[Wintermute0110]

Hi - Thank You so much for the explanation and the road map. I would like to try and get this working. If we can get this going maybe we can explore the rest of your suggestion. So i changed the arguments and YES i have all my artwork local. Fanart, thumbs etc ... 

So i get my comic book launcher to launch CDISPLAYEX.exe but where in the Launcher do i point to the Comic Books (the .cbr files)

Many thanks in advance 

Here are some tips to create your comic launcher. Many of the steps in AEL should be very familiar for an AL user.

Let's suppose that CDISPLAYEX.exe is installed in C:\CDISPLAYEX\ and you have a Batman collection of comics (a set of .CBR files) in C:\Comics\Batman\.

1) Create a directory to store AEL artwork, for example C:\AEL-assets\Batman\.

2) Open AEL. On any row of the root window open the context menu, then select "Add New Launcher". Select "ROM Launcher (Emulator)".

3) In "Select the launcher application" browse and select CDISPLAYEX.exe. This will be called the Launcher app.

4) In "Select the ROMs path" browse and select the directory C:\Comics\Batman\

5) In "Set file extensions" type cbr

6) In "Application arguments" the default "$rom$" is fine.

7) In "Set the title of the launcher" type any name you wish for your launcher.

8) In "Select the platform" choose "Unknown" (the last one). The platform is only used by the scrapers.

9) In "Select asset/artwork directory" choose C:\AEL-assets\Batman\. This is the Artwork directory.

10) Your launcher will be created now. If you browse inside it the launcher will be empty. You have to scan the "ROMs" in your launcher, in your case the CBR files. To do the scan, browse to the launcher and open the context menu, then select "Add ROMs" and finally "Scan for New ROMs". Even if you have thousands of CBR files, the scanner should take a few seconds.

11) By default, AEL will use the Offline Scraper for Metadata and Search for Local Images (no online scraper for artwork). Because AEL has no scraper for comics, this default Scanner settings should be OK.

In order to use the previous existing artwork in AEL, do the following:

1) At the time of the launcher creation, AEL automatically makes several subdirectories inside the Artwork directory: banners, boxbacks, boxfronts, etc.

2) By default, AEL maps boxfronts to Kodi Icons and fanarts to Kodi Fanarts. This means that you must copy/move the former AL Thumbs into the boxfronts directory, and AL fanarts into the fanarts directory.

3) If you copy your Thumbs and Fanarts before you do the initial scan, then AEL will pick them up automatically with the default settings providing the name of the images are the same as the name of the CBR files.

If you did an scan first and want to scan for locally available artwork, go to the comic launcher and open the context menu, then select "Edit Launcher", then "Manage ROMs", and then "Scan ROMs local artwork". Note that if you do some changes to the images then you can repeat "Scan ROMs local artwork" as many times as necessary to bring AEL database up to date.

I recommend you create a separate Artwork directory for every comic launcher. Otherwise, artwork images will be overwritten if you have two CBR files with the same name on two different launchers.

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I hope this mini-tutorial is useful to you. Tell me if you have any trouble or something is not clear enough.