JoeViking245

March 9

10 minutes ago, thomsi said:

is their any way of creating a list of game that have missing clear logos.

It's not a "list", but you can see them by selecting Games Missing Media in the dropdown box in the left panel. Then select Clear Logos.

To do what you were asking in Excel, after having selected the games/rows in Audit and pressing Ctrl+C, you can right click in a cell and select Paste Special, then select Text.

March 7

v2.2.1 Released

Fixed: Save button gets hidden when disabling an emulator
Improvement: Refresh All now only takes [up to] seconds to complete.
New Feature:   Added mini bezel preview image
New Feature:   Added button to navigate to the selected platforms bezel folder
New Feature:   Bezel folders for platforms no longer existing in LaunchBox will be deleted IF they are empty

March 7

Then it should be taken care of with Box Front Priorities. Just make sure Box-Front is above Advertisement Flyer-Front in the priority list. Or, since Arcade is the only one that has Advertisement Flyer-Front images, assuming you don't want to see that image type at all, just un-check the box.

May also scroll through all 12 images for that game and see if there are other Box-Front images. If there's more than one of that type, they will alternate randomly.

March 7

Check that your game(s) actually have the Box-Front (or Box-Front-Reconstructed) images.

March 7

Your 1st screenshot is showing Box-Front images downloaded from EmuMovies.

The 2nd one is showing Advertisement Flyer-Front images downloaded from LaunchBox Games Database.

March 6

What's your monitor size? 1920x1080? It looks like it's not going to the bottom (and top?) of the screen. (Maybe that's how your monitor is, or you messed with the .lay file? Not sure exactly how that works.)

If that were "fixed", you'd gain a little more real estate.

Decreasing the size of the left/right sides will of course increase the width of the playfield. But will also distort (stretch) it's 256x224 (3:4) resolution.

(I think) to do what you want, you'd need to find/create a bezel image with narrower side bars and adjust the lay file to match.

What you may have seen is someone had a bezel for 7:8. Which would make it a little wider. When you go into the Tab menu - Video during gameplay, you can switch between Bezel (or 3:4) and 7:8 to see the width difference. Turn off Maintain Aspect Ratio and see how out-of-wack it can get.

March 6

Can you share a screenshot of what you're seeing?

March 5

37 minutes ago, Tsik said:

Well, I am aware that "MAME (or a derivative like MAMEUI), RetroArch or DOSBox are blacklisted from the plugin "
your "Documentation" is pretty clear

Sincerely, thank you for reading the documentation!

41 minutes ago, Tsik said:

I surely use the above ones on many platforms

I'm going to guess: "many" = 109.

23 minutes ago, Tsik said:

If you want I can see if could I make a list of 'Which Platform Uses Which Emulator'

Thanks. But that won't be necessary. This plugin "knows".

March 5

14 hours ago, Tsik said:

the numbers don't match

To clarify, are you talking about the number of platforms? e.g. You have 191 and the plugin is saying 82.

Any chance you have 109 platforms that use either MAME (or a derivative like MAMEUI), RetroArch or DOSBox?

If so, the 3 emulators are blacklisted from the plugin.

March 4

1 hour ago, Tsik said:

Yes, (for me at least) it always completes the refresh on both PCs if I don't click the plugin window (which causes Windows to ask to kill the process).

K. So that tells me it is working. Just slow, like molasses.

1 hour ago, Tsik said:

Just as I thought, but wouldn't it be more logical/productive to create those folders only if the user enables the bezel for that emulator?

When you enable the emulator, chances are you're going to want to click Test to check/set the window parameters at that time. My presumption is users will copy over their RA bezels, then enable them in BezelLauncher. Horse-cart. Chicken-egg. Logical-productive. I chose the coin toss.... Heads-tails.

1 hour ago, Tsik said:

2 hours ago, JoeViking245 said:

If the folder is empty, it will be deleted.

It is not. 🙃

You're right. At one point I had thought about doing that (this part I remember). Then "tails" prevailed and I didn't add it in (this part I forgot).

I will for sure look at fixing the Save button not being visible after selecting disable. I'll also spend some time looking at the Refresh thing. Can you attach your BLSetup.xml file that registered 191 platforms? I should be able to use [just] that to test with.

March 4

10 hours ago, darreldearth said:

if i disable bezels for an emulator there is no save option/button the way there is when you enable bezels for an emulator, so the emulator goes back to enabled the moment you click off of it.

This has probably been like that since at least that last update, 9 months ago. I'll add it to my "to do - fix this" list.

2 hours ago, Tsik said:

I copied over to a new fresh build all my platforms and although at first I got the same hang/crash when I clicked the 'Refresh' button

I wonder if on first run, the 'start the setup, then close it... then restart it, then Refresh' has something [in the coed] to do with that. You said it did work after that, though was inconsistent. Or just took an extremely long time.?..

2 hours ago, Tsik said:

As I created the 190th platform the refresh took significantly more time (which for my super-potato pc is around 6~10 minutes) but the process eventually ended successfully.

I shouldn't take that long. Even on a potato. That said, a quick glance at that section of the code [written over 2 years ago] shows me I knew just enough to 'make' it work'. But was ignorant enough to not include more checks and balances. 😊 It does work (with fewer platforms???), but is some ugly-arse code. I'll look at possibly refactoring that part or (might end up being easier) just rewrite it.

Question: When it hangs, if you wait [the unfortunate 6 - 10 minutes], will it always eventually complete? As in, it does actually work. It just takes a stupid-long time. This may be moot if I decide to do a complete rewrite of that section. Some day. But will give some guidence.

2 hours ago, Tsik said:

I noticed that the plugin creates folders in ..\BezelLauncher\Bezels which are empty apart from the ones I activated the bezel for

On step 1 of Setting up, the folders are created. ("This will create the \Plugins\BezelLauncher\Bezels\platform_name\ subfolders")

The intent is to have the folders there for you to place your bezel files into. Similar to how LB's Auto-Import feature creates folders under /Games/. The main purpose is to give the proper/correct folder names for you to place the bezels in, corresponding to where the plugin looks. The hope was to alleviate issues in folder naming conventions like: Sony Playstation 2 vs. Playstation 2 vs PS2.

"In theory", when clicking Refresh All, it'll [also] create new folders for newly added platforms. It's "supposed to" also remove empty folders for platforms no longer existing. e.g. If a platform that had once existed in your collection and is no longer there, if it has a Bezel subfolder with files in it, it will not be deleted. If the folder is empty, it will be deleted.

March 3

5 hours ago, darreldearth said:

not sure if anyone else is having this problem but nothing can be updated through the UI anymore. if i try to scan for new systems it just hangs and launchbox needs to be forced closed. I can only change things by editing the BLSetup.xml directly. not sure if its the newest launchbox or something else. can anyone else confirm on the newest version of LB if theirs bezellauncher still works correctly? thanks

I'm not able to reproduce it hanging on Refresh All. If you zip up and attach your Logs folder (\LaunchBox\Plugins\BezelLauncher\Logs\) I'll see if I can find anything in there where the issue is occurring.

One "fix" could/would/should be... with LB closed, delete (or rename) BLSetup.xml then start LaunchBox and go to Tools - BezelLauncher Setup.

March 2

Glad to hear it worked!

21 minutes ago, stonev said:

could you have a checkbox option to close the additional app after the game stops running?

Yes.

25 minutes ago, stonev said:

Would that be something relatively easy for devs to implement?

"Relatively" is relative. "Easy" is in the eye of the beholder. That said, the process seemingly is actually pretty straight forward. But it comes down to a cost/time benefit.

39 minutes ago, stonev said:

Are there complexities in that process I’m not considering?

The process to "close the Additional App" (that I can think of) actually "kills" the app. So, it's not very graceful. But it most cases it won't 'hurt' anything. Like killing an AHK script or DemulShooter. (See caveats below)

43 minutes ago, stonev said:

Would it even be worth it?

That's a loaded question. For "you"? Yes, of course. For the developers to implement it? Right now, today, this minute? A resounding No.

1) You have the tools available to do what you want. Simple version: the script I just gave you. Less "simple": [You] taking a few extra steps and create an Additional App to close (kill?) the app After Game Exits.

2) Goes back to the time/cost benefit. The 'immediate' benefit is negated by item 1).

However, to submit a Feature Request is free for everyone. Submit it. Share it. Enough people upvote it, the one-in-charge of time/cost management will happily tell their developer/programmer (who may mutter "they have the tools to deal with this already") to implement it. And wha la.

Request option "B":

Another [unavailable] feature option would be to have Running Scripts for games that don't use an emulator. In the games Emulation section, if the Use an Emulator box is un-checked, have a field for Running Scripts (similar to what's in Emulators, and how they function).

Caveats to auto closing after game exits:

The caveat to either of these is games that are ran via a launcher. Notably TP and Steam (maybe the other storefronts too?). The 'launcher' launches the actual game then closes itself. You told LB how to start the game, and that's what LB monitors for "game exiting". So with launchers, the "game" essentially starts and exits right away [as LB sees it].

Making this nearly all for naught.

1 hour ago, stonev said:

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts

Use the tools already available because they're there, they do work and they're "relatively easy to implement".

March 1

3 hours ago, stonev said:

The only problem is that when I exit the game, the AHK script (and the re-mapping) persists. I'd simply like for the script to exit when I exit the game.

This assumes the games exe file is "OR2006C2C.EXE" (adjust accordingly). If it's being ran through Steam or TP, that's a completely different story.

Process,Wait,OR2006C2C.EXE 
WinWaitClose,ahk_exe OR2006C2C.EXE
ExitApp

1::Enter ; Start button
5::Escape ; Coin button

Wait for the games exe process to be running
Now wait for the games exe process to close/exit
- While waiting:
  - Hotkeys "1" and "5" will be active
  - Actually, they'll be active as-soon-as the script is running.
    - So don't get jumpy pressing the "5" key.
Exit/close the script when the games exe process is no longer running

March 1

2 hours ago, 51mm5 said:

When I try editing it, it doesn't give me any other options

Click the red X next to LaunchBox DB ID
For the Title, type in "resident evil 4 remake"
It will show "Resident Evil 4 (Deluxe Edition)"
- select it
Go to the Alternate Names section
Select "Resident Evil 4: Remake"
Click "Set Selected Name as Title"
Click OK to save and close

February 28

26 minutes ago, dragon57 said:

Yes, two different sites.

Clicking on any missing image always gives me an error. After multiple refreshes and if a graphic shows, you can click on it to expand it like expected. Just for completeness, I have tried on multiple browsers/browser restarts and multiple machines and all give me the same observations.

Can you share a link (or 2 or 3) to a game(s) on the Games Database that you're seeing this happen? This way the developers can try to reproduce it and possibly find a fix.

February 28

10 minutes ago, dragon57 said:

More info: If I keep refreshing pages with missing graphics, eventually the items show up. This generally refers to something on the server side of things.

To clarify, you're talking about 2 different sites. Correct?

The LaunchBox Forums (where we're at now)
- Users' icons (avatars). Which seem to be showing for you now.
- I know on some older posts, inserted images can sometimes appear blank.
  - Clicking the "image" will open the actual image in another tab/window
The LaunchBox Games Database ("the database/DB")
- https://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/

February 27

LaunchBox does not have any available command-line parameters when starting it.

But you should be able to deduce the parameters needed to launch a game by combining

the full emulators application path
the command-line parameters (if any)
- or overrides under Associated Platforms
the full path to the ROM file (depending on checkboxes checked in the emulator settings)

February 27

1 hour ago, Fursphere said:

When you re-import MAME to update it - do the hidden games get un-hidden?

It shouldn't import games already existing. Though I'm not sure if it overwrites the existing games or skips matches. I assume the latter.

One sure way of finding out. Turn on the Backups feature. Exit LB (to ensure a backup is created). Start LB and re-import your new ROM set. If it screws things up, restore your backup and go to Plan B.

1 hour ago, Fursphere said:

MAME is just stubborn due to the way its updated monthly.

? Just because it updates doesn't mean you have to. My method is to keep my ROM set up to date then read whatsnew.txt to see if there actually are any "new" games. Then add the 0 to 5 new games. But also, my "curated" set in LB points to my full set folder. So any ROMs that get updated are a non-issue (as the game's ROM file [Launching section] points to the same filename).

February 26

Don't recall what the startup time for my cab with its antique i5 is, but about 19 seconds seems right.

Here's an article about Troubleshooting LaunchBox & Big Box Performance that may (or may not) help give some insight.

February 26

46 minutes ago, lightfox said:

I AM morbidly curious!

Me too. Here's what I found in that section:

<configuration name="Keyboard layout" tag="kbd:LAYOUT" mask="24">
   <confsetting name="QWERTY/,УЕИШЩ" value="0"/>
   <confsetting name="QWERTY/ЯВЕРТЪ" value="24"/>
   <confsetting name="QWERTY/ЙЦУКЕН" value="8" default="yes"/>
   <confsetting name="Test?" value="16"/>
</configuration>

February 26

34 minutes ago, lightfox said:

The root cause? Well..I'm also playing japanese language video games. For that to work, I have set up my PC a certain way that LaunchBox didn't like.

My ignorant American mind would have never guessed that. Thanks for being "curios" and looking into it further AND most of all, figuring it out! (I'll add this to my notes)

February 26

Welp, I'm at a loss.

Tried it here (LB 13.26) with MAME 0.285 and 0.286 with no error.

Your MAME is from MAMEDev? (Or LB installed it for you. Same thing.) vs. something like MAMEUI or HBMAME

Reinstall MAME? Try the importer again.

File a bug report: (the top of the page) click Help & Support and select Report A Bug.

If you're still morbidly curious... Run the importer, get the error, open the file in \LaunchBox\Metadata\Temp\ that's approx. 305MB (it won't be an xml file) using NP++, look again for the line number. Though this won't help with the issue at hand. But may show 'a something'.

February 26

1 hour ago, lightfox said:

I guess that we want to consider that line 1 = line number of of the <mame> tag, I have to subtract 163 lines, not add them?

Well, no. Because 1 is to 164, as 4292731 is to 4,292,895.

Either way we go, nothing came to light. It's also possible that LB stripped some of the unused elements before parsing it, Thus changing the line numbers even further.

Did you try rerunning the Import Wizard?

February 25

40 minutes ago, lightfox said:

When I go to line 4292731, I see this, which doesn't seem invalid to me:

The error message looks like an xml parsing error. Since list the listxml result starts with a DOCTYPE declaration, go down from the line it says errored about 163 more lines. (to approx. line 4,292,894) "163" being about the length (# of lines) of the declaration.

Also, you're probably looking for <machine name=. I suspect LaunchBox parses the xml into a Model which has the elements saved as capitalized words. (like shown in the error, Name)

Or, retry the MAME Arcade Import Wizard again. It's possible when LaunchBox ran its own -listxml, something got malformed.

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