Expand Launchbox to give ROM manager capability

[RetroFrogg]

Currently, if you want the features of a ROM manager (the ability to check your ROM folder against an up to date list of all available games (.dat file) (amongst other things), then you have to use a separate app. It would be great if ROM management function could be added to Launchbox, to remove the requirement to have to use a separate app, and to make updating ROM sets much easier.

[Fugus]

Would 100% support this, but the question is how to handle that. Especially when you have stuff like the RVZ files while Redump only wants to handle Wii/Gamecube in ISO so they would have to include support for the Dolphin tool to verify and all the Bin/Cue and ISO for the other systems where CHD is infinitely superior to them but again ReDump only wants to use Bin/Cue and ISO for everything.

If they included an actual Rom Manager into launchbox, especially ones that supported those, the emulation community would gravitate to launchbox even stronger than they already do.

[RetroFrogg]

Agree with your second paragraph @Fugus - closing the loop in this way would likely not only expand the Launchbox userbase to include the ROM collector community, but also increase the gap between Launchbox and its competitors by a much more significant margin. It would, of course, have to be implemented as a “behind the scenes” feature so that those who don’t want to use it aren’t encumbered by it.

In terms of your first paragraph - I don’t know enough about how it all works, but I know that other dedicated apps manage it. It might make most sense to reach out to the dev of one of those existing apps (RomVault for example is in active development, has some great automated DAT update features and has a dev that would likely be receptive to this).

[Fugus]

With my first paragraph, the RVZ format they made with Dolphin, they actually made a tool to go with it that they include with the emulator called “DolphinTool.exe” and it allows you to audit the RVZ and get check its integrity and get its has values so you can check it against the ReDump dats for their ISOs. Just have to have the rom manager setup to support it.

With CHD, the CHD also has a way to retrieve the metadata for its files and it will spit back the value for each track in it so you can compare it against a Bin/Cue dat on them. Don’t think it will spit the total combined values though to compare with ISOs though, but don’t know enough about it to say for sure though. But with the DolphinTool and CHDMan, you can audit RVZs files and CHDs that were based on Bin/Cue though without issue outside of it saying the Cue file might be different at most but even then most of them would pass as well.

[RetroFrogg]

Worth noting that the dev of the Romvault rom management app (Gordon) is working on a plugin that will enable Romvault to sync with Launchbox, which will hopefully be a good solution to this.

[Christian]

Issue #7638 was marked as a duplicate of this issue.