Fry

Uploading a new version (v.015) with a small new feature to choose whether games repeat to fill the screen or not. So for example if you have a list with just one or two games, should the list just end and leave black space or should they repeat endlessly to fill the screen? You can specify your preference in LaunchBox > Tools > Manage eclipse > Lists (tab) > Repeat games to fill screen. Repeat games to fill screen checked: My Atari Jaguar platform only has two games and they repeat endlessly to fill the screen: Repeat games to fill screen: Unchecked My Atari Jaguar platform only has two games and they don't repeat any more: I'm not sure why I prefer the first option with the games repeating but I think I'm the only one. Most people think that looks weird and they're probably right. So I decided to add this little setting so you can choose how the theme behaves.

Yeah something we found is that there was a bug prior to the latest version (.014) where if you have multiple playlists with non-unique sort titles it would error when building the game lists. I’ve put in a temporary fix that just combines all playlists with identical names into a single list. I’ll be looking into an ability to support multiple playlists with the same sort title as their own distinct list.

Hi there, I’m glad you’re enjoying the theme so far. So you would prefer the lists to not replicate items to fill the screen and instead just end with however many items are in the list. You mentioned some changes in previous versions of LaunchBox and that this is an issue in other themes as well. So I’ll point out a few things about this theme. It is not built using the native LaunchBox theme engine like pretty much any other theme. This theme functions pretty differently than others because the functionality is built completely in C# using the plugin API. So if you take a look at the theme itself, you’ll find there is just one view and that view just references the plugin user control that I built to operate this theme and there are no other elements on there. You can take a look at the code for the theme in the repo here: https://github.com/AtomFry/Eclipse/blob/master/Eclipse/Eclipse/LaunchBox/Themes/Eclipse/Views/PlatformWheel1FiltersView.xaml I wanted to point that out since you mentioned you are new to LaunchBox and mentioned possibly editing theme files to affect this change on this and on other themes. So for other themes I’m not too sure how you’d go about making this change. If it is possible then in the view XAML, you would need to modify some properties on the wheel to specify not to repeat items but I have bo idea if such a property exists. For this theme, since the functionality is defined in a plugin, we need to change some C# code that describes the behavior of the eclipse game lists to affect this change and recompile the plugin and update the plugin in the LaunchBox\Plugins folder. Of course you are more than welcome to pull down the project and make any code changes. But you mentioned you may be a little limited on coding knowledge. If you are interested and want to get into it, I found LaunchBox plugin development to be a pretty fun hobby! Anyways, because of my terrible implementation of game lists in this theme (I was very new to WPF at the time) the change you’re asking for is not that straightforward. It’s definitely possible but my design has made this more difficult on us than it needs to be. It may take some time since I am busy with some stuff at the moment but it’s possible I can add a toggle to the settings that lets you choose if the lists repeat endlessly or not. ok so your second question, I’m a little confused about. Just to clarify, when using this theme you probably want the standard attract mode to be turned off. In BigBox, You can go into options - options - attract mode - and switch off enable attract mode. And then if you go out of big box and into Launch Box and select tools - manage eclipse - other (tab) - there is a check box to toggle the screen saver on or off. Also on the inputs tab there is a setting that lets you bypass game details. I wasn’t clear from your description of a play button being there in screen saver mode and games automatically starting what was going on. Those aren’t really features in this theme. It made me wonder if you have any other plugins installed? So the way the screen saver in this theme should operate is after the screensaver delay elapsed and there has been no user input then background images are randomly selected to fade in and slowly slide across the screen. Are you asking for an attract mode option that plays game preview videos instead? Or maybe you were looking for a different functionality and I didn’t quite understand.

FYI - I've uploaded version 13 with a fix for the background videos playing while you start up a game. I've done a lot of testing today and haven't had that issue occur since so I think it's solved. Please let me know if anyone updates to version 13 and still runs into that problem! Also FYI - I'm working on a few other minor features since time has been short before I dig into a bigger feature of a metadata search that lets you do an on screen keyboard search that presents matching metadata options that should help you to quickly filter your game collection. Not sure how long that one will take me.

Awesome, thanks for sharing your great work!

These are great, do you mind if I include them with my theme/plugin?

Thank you so much for your hard work! These are great!

Awesome! Glad you got it working. That’s weird though, I didn’t think this theme was available to install from the manage themes menu. I have not submitted it for review/approval for the official themes because of the nature of this theme being 99% based on a plugin I don’t think it could pass the approval process for an official theme. I wonder if you had installed it manually and then enabled it through the theme manager? Anything installed will be visible there to be enabled so that could be it. Anyways, glad you got it working now.

You can see if the video delay setting gets you what you are going for? In LaunchBox go to tools > manage eclipse > other and use the video delay slider to decrease the time that the theme stays on the fan art background image before it fades into the preview video. I’m not sure if this is exactly what you are looking for or are you looking for something else?

Uploaded Eclipse v0.0.012 Added setting that lets you bypass the game details screen Added page up and page down options that let you play a game, bypassing the game details screen Added page up and page down options that let you view game details So if you want to mostly bypass the game details you can toggle the bypass details settings on and pressing enter on a game will launch the game instead of opening the game details. If you want to mostly see the game details before launching a game then you can toggle the bypass details settings off and pressing enter on a game will open the game details like normal. Then if you want, you can use the DisplayDetails or PlayGame option on page up and page down to kind of override the behavior.

Hot keys aren’t so easy. I haven’t figured out how to bind to more inputs. The plugin API only tells me if up, down, left, right, page up, page down, enter, or esc are pressed. So a few things I can think of would be easily doable, to add a global option to the settings which lets you choose whether you always or never want to view game details. Another option could be to add an additional behavior selection on page up and/or page down so you can launch a game directly with one input and open the details with the other. Been super busy and haven’t touched the code base in some time but I don’t think these settings would be difficult to add.

@ARandomMastodon I think it'll work fine out of the box. To use xdelta, you can download it and place it in the LaunchBox\LaunchBoxRomPatchManager\Patchers folder like this: Then you need to add the patcher in LaunchBox under Tools > Manage ROM patchers with the command line -f -q -d -s {rom} {patch} like this: I associated it with Nintendo DS to test the ROM hacks you mentioned. Then you can import the rom hack by right clicking a game and Import ROM Hack. It doesn't default the patch (I could add a small code change to have it look for xdelta files) but you can manually pick the xdelta file like shown here: It was able to successfully patch the game and add the hack.

Could you point me to an xdelta patch or two that I can use to test with? It is possible we can get it to work without any code change by adding the xdelta patcher to the patchers list with the right command line arguments. It is also possible a code change would be needed to support the xdelta command line arguments. I’d like to test but all the rom hacks I ever tried use ips, bps, or PPF format. If you can link me some xdelta examples, I’ll test it out and report back.

Thanks for the heads up. I have not been able to reproduce this in my development machine, but I am getting it a lot on my arcade cabinet where this is running. I'll try to get it fixed asap.

I’ve also noticed a bug lately where occasionally, preview videos seem to keep playing when I start a game and when I exit the game the system has gone into the screen saver. It’s supposed to stop preview videos and the screensaver timer while in game so that’s a pretty big issue for me that I’ll make my main focus as soon as I can get back into working on this. I’m curious if other people have experienced that problem.

I like it. Search functionality is on my list. I'll see when I can get it added. https://trello.com/c/8wwyiifk/43-keyboard-search

Another beautifully crafted theme. You did a wonderful job with this, I love the look and feel. The progress bars are really cool. Well done!

A plug-in could be created that would trigger the voice search from a system menu item. There's currently no way to bind a hotkey to a plug-in system menu item so it would have to be manually selected from the tools menu. Clicking the menu item could trigger a voice search but there's no plug-in API available to search or filter LaunchBox. A change would be needed to ILaunchBoxMainViewModel. So I could either create a custom UI to display the matching games and let you launch them from there or just straight away launch the highest confidence match returned. It would be doable but not really the best user experience. The code for the big box voice search is out there and could be adapted as described above but I don't have a ton of interest in that because I mostly just use LaunchBox to manage my games to support my arcade cabinet so I mostly just use BigBox when I'm playing games.