Making Launchbox portable issue

[AOR]

I am using a Mac computer running parallels desktop 19. I am running Windows 11. I successfully installed everything onto the internal hard drive.  I have no issues running  Launcbox or playing games from the internal hard drive. I have copied and pasted the entire Launchbox directory to an external hard drive. When I launch the Launchbox application inside the external hard drive  I receive an error message.

please see attached picture. I have tried moving the Launcbox entire folder a few times to the external hard drive. I have restarted the computer. I am not sure what I am doing wrong. Thank you 

 

[Retro808]

There error is telling you one of the files is corrupted. Just do what it is advising and see if it fixes. On the external drive go into the \Backups folder and open one of the zips. Copy the Arcade.xaml to the \Data\Platforms folder. 

[AOR]

Thank you. I tried this multiple times and it Is still showing the same message. I now get the message twice 

 

[AOR]

After trying this yesterday I tried launching lunchbox from the internal hard drive installed in my user profile folder which was working fine until I tried moving that file. It brought me to the screen to import ROMS. I then went to my external hard drive to delete the three failed attempts of the entire lunchbox folder and when I would right click then delete the folder it gave me several error messages something like the compressed file cannot be found. I tried 50 times or so SKIP SKIP SKIP and gave up so after dragging the file from the external hard drive to the recycling bin they deleted just fine. I used copy and paste to move the entire Launcbox folder from the internal hard drive to the external hard drive.

 

Question 1 Did I install Launcbox in a location on the internal hard drive that is known to be issue free?

Question 2 Did I move it to the external hard drive correctly? 

Question 3 why did I get error messages about missing files when trying to delete them with right click and delete from the external drive?

 

again this is running on a Mac using Parallels desktop 19 as a virtual machine

 

thank you 

 

[skizzosjt]

well I noticed the XML file is called "._Arcade.xml" ? I would think that is causing your issues.  That likely is not a proper name. One would assume you mean to call your Arcade platform "Arcade" not "._Arcade". If you named it appropriate as "Arcade" it would create an XML file called "Arcade.xml"

Otherwise the error is referring to the contents of the file. Literally the first character inside the file is a period "." per that error message and that is def not how it should be. Assuming there are not further issues, deleting the period would take care of that error. But, depending on how messed up the file is, a different error may pop up afterwards.

 

19 hours ago, AOR said:

Thank you. I tried this multiple times and it Is still showing the same message. I now get the message twice 

 

Maybe due to what I am pointing out. Do you now have both "._Arcade.xml" and "Arcade.xml" in the data folder? guessing both are messed up, so it may produce throwing two errors

[skizzosjt]

Hi @AOR I re-read this, and now I know exactly what is going on! This is an eccentric macOS issue. macOS creates a hidden file prepended with "._" for every file. so due to you're putting your LaunchBox install onto I assume a NTFS drive connected externally, this will keep occurring. Said files must be getting accessed from Windows from the external disk, which reads them and says "what is this?!" because it's data is going to be nonsense to LaunchBox. The whole idea of running things through a VM is a bit of an exotic setup. Prolly should consider making a native Windows install and boot into that when you want to use LaunchBox

I used to see this same thing occur all the time when I had one of my HDD's formatted as exFAT so I can share TV and movies between macOS and Windows. Drove me nuts to always see these ._ files everywhere in Windows. They are otherwise harmless, but in your case, they are a problem because LaunchBox is going to continually try and use them as a platform file.

 

[AOR]

Thank you. I am out of town now. The external drive is formatted Exfat.

I brought my external drive to connect to a genuine windows machine and it would not even load. My Windows machine may be to old to run it.

I am trying to install it now after copying over the roms folder. The PC I am on is a core 2 processor.

My Mac machine I am working on is Apple Silicone based so there is no option for a stand alone native installation with Bootcamp. I am forced to run as a VM.

Good call on the period before the file name. I will check when I get back home.

[skizzosjt]

13 hours ago, AOR said:

My Mac machine I am working on is Apple Silicone based so there is no option for a stand alone native installation with Bootcamp. I am forced to run as a VM.

ahh ok, I've been out of the modern macOS loop, since my Apple systems are kinda old at this point lol. I see there is a difference between the Intel and Apple chips based systems. Bummer it's not as straight forward as it used to be.

So, the drive format isn't so much the direct issue. And the file name might not really be an issue. It's the fact there are additional files being created due to macOS accessing the disk, and their contents will be garbage data for Windows let alone LaunchBox. Lets pretend the exFAT drive is brand new formatted on a Windows system. Everything will work perfectly fine for LaunchBox at that point. The very second that macOS touches that disk, or at least specific folders/files, it will begin creating those duplicate files prepended with "._" and that is when you will start having issues. I'm not sure there is a good way around this situation. Maybe this doesn't occur if the exFAT disk is connected internally vs externally? I'd guess no, but would be worth doing a quick comparison. If your internal disk is HFS+ or APFS these duplicate files with "._" prepended on them are by default hidden in macOS. So, maybe that is why LaunchBox works from the internal disk, but not the external one. Internal disk is hiding these files so LaunchBox doesn't try to use them and works as expected. But eternal disk is making them visible to the OS so will create errors on boot of LaunchBox. It should work from the external disk if none of those ._ files existed. You would need to make sure those are removed every time you boot LaunchBox or it will keep trying to use them as a platform XML file. Maybe some scripting to check if the files exist and if so, delete them. But you would then likely want to launch LaunchBox or Big Box through this script to make things user friendly

Here is a proof of concept on that idea I tested out. You would need to put in the proper path to your folder where the XML files are in the "XML_Directory" variable. Also, adjust the path to LaunchBox, or Big Box, in the Run command. What this does is delete any file that starts with ._ before launching the program, that way they are never attempted to be used by LaunchBox or Big Box. This my only idea on how to automate getting around this whole situation. Otherwise you're likely looking at figuring out another way to setup your system or would have to do this script work by hand manually deleting the files any time they are regenerated

#SingleInstance, Force
SetWorkingDir, %A_ScriptDir%

XML_Directory := "D:\Frontends\LaunchBox\Data\Platforms\"

Loop, Files, %XML_Directory%._*.*, F 
        FileDelete, % A_LoopFileFullPath

Run, D:\Frontends\LaunchBox\Core\LaunchBox.exe

Paste this script into a text file, and save it as something like "Launch LaunchBox.ahk"

If the .ahk file does not run with a double click, you need to assign an AHK executable to the .ahk file extension, please do the following:

1.     Right click on the .ahk file
2.     Go to Open With > Choose Another App
3.     On the pop up window that appears, click on More Apps
4.     Scroll down to bottom of list and click on Look for another app on this PC
5.     Navigate to the AHK exe included with LaunchBox. It will be located in \LaunchBox\ThirdParty\AutoHotkey
6.     Select the AHK exe

[AOR]

thank you for the detailed response. Today I made a new install of launch box on my 15 year old windows machine and it worked. I copied it all from the windows machine to the external drive. It boots and runs Launchbox fine. I am going to bring it home in a few days and try it on the Parallels VM and hope it works. I will post here once I have results to hopefully help others. 

[AOR]

I brought the drive home I made on a genuine Windows machine and it works as a portable install of Launchbox on my Parallels VM 

 

[skizzosjt]

3 hours ago, AOR said:

I brought the drive home I made on a genuine Windows machine and it works as a portable install of Launchbox on my Parallels VM 

 

good! that should be expected since you stayed in Windows the whole time. Even if in a VM, it's still Windows to the disk. The issue potentially occurs when macOS gets involved. I used to think it was when ever the contents got accessed by macOS these files are created, but that seems it's only part of the reason. As I now think about it, this only occurred on my external disks but I never really investigated further until now to check my theory.  These pages explains why this all happens very clearly. It actually only occurs if you also copy contents to an external disk (doesn't really need to be external, just a non macOS formatted disk, which 99.9% of the time is going to be connected externally rather than internally), which is exactly what you did, and what I did in the past. all the dots are connected now, makes total sense to me.

https://kb.synology.com/en-ro/DSM/tutorial/Why_are_dot_underscore_files_created

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/14980/why-are-dot-underscore-files-created-and-how-can-i-avoid-them