarch.exe or the mame.exe in the emulator for the games you are importing media for, and doesn't appear to care what the emulator is named under its settings, which is why it worked for mame and not retroarch.

The solution is simple, either use two emulators of retroarch inside launchbox, one targeting the .bat and one targeting the retroarch.exe and switch to the one targeting the exe as the default for the system you are importing or triggering reimporting media files for, let it do its thing, then switch back to the emulator targeting the .bat file and let it override the games default system. The other solution is just to edit the emulator inside launchbox to target retroarch.exe whenever you want to import games with bezels or update/reimport media files for a system running retroarch, then switch it back after its done doing its thing. The latter for me is faster since you dont have to have it update all the games to a different emulator each time.

Im not sure if this is caused by bezel project or how launchbox handles bezel project, though i feel its somewhat tied to launchbox as when you import via bezel project manually it just downloads bezels for all games in the system, and uses the no intro name set, where when done through launchbox it only grabs the files for the games imported and renames the bezel files to match the file names.

If a developer sees this, any way you could make the prompts for bezels to trigger when it sees the name of an emulator is RetroArch, instead of looking for the retroarch.exe? or have a checkbox in the emulator settings to trigger the bezel prompt when updating or importing media files? This is only a niche case though so not sure how important this option would be to be intergrated