Skip to main content

Improve RetroAchievements Matching for Archived/Compressed Games

LaunchBox for Windows

LaunchBox currently has partial support for archived games during RetroAchievements scans. .7z archives are already handled by temporarily extracting the archive and attempting to hash a game file from inside it.

However, this same scan-time handling does not appear to apply consistently to other archive formats, such as .zip and .rar. As a result, games in those archive formats may fail to match during a RetroAchievements scan, even though the emulator can identify them correctly once the game is launched.

The request is to expand LaunchBox’s RetroAchievements scan support so archived games are handled consistently across supported archive formats:

  • Already supported: .7z archives are temporarily extracted during the RetroAchievements scan.

  • Not fully supported: .zip and .rar archives do not appear to receive the same scan-time extraction and matching behavior.

  • Remaining gap: some archive layouts may still fail if LaunchBox does not select the same game file that the emulator uses.

Ideally, LaunchBox would use the same general approach for all supported archive formats: temporarily extract the archive during the RetroAchievements scan, identify the correct game file inside, hash that file for RetroAchievements matching, and then clean up the temporary files.

This would let users keep games compressed while still allowing LaunchBox to display and track RetroAchievements data reliably.

Posted by duerra ·
Status: Open To Community4 comments

Log in to comment and vote

Comments4

  • AstroBob changed status to Open To Community
    Team•

    Apr 28

    Pinned

    Hi there!

    Thanks so much for submitting this request and for taking the time to explain your use case — that context is always super helpful.

    I’ve gone ahead and fleshed out the main idea using the info you provided, and I’m opening it up to the community for further discussion and feedback. Please let me know if this fleshed-out version doesn’t match your original intended request.

    Feel free to let me know if you have any extra thoughts, examples, or edge cases you think might be relevant!

    Cheers,
    The LaunchBox team

  • killemall1057

    •

    Aug 10

    Upvoting this. Probably my biggest issue with Launchbox at the moment.

  • duerra

    •

    May 5

    @AstroBob the only concern I have with this implementation approach question is with large compressed archives from like the ps2/ps3 era and copy them from NAS using something like Archive Cache Manager. Decompressing and evaluation across a set like this could take days.

  • RoyalApe

    •

    May 5

    The inconsistency of RetroAchievement file recognition has been my biggest issue with Launchbox for the past several months. I would expand this to also address .CHD recognition.