Easily Import Tens of Platforms?

[brando56894]

I have a huge collection already organized on my NAS and shared out via SAMBA shares on a RetroNAS VM. I have the drive mounted as Z:\ and all the ROMs are sorted by platform under either Z:\recalbox or z:\retroarch

I haven't found an answer to this yet, but is there a way I can tell LaunchBox "Import all the platforms under z:\recalbox" instead of having to go through the Import wizard tens of times, amounting to hundreds of clicks taking an hour or two? 

[faeran]

13 hours ago, brando56894 said:

I have a huge collection already organized on my NAS and shared out via SAMBA shares on a RetroNAS VM. I have the drive mounted as Z:\ and all the ROMs are sorted by platform under either Z:\recalbox or z:\retroarch

I haven't found an answer to this yet, but is there a way I can tell LaunchBox "Import all the platforms under z:\recalbox" instead of having to go through the Import wizard tens of times, amounting to hundreds of clicks taking an hour or two? 

Yes, but I would highly recommend not doing it, especially if you are not sure if your folders and files are standardized in a way that LaunchBox can consume already. If not, you could end up creating a mess for yourself.

If you are not wanting to do that leg work, I'd recommend still doing it one platform at a time, but in a different way than what you are currently doing.

First, just be sure that your platform game folders only contain your games and nothing else. It's also best to have a flat folder structure, ie z:\games\Sega Saturn\allyourgames.files

Also make sure that the auto rom imports option is turned on under Tools > Options > General > Automated Imports

Then go to Tools > Manage > Platforms, Add a new platform. Type in the Title and set the Scrape As value, and Press OK

Find the new platform in the list and edit the platform. Navigate to the 'Folders' tab, assign the 'Games' folder to your games' location, and click 'OK'.

Everything inside of that folder will now import and download a small subset of media

 

 

 

[brando56894]

Thanks, that's still a lot more work than I'd like to do because I'd have to add in about 25-30 platforms manually and then change all their paths manually, which isn't really ideal. 

[DeadVoivod]

Life can sometimes be very difficult 😒

[brando56894]

It would be nice and more user friendly if there was a way to mass import everything at once for those of us that have gigantic libraries, like Emulation Station and RetroArch do, instead of having to click though handfuls of (or literally a hundred) dialogue boxes and dropdown menus, but, alas, my opinion won't change anything. I like the desktop UI and filtering ability that LaunchBox has, but the import process makes me not want to use it over the other two due to the hours it would take to setup.

I'd also have to reorganize my folder structure apparently, because under each console name I have the country/general area that they were released in (US, EU, JP, etc...), then separated alphabetically in chunks (A-F, G-M, N-Z) depending on how many games there are for that system. Also, I have a folder in the same level as the alphabetized folders which uses categories as subfolders (game series, FPS, RPG, etc...) so you can search for a game by that as well instead of scrolling through the list alphabetically. This wasn't my own layout, by is a "standard" set up by the Hardware Target Game Database organization system and is used by a bunch of "Retro Archivists".

[faeran]

On 10/13/2024 at 9:41 AM, brando56894 said:

It would be nice and more user friendly if there was a way to mass import everything at once for those of us that have gigantic libraries, like Emulation Station and RetroArch do, instead of having to click though handfuls of (or literally a hundred) dialogue boxes and dropdown menus, but, alas, my opinion won't change anything. I like the desktop UI and filtering ability that LaunchBox has, but the import process makes me not want to use it over the other two due to the hours it would take to setup.

I'd also have to reorganize my folder structure apparently, because under each console name I have the country/general area that they were released in (US, EU, JP, etc...), then separated alphabetically in chunks (A-F, G-M, N-Z) depending on how many games there are for that system. Also, I have a folder in the same level as the alphabetized folders which uses categories as subfolders (game series, FPS, RPG, etc...) so you can search for a game by that as well instead of scrolling through the list alphabetically. This wasn't my own layout, by is a "standard" set up by the Hardware Target Game Database organization system and is used by a bunch of "Retro Archivists".

Thanks for the input.  We already have support for Emulation Station type bulk imports as mentioned in my first post. You just drop your ROMS for all your platforms into the LaunchBox\Games folder and you are good to go. Advanced users can use symlinks and other methods as I listed in my first post to utilize this system for files in their custom locations, but it would be much better to have our own UI for bulk imports.

This is why we want to provide an interface inside of LaunchBox to handle this eventually, where you point to a root folder and we attempt to identify what platforms you have. As you mentioned, with people being able to organize their ROMs into any folders and folder names as they like, this can pose complications. Like all apps, including the ones you mentioned, things become a heck of a lot easier when you follow their naming structures, and falls apart when you want to go against the apps programming. Therefore, the UI would have to provide feedback for which platforms we automatically identify and which ones that we don't, and then provide users per-platform solutions to correct them. There are many ways people are organizing their ROMs, you are following one, we've had our own for the last 10 years or so, another app will do it different, and every individual person will also do it slightly different. Whatever UI bulk solution we come up with, we want to make sure it's as seamless as possible for as many people as possible, knowing full well we can't appease everyone.

[brando56894]

Thanks for the insight. It's nice to know that you're taking it into consideration 😀 I definitely can't copy my games to my PC because I have about 15.7 TB of games (properties shows 233,782 files, anything larger than a cartridge ROM, like CDs/DVDs, are split files. Anything from the 90s and before is 605 GB, about 72,000 files) on my home server shared out via Samba/SMB/CIFS. Creating sym/hard links on my server (which runs Linux) would work, but it would most likely require linking every file since LaunchBox likes a flat folder structure. Also, Samba sometimes doesn't play well with links, symlinks can easily be broken when the source file is moved, which just creates more headaches. Hard links would be much better in my case since all links point to the same inode, so they can't be broken like symlinks can.

While moving my games to a non-alphabetized folder hierarchy (removing my A-whatever subfolders under the platform folder) would be feasible, it's just not ideal since I also have a MisTer, which I prefer to use for any systems from the 90s and before, since it's hardware emulation and not software emulation. I can create "favorites" in the MisTer UI for games I frequently want to play, but if I want to get to a letter near the end of the alphabet, it would require scrolling through hundreds, if not thousands of files per console. Just as an example, my SNES folder of just US released games is 733 files. Like you said, everyone has their own way of doing things, and it would be difficult for you guys to cover everything under the sun. I actually rarely play any of these games, I'm a data hoarder and they're just nice to have for whenever I get the urge to play something old.