lost all emulation data and need to start from scratch......after 12+ years? 🤔

[Jammy]

Hello,

as mentioned in the title i lost my conplete emulation setup due to the passing of my old ssd. 🪦

I mainly used emulation for old stuff from snes/sega genesis up to psx/sega saturn but since emulation has quite evolved i might consider going up a bit in console gens.

Back then i switched from single emulators like snes9x and one for gba and sega genesis (i forgot the names, sorry) to retroarch.
(i added psx and sega saturn after a few years i think)

I am not good at stuff like this and it took me forever to set everything up.
To be frank, i am dreading the process of setting up everything from scratch.

I would go Retroarch again since it is all in one and i already know it but Launchbox looks nice too.
The thing that makes me pick RA over LB is that you have to add emulators to LB if i understood that right?
Or should i start with RA and get to LB later?

I'd be grateful for any recommendations/tips.


and if you know some "really" simple guides you would recommend to your "slowest" friend, that'd be nice too 😅

Oh! And if i "that friend" needed any bios, or roms etc. would you point them in a certain direction or would a google search be sufficent enough?

[C-Beats]

LaunchBox is a front end NOT an emulator. You don't actually play games via LaunchBox, it simply opens the app that does. That being said we can download emulators for you for most platforms during our import process, as well as set up basic command line that makes them largely "just work". You MAY need to swap some options around to play nice with how you want things, but that should be about the extent of what is required from you.

That being said you need to supply your own ROMs for emulated platforms, we (nor anyone in the community) can't tell you where to get them or give theirs to you as that is illegal in most countries (including the one we operate out of). I'm sure finding ways of grabbing "fullsets" from various "archives" exist, but we can't help facilitate that.

[launchretrogirl2562]

which platforms did you all have?
and do you still have all your games?

[Jammy]

1 hour ago, C-Beats said:

LaunchBox is a front end NOT an emulator. You don't actually play games via LaunchBox, it simply opens the app that does.

then that is what i meant by "needing seperate emulators". thx for the swift reply ^^

[Jammy]

28 minutes ago, launchretrogirl2562 said:

which platforms did you all have?

only the ones mentioned in the post.

• snes
• mega drive
• gameboy advance
• sega saturn
• sony playstation

29 minutes ago, launchretrogirl2562 said:

and do you still have all your games?

sadly not. it was all on my ssd and i did not have any backups. 😭

[lessthanzero33]

I totally feel your pain. I lost years worth of emus and game on an 8tb external HDD. It cost me $200 at the time but i called a local data recovery site and they wanted to quote me $1500 USD for the recovery. I just got my self some external SSDs and was able to get everything back in no time. It's honestly very easy to recover everything yourself because everything is package and gives little to no errors depending where you get everything from. It also helps to keep a little sticky note on your pc for emus (not games because that can be time consuming). It's not as cumbersome as it was 12+ years ago.

[Suhrvivor]

I would be so sad if I lost all my work of more than a decade. Not so much for the media itself that can be redownloaded easily but for the settings of LaunchBox and the emulators. I've spent lots of time oto make every system and every game run like I want.

Anyway, welcome to LaunchBox! The app is new user friendly and it will help you get back retroarch and other emulators quick and easily.

[launchretrogirl2562]

17 hours ago, Jammy said:

only the ones mentioned in the post.

• snes
• mega drive
• gameboy advance
• sega saturn
• sony playstation

sadly not. it was all on my ssd and i did not have any backups. 😭

u can find pretty much every dataset on the internetarchive.
as to emulation, I think most can be run in Retroarch without much hassle.

[SiriusVI]

23 hours ago, Jammy said:

only the ones mentioned in the post.

• snes
• mega drive
• gameboy advance
• sega saturn
• sony playstation

sadly not. it was all on my ssd and i did not have any backups. 😭

Sucks that you lost your whole setup, but trust me, it's not actually that hard and it won't take that long to build it up again if it's just those 5 platforms.

What you wanna do is:
1. Download Launchbox
2. Setup Retroarch as an emulator (Launchbox can do that for you). Retroarch will be able to emulate all of these platforms, no need for standalone emulators.)
3. Get your games back (depending on how you want to go about it, this can take a bit longer. Did you have a hand-picked collection, a 1g1r set or a complete set with all available games for each system?)
4. Import all the games into Launchox and download all the metadata and media.
5. Aaaaand you're done --> Don't forget to make a backup this time 😃

If you have no experience with Launchbox, it may take a bit longer, and of course getting your game collections together might take a while. But if I had the games ready, JUST the setup within Launchbox & Retroarch would probably take me half an hour.

Good luck and don't forget to have fun.

Edited Tuesday at 07:41 PM by SiriusVI

[Jammy]

14 hours ago, Suhrvivor said:

I would be so sad if I lost all my work of more than a decade. Not so much for the media itself that can be redownloaded easily but for the settings of LaunchBox and the emulators. I've spent lots of time oto make every system and every game run like I want.

exactly this.
And not just the settings, but i dove so deep into bezels for example.

But from checking youtube and google for setup guides my understanding is that the overall process has gotten easier.
already booked this weekend to start from scratch.

 

15 hours ago, Suhrvivor said:

Anyway, welcome to LaunchBox! The app is new user friendly and it will help you get back retroarch and other emulators quick and easily.

Thank you. ^^

I'll start with retroarch (since i know it already) but now that i have seen what can be done on the front end and how nice it looks, i think that next step won't take long. 😅

[Jammy]

4 minutes ago, SiriusVI said:

Good luck and don't forget to have fun.

Thank you. ^^

i am already preparing for the new setup....mostly by just searching and downloading stuff.  😅

 

7 minutes ago, SiriusVI said:

Don't forget to make a backup this time 😃

[SiriusVI]

20 minutes ago, Jammy said:

And not just the settings, but i dove so deep into bezels for example.

There are great ways to automate this as well.

If it's just bezels / overlays that you want, then you should take a look at the bezel project. It's a fully automated installer that will automatically set up bezels for all of your games:

https://github.com/thebezelproject/BezelProject-Windows

If you want something even fancier, I suggest looking into HSM shaders with included bezels. I recommend Duimon's shader presets:

https://forums.libretro.com/t/duimon-hsm-mega-bezel-graphics-and-presets-feedback-and-updates/28146
https://github.com/Duimon/Duimon-Mega-Bezel

Here is an example of what they loo like:

Edited Tuesday at 08:03 PM by SiriusVI