Coverbox Remastered v2.23.1 - Early Access

I'm TOTALLY impressed so, it certainly makes me wanna just look at all the animation & not even play a game...lol I'm so glad I bought a new laptop, cause my old one couldn't even handle the basic BigBox theme. I'll keep playing around with it & if I run into any snags, I'll be sure to let you know. Again AMAZING work my friend

On 9/20/2025 at 9:45 AM, KingSlayer420 said:

Your good my guy, I'm going to change those font colors today and see if I can reproduce what you reported. I made this to look real nice when browsing your game list, it def not made to be the fastest theme here in the forums. I actually dont have a emumovies sub right now, so I use the low quality videos to test (for now). Thats the only thing I can think of right now that I need to test, we have almost the same specs, your pc is actually a bit faster than mine. I have all settings ON for testing, and never had a video lag like your describing. I know they were having some issues with video with 30 series cards, not sure if thats still a thing or not as I never had any issues with it with my 3060, maybe I just got lucky. Some info in the beta thread about it.

Does it do that in all the game list views? or only nes? 

I attached a video of me testing out the NES with OBS, which usually slows my pc down a bit when using it AND using bigbox. Is this the general laggy-ness you were describing? I will still get some high quality videos and test that as well, it shouldn't make much difference i would assume but i'll test it anyway to be sure. Hopefully we can get to the bottom of your video issue. 

 

 

Sorry it took me a few days to get back to you on this. I recorded a video that shows my experience. Basically night and day from yours. I used a couple of other themes as reference including the original coverbox. The other themes runner very smooth but when I use coverbox remaster the framerate drops very low. You can see the animation, videos, and scrolling are all very sluggish. I do see that when I focus out of bigbox the video stops and the rest of the animations run at the correct fps. I would say that this is all on my end but then Im not sure why other themes would work ok and this one will not.

 

 

2 hours ago, spiritedusual said:

Sorry it took me a few days to get back to you on this. I recorded a video that shows my experience. Basically night and day from yours. I used a couple of other themes as reference including the original coverbox. The other themes runner very smooth but when I use coverbox remaster the framerate drops very low. You can see the animation, videos, and scrolling are all very sluggish. I do see that when I focus out of bigbox the video stops and the rest of the animations run at the correct fps. I would say that this is all on my end but then Im not sure why other themes would work ok and this one will not.

 

 

 

Wow, that's some brutal lag you weren't lying.  I def don't experience that with my snaps at all. Which is weird because we have similar specs. Not sure exactly what's going on with that man, I do know this theme runs slower than all the others because almost all the other themes here are designed to run fast an smooth, for cabinets and such. I don't own a cabinet and will never build one, so I dont need it to run super fast, I'd rather have all the details. So I built a theme just for that. I only use BigBox to browse through and look at my games, it's the best fullscreen frontend and it has its own theme creator (CTC). I use Playnite for my main frontend, when I actually want to "play" a game I use that. The OG coverbox works so fast because there aren't as many elements and fine details as this one. Each element I add creates some overhead. I can't do both. It's either fast and responsive, or packed with details. In my opinion I think my "packed with details" theme is making some issue you have worse and more noticeable. Do you update your GPU drivers frequently? Updating the drivers has solved my issues a few times with weird quirky things like this. Wish I had better information to give you....on the bright side I know a bit about troubleshooting pc issues and I will say that laggy videos isn't something that sounds severe. Sounds like a driver issue maybe, or some conflicting app or something. No nahamic right? 

7 minutes ago, KingSlayer420 said:

 

Wow, that's some brutal lag you weren't lying.  I def don't experience that with my snaps at all. Which is weird because we have similar specs. Not sure exactly what's going on with that man, I do know this theme runs slower than all the others because almost all the other themes here are designed to run fast an smooth, for cabinets and such. I don't own a cabinet and will never build one, so I dont need it to run super fast, I'd rather have all the details. So I built a theme just for that. I only use BigBox to browse through and look at my games, it's the best fullscreen frontend and it has its own theme creator (CTC). I use Playnite for my main frontend, when I actually want to "play" a game I use that. The OG coverbox works so fast because there aren't as many elements and fine details as this one. Each element I add creates some overhead. I can't do both. It's either fast and responsive, or packed with details. In my opinion I think my "packed with details" theme is making some issue you have worse and more noticeable. Do you update your GPU drivers frequently? Updating the drivers has solved my issues a few times with weird quirky things like this. Wish I had better information to give you....on the bright side I know a bit about troubleshooting pc issues and I will say that laggy videos isn't something that sounds severe. Sounds like a driver issue maybe, or some conflicting app or something. No nahamic right? 

Yea I updated my driver's and launch box to troubleshoot this. How many games do you have in your nes platform?

18 minutes ago, spiritedusual said:

Yea I updated my driver's and launch box to troubleshoot this. How many games do you have in your nes platform?

total, maybe 500. I play alot of games over at RA and dont download whole sets just what I plan on playing. I separated those as well when I was making the other region list views, so many 100-200 in nes and 150 in famicom. You think that might be what the issue is? the game count. 

I could download the whole set and add them real fast, my bigbox is a dummy right now I can add whatever it doesnt matter really. Its basically barebones. 

UPDATE: currently adding 5k to what i have, lb is downloading 27k assets, might take a min. I'll be back with results at some point

Edited September 24 by KingSlayer420

43 minutes ago, spiritedusual said:

Yea I updated my driver's and launch box to troubleshoot this. How many games do you have in your nes platform?

OK, I'm back. I will be transparent and tell you that I did not let lb finish downloading all that media. My adhd got the better of me and I canceled it maybe 20 mins in (it downloaded maybe 4k assets). It was gonna go on for hours. I can let it download but I dont see how it would effect anything too much, i have all elements set to update "on selection" not during. That means it loads those assets and metadata soon as you stop on a game, thats what causes that bit of lag when stopping on a game, I'm loading alot of info in soon as you select it. I made a video of the test, it seems the same to me but i'll post it below. This test has 4k games added. 

Wanna try something for me? open your task manager (ctrl-alt-delete) then open bigbox, then load my theme. I wanna see if your bottlenecking. If you dont mind posting a screen (with NO private info) of the results? Make sure to sort task manager so it pulls the troublemaker (app using the most resources) to the top so I can make sure everything looks ok. 

 

Edited September 24 by KingSlayer420

1 hour ago, KingSlayer420 said:

total, maybe 500. I play alot of games over at RA and dont download whole sets just what I plan on playing. I separated those as well when I was making the other region list views, so many 100-200 in nes and 150 in famicom. You think that might be what the issue is? the game count. 

I could download the whole set and add them real fast, my bigbox is a dummy right now I can add whatever it doesnt matter really. Its basically barebones. 

UPDATE: currently adding 5k to what i have, lb is downloading 27k assets, might take a min. I'll be back with results at some point

I did think it may have something to do with the qty of roms. I have the full nointro imported. However I moved them all and left just one and I am still experiencing the same behavior. I will attach that screen shot below. The screen shot is when bigbox is focused and the video is playing. When I focus on the task manager the video pauses and all of the menu ui elements run at a proper fps. The only difference there is the i/o rate goes up during video playback but it's on the nvme. I really dont know whats going on but its clearly on my end.

21 minutes ago, spiritedusual said:

I did think it may have something to do with the qty of roms. I have the full nointro imported. However I moved them all and left just one and I am still experiencing the same behavior. I will attach that screen shot below. The screen shot is when bigbox is focused and the video is playing. When I focus on the task manager the video pauses and all of the menu ui elements run at a proper fps. The only difference there is the i/o rate goes up during video playback but it's on the nvme. I really dont know whats going on but its clearly on my end.

Task manager looks fine, you never know what people have installed so it's always best to check that first and make sure. If it's running decent when video stops it sounds like that might be some sort of video issue. Might be a dumb question but, you tried setting your video playback to different things in LB settings? I use Windows Media Player. 

The i/o is just your power draw, when using the GPU it will draw more power that's normal. Your task manager all looks fine from the screenshot. It's gotta be something else, since it works fine with other themes. Bothers me that it only does that with this theme tbh, I'd like to get to the bottom of it. 

I'm not at my pc right now, but tomorrow when I wake up I'll do some research on why something like that might happen, see if I can find anything useful to try. 

Edited September 25 by KingSlayer420

My setup includes a i9-10850k and a asus strix 3080 with 32gb of ram on a 1tb nvme. I use the no-intro romset for NES with over 3200 roms and the theme works at full intended speed and no abnormal hitching. Im sorry to hear about your issues Spiritedusual and hope they get solved soon. With the Kingslayer on the case your in good hands .

Edited September 25 by zyute

18 minutes ago, KingSlayer420 said:

Task manager looks fine, you never know what people have installed so it's always best to check that first and make sure. If it's running decent when video stops it sounds like that might be some sort of video issue. Might be a dumb question but, you tried setting your video playback to different things in LB settings? I use Windows Media Player. 

The i/o is just your power draw, when using the GPU it will draw more power that's normal. Your task manager all looks fine from the screenshot. It's gotta be something else, since it works fine with other themes. Bothers me that it only does that with this theme tbh, I'd like to get to the bottom of it. 

I'm not at my pc right now, but tomorrow when I wake up I'll do some research on why something like that might happen, see if I can find anything useful to try. 

I did try to use both the wmp and ffmpeg video playback I also tried a fresh launchbox install and still same issue. Whatever it is it's on my end for sure. No idea though

9 hours ago, zyute said:

My setup includes a i9-10850k and a asus strix 3080 with 32gb of ram on a 1tb nvme. I use the no-intro romset for NES with over 3200 roms and the theme works at full intended speed and no abnormal hitching. Im sorry to hear about your issues Spiritedusual and hope they get solved soon. With the Kingslayer on the case your in good hands .

Thank you Zyute. You got that strix 3080? man that one was pretty. You have a nice pc.

 

8 hours ago, spiritedusual said:

I did try to use both the wmp and ffmpeg video playback I also tried a fresh launchbox install and still same issue. Whatever it is it's on my end for sure. No idea though

I did a bit of reading this morning. I didn't find an exact solution, but instead just some things to try. I will list some threads below and you can see if any have any info that sounds helpful.

Reddit Post #1

Reddit Post #2

Reddit Post #3

Nvidia Forums Post

Windows 11 Forum

 

I also read alot of threads that I didnt post because of redundancy.  Most of the threads complained about a faulty gpu driver causing this stutter. I've only seen that in a few instances and yours doesnt compare well to my experiences. I've had several PC's (i used to repair them) do that stutter when the CPU fan was caked with dust and fans clogged. Basically they were overheating, causing the pc to slow to a crawl as the cpu gets dangerously hot. Your problem seems like it is something else. I've seen bad cpu/ram make a pc act real crazy a few times, this one is new. 

 

Since we have 2 sides able to test, one that works ok and one that doesnt, we can compare our setups to see what differs? 

• I have all my frontend stuff on its own nvme
• I have Windows 10 installed on its own 2nd nvme
• All my emu's/apps (used for gaming) are on ssd
• all my roms are on a huge mechanical hdd (8TB)
• all my pc games are on a VERY large mechanical hdd. (16TB)
• I use windows 10 (for now)
• Launchbox settings are out of box default
• WMP video playback
• BigBox setting on my end are all default. (do this when making themes so i can see what a new user would see on a default install with no extras)
• I have 3 monitor setup, 2 run at 70mhz the main one in center runs at 144Mhz. 
• I don't have emumovies sub right now, all my videos are of low quality. 
• I use Nvidia App to update my gpu drivers maybe once a month or so. 
• My windows power plan setting is set to "High Performance".
• I disabled my CPU overclock and only enabled the boost. (B550+) 
• No GPU overclock, just basic settings that Nvidia App optimizes automatically. (msi 3060 12gb)

I know all this is just info, but we actually have similar setup and similar parts, you might just have some windows setting wrong. So I'll leave these here so you can look over it. I will say again so you don't get too discouraged, i don't see any red flags. The things that draw my attention to hardware are bsod, freezes, and other bad things. You reported none of those. Your gaming rig is faster than mine and should be able to run this theme, as I do if not faster. 

UPDATE: Ya know....it sounds more and more like you might not be using all your CPU cores somehow. The pc would indeed react that way if it was only using a single core. Check to make sure with Ryzen Master that your using all cores.

 

Edited September 25 by KingSlayer420

9 hours ago, KingSlayer420 said:

Thank you Zyute. You got that strix 3080? man that one was pretty. You have a nice pc.

 

I did a bit of reading this morning. I didn't find an exact solution, but instead just some things to try. I will list some threads below and you can see if any have any info that sounds helpful.

Reddit Post #1

Reddit Post #2

Reddit Post #3

Nvidia Forums Post

Windows 11 Forum

 

I also read alot of threads that I didnt post because of redundancy.  Most of the threads complained about a faulty gpu driver causing this stutter. I've only seen that in a few instances and yours doesnt compare well to my experiences. I've had several PC's (i used to repair them) do that stutter when the CPU fan was caked with dust and fans clogged. Basically they were overheating, causing the pc to slow to a crawl as the cpu gets dangerously hot. Your problem seems like it is something else. I've seen bad cpu/ram make a pc act real crazy a few times, this one is new. 

 

Since we have 2 sides able to test, one that works ok and one that doesnt, we can compare our setups to see what differs? 

• I have all my frontend stuff on its own nvme
• I have Windows 10 installed on its own 2nd nvme
• All my emu's/apps (used for gaming) are on ssd
• all my roms are on a huge mechanical hdd (8TB)
• all my pc games are on a VERY large mechanical hdd. (16TB)
• I use windows 10 (for now)
• Launchbox settings are out of box default
• WMP video playback
• BigBox setting on my end are all default. (do this when making themes so i can see what a new user would see on a default install with no extras)
• I have 3 monitor setup, 2 run at 70mhz the main one in center runs at 144Mhz. 
• I don't have emumovies sub right now, all my videos are of low quality. 
• I use Nvidia App to update my gpu drivers maybe once a month or so. 
• My windows power plan setting is set to "High Performance".
• I disabled my CPU overclock and only enabled the boost. (B550+) 
• No GPU overclock, just basic settings that Nvidia App optimizes automatically. (msi 3060 12gb)

I know all this is just info, but we actually have similar setup and similar parts, you might just have some windows setting wrong. So I'll leave these here so you can look over it. I will say again so you don't get too discouraged, i don't see any red flags. The things that draw my attention to hardware are bsod, freezes, and other bad things. You reported none of those. Your gaming rig is faster than mine and should be able to run this theme, as I do if not faster. 

UPDATE: Ya know....it sounds more and more like you might not be using all your CPU cores somehow. The pc would indeed react that way if it was only using a single core. Check to make sure with Ryzen Master that your using all cores.

 

Hey thanks for all that. I checked ryzen master. The 5800x3d doesnt let you manually adjust clock speeds but you can see activity on all the cores. I will try to stress it later and see what happens.

I went nuclear and installed windows 10 on an ssd. On a fresh win10 install with updated drivers and one rom imported in to LB the lag is still present. I was on 13.23 ver of LB I didnt check any other settings but at this point Im running out of things I can think of as the problem besides hardware maybe but why is it just launcbox or even just this theme. Im about to call it quits honestly.

31 minutes ago, spiritedusual said:

Hey thanks for all that. I checked ryzen master. The 5800x3d doesnt let you manually adjust clock speeds but you can see activity on all the cores. I will try to stress it later and see what happens.

I went nuclear and installed windows 10 on an ssd. On a fresh win10 install with updated drivers and one rom imported in to LB the lag is still present. I was on 13.23 ver of LB I didnt check any other settings but at this point Im running out of things I can think of as the problem besides hardware maybe but why is it just launcbox or even just this theme. Im about to call it quits honestly.

If the other cores have activity then its running on all cores more than likely. I know how that feels man, I feel bad. I wish I could be of more assistance. Without your PC right in front of me I will have a difficult time diagnosing any issues. On the positive side at least she works eh? Theres alot of other really nice themes here that can fill that same gap. I'm here if you need any help in the future. Keep in mind it very well could be this theme, its early access and I plan to clean it up quite a bit once I finish most of the game list views. 

20 minutes ago, KingSlayer420 said:

If the other cores have activity then its running on all cores more than likely. I know how that feels man, I feel bad. I wish I could be of more assistance. Without your PC right in front of me I will have a difficult time diagnosing any issues. On the positive side at least she works eh? Theres alot of other really nice themes here that can fill that same gap. I'm here if you need any help in the future. Keep in mind it very well could be this theme, its early access and I plan to clean it up quite a bit once I finish most of the game list views. 

No worries, Im more annoyed that the problem is persisting without a clear reason. I'll keep checking back maybe it'll work itself out.

Thanks for all your help!

Hey KS how you doing buddy? Well I've been having same issues as previous individual with theme MAJORLY lagging on my laptop, but mines even worse as the short video game intro to the left doesn't even play on mine. Attached are 2 screenshots of task manager, including one with all my cores, see if maybe you can tell what's happening. Other themes play without problem, but love your theme the best & REALLY wanna make it work. Thanks bud

59 minutes ago, Marine4Lyf said:

Hey KS how you doing buddy? Well I've been having same issues as previous individual with theme MAJORLY lagging on my laptop, but mines even worse as the short video game intro to the left doesn't even play on mine. Attached are 2 screenshots of task manager, including one with all my cores, see if maybe you can tell what's happening. Other themes play without problem, but love your theme the best & REALLY wanna make it work. Thanks bud

It looks (from the screenshot) like your not using your GPU? It's at 0% usage. That would def cause that. 

 

I took a screenshot of mine with the snes theme running, it uses maybe 30-40%. Before I load the snes theme it uses maybe 10-15%.

Knew you could point out the problem bud. So how do I fix this? You can tell I'm a newbie...lol

21 minutes ago, Marine4Lyf said:

Knew you could point out the problem bud. So how do I fix this? You can tell I'm a newbie...lol

I've never actually owned one of those fancy gaming laptops, although I've repaired quite a few. Usually it's a bios thing, sometimes it's something else. I'll list some threads below to read and hopefully help ya out a bit. If not I can help ya if you provide me some more info about your laptops make and model, etc. 

SOME (MAYBE) HELPFUL THREADS:

Laptop not using GPU reddit

Laptop not using GPU windows 11

Laptop not letting me use the dedicated GPU

How to make laptop use dedictaed GPU

If none of those help, send me more info and i'll look up the manual for your laptop and give it a read, see if I can help. Does it never go above 0%? like ever? 

Some laptops only let you use the dedicated GPU IF you use hdmi or display port. Others let you reguardless, really depends alot on what laptop you have.

Edited September 26 by KingSlayer420

Alrighty I searched around & had to global set my GPU processor using my Nvidia control panel & BAM!!! BigBox is using rhe GPU as seen on the attached file & no lagging at all, but that video short on the left side isn't playing, is there an option I have to check off for it to work? ALMOST THERE...lol

34 minutes ago, Marine4Lyf said:

Alrighty I searched around & had to global set my GPU processor using my Nvidia control panel & BAM!!! BigBox is using rhe GPU as seen on the attached file & no lagging at all, but that video short on the left side isn't playing, is there an option I have to check off for it to work? ALMOST THERE...lol

Glad you got that working! Your gonna need that enabled for more than just BigBox haha. You should notice a huge difference now with emus and other gpu related tasks. It looks like you may not have a video snap for that game 😁 You can always tell because (for some odd reason) it shows a gameplay snap if (if you have one) instead of the video snap. I never added that in, must be a bigbox setting or something. It always cuts off the bottom and top, if you browse to another game (that you now 100% has a video snap) does it still not play?

Ok bros might be a misunderstanding on my part. I thought your theme included video snaps, but I take it you have to subscribe to EmuMovies to get the video snaps of games included in your theme am I correct?

Just wanted to drop in and say that performance issues are, of course, inevitable with how robust this theme is. Optimizing is always ideal, but I really appreciate the effort you’re putting in to work with the community and make sure everyone has a good time! Personally, I run a pretty strong rig, so I’m not experiencing any issues myself—though my setup is pretty unorthodox to say the least, haha.

At some point I’ll upload a video of my BigBox collection using this theme, partly to show how well a large collection can run with all the bells and whistles, and partly just to share the hobby with the community.

All in all, this is a solid update as usual. There may be issues I haven’t noticed, but everything looks great on my end. Keep up the good work!

7 hours ago, Marine4Lyf said:

Ok bros might be a misunderstanding on my part. I thought your theme included video snaps, but I take it you have to subscribe to EmuMovies to get the video snaps of games included in your theme am I correct?

Yeah, unfortunately Circo charges a monthly fee to access his video snap collection over at emumovies. I have gotten it a few times, its wasteful to just pay for it when I'm not using it so I canceled it last year. I still need to get it at some point I hate the blurry 30fps free videos. Don't feel embarrassed, we all did that lol. I thought you could just grab them here when I first started. Emumovies does have some free snaps you can use, they are a hassle to download and they arent very clear but they work in the meantime.  

3 hours ago, vahn65 said:

Just wanted to drop in and say that performance issues are, of course, inevitable with how robust this theme is. Optimizing is always ideal, but I really appreciate the effort you’re putting in to work with the community and make sure everyone has a good time! Personally, I run a pretty strong rig, so I’m not experiencing any issues myself—though my setup is pretty unorthodox to say the least, haha.

At some point I’ll upload a video of my BigBox collection using this theme, partly to show how well a large collection can run with all the bells and whistles, and partly just to share the hobby with the community.

All in all, this is a solid update as usual. There may be issues I haven’t noticed, but everything looks great on my end. Keep up the good work!

Thanks for this vahn, I was feeling a bit discouraged yesterday about it not working as I wanted for everybody. I will do my best to get everything fixed up at some point. Feels more and more like this is "again" a theme that some users won't be able to enjoy fully due to not having a fast enough rig. I tried my best to counter that this time and still it remains a issue. It is nice to hear it's working as expected for you, and decent enough for others. 

I can share any videos you make in the thread if you want extra yt views. That goes for anybody that wants to make one btw, Donnell usually does those but I think he's been busy at work lately. I made a short one last night but had to stop it when my wife finished up dinner. 

I'm sure I missed a few things, I will do a better check today like I usually do and fix any reported bugs. I spent extra time in those so they may not have as many bugs. Also gonna start some new views later, Patrick wants to see some Atari on the list so I might start researching those. I've never owned or played any of those so I gotta do some research. I assume they have no bios menu so I'll have to get creative again. 

Thanks for all the positive vibes, always helping out, and motivating me to keep going. I'm glad your happy with it so far

Morning KS...Registered over at EmuMovies & been looking around, yes you can download the individual files for each console, but it seems like a pain in the ass to install them all. Would you recommend the yearly subscription? If I'm using BigBox, might as well have all the bells & whistles to make the setup look amazing, especially with your theme