API Access to LaunchBox
Issue #902
new
I'd like to code up a companion app for LaunchBox. The concept being users could pull up a webpage hosted on their PC (via the app) from their phone and see relevant details to the game they are playing. Specifically control scheme, game manual, appropriate links, notes, and additional interface shortcuts (like savestate / loadstate) or AHK scripts.
This might make a nice feature for the main LaunchBox, however I think that API access would address more usecases.
Comments (8)
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repo owner
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reporter
- marked as minor
- changed title to API Access to LaunchBox
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reporter
Thank you for your quick response; I wish more dev's had the customer focus you do! Since the Games DB is downloadable, I think the rest can be hacked around. I'd just write a wrapper that takes the emulator and rom name as parameters, then passes them to their targets (while pulling the game name and emulator to inform the companion app). API access would still be useful at some point in the future, however please do not divert resources on my account :).
An ideal API would include:
- Current Game
- Current Emulator
- Games DB content (Probably already could be targeted via XML )
- Write access to the Games DB, or My Collection (Probably already could be targeted via XML )
- Configuration RW access (Probably already could be targeted via XML )
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Keep in mind that we grabbed the data from the GamesDB a while ago now and have since made lots of changes to it and our users started to upload and edit the Database as well. So there may be quite a few differences at this point.
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repo owner
I think he meant the LaunchBox Games Database, just used the old lingo. :)
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Well if that's the case, then ignore me! Just in case though...
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Hey Jason, that Metadata.xml works great for most things but I noticed it is missing one important thing. It doesn't have any of the Alternate Names fields so I'm missing some matches. Any chance of adding that to the output?
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Poke. Missing name aliases from the Metadata file is pretty much the only issue with it right now, any chance of having that added?
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Hi Steven, that sounds cool. I did actually have that in mind for long term, but obviously it'll be a while before I can get to that myself. We will be looking at opening up an API of some sort soon, but of course building the API is in competition with creating so many other features. Per all the data from the LaunchBox Games Database, this is already directly accessible through this download here:
http://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/Metadata.zip
That file is updated daily and gives you all the data in XML format. Of course people's local data in LaunchBox can be accessed from the LaunchBox.xml file.
One more thing to keep in mind, there is some overlap here with the "My Collection" features with the LaunchBox Games Database, which basically allows people to post their whole collections online. We will be expanding this relatively soon to add additional features.