Fry

No offense taken here, friend. I saw your message on my phone and I read and responded too quickly. I misunderstood what you were asking and thought you were asking how to turn the plug-in off and change to another theme because this one loads too slow for you. Code changes are needed to optimize the loading. I'm super swamped with family and work and as this is a hobby project of mine, changes to it will come slow. I do agree there is a ton of room for improvement on the loading but it will be some time before I can tackle those. All this being said, I want to clarify what is going on when it loads up. There are two main things that are happening: First - Images are scaled and cached to match your resolution This process looks for any images in the LaunchBox images folder and creates a scaled copy of the image in the plug-in folder to help with performance while running the plug-in. On subsequent runs of BigBox, unless new games or images have been added, there should be no building of the image cache. If you add a handful of games, you may see a few seconds of loading to scale and cache any images that exist in the LaunchBox images folder that do not exist in the plug-in media folder. When this is happening you should see the progress bar message, "updating image cache". The image cache for the plugin is saved in a folder at this location: LaunchBox\Plugins\Eclipse\Media\(1920x1080)\Images. If you are seeing a long window for "updating image cache" every time you load the theme then something is going wrong where the files are not saving here or they are being removed or something. My guess is that the delay you're seeing is actually on the next step where the game lists are created. Second - Game lists are created This process occurs each time BigBox loads. This process goes through each game, creating sets of games like games by platform, games by genre, games by release year, etc. For each game it also loads the box art, logo, and background images into memory. When this is happening you should see the progress bar message, "Creating game lists". This has to be done each time BigBox loads. I agree there's not only room for optimization here but I can also make some changes so that this process doesn't have to reoccur every time you go out into the BigBox settings menu and come back into the theme. When you go into the BigBox settings menu and then come back into the theme, BigBox reloads the plug-in and this process is reoccurring. Some code changes here can probably be made to avoid this. Both of these processes need a big time overhaul to work asynchronously and load as you go. This is going to be a big undertaking for me so I wouldn't expect it super soon. I may be able to get a couple of small tweaks out relatively quickly that help to stop the reloading from occurring when you come back out of the BigBox settings. I'm also looking into reworking the way the game list sets are built to make them configurable. That has the potential to reduce some of the loading that's being done by specifying that you only want games by platform for instance and you don't care about loading up the games by genre, playlist, developer, publisher, etc... I'm glad you're enjoying the theme and sorry to hear about your experience with the performance. I will post updates as time permits, maybe get something out this week that can at least keep it from reloading the game lists when you come out of the big box settings screen.

I see. Bps files should be fine with floating IPS patcher and sega master system roms shouldn’t be a problem to patch either. I am curious why your log file seems to have an entry in it but no log message. Normally if there is a log entry, there would be something written in there. Would you be able to share your data file? I’d like to confirm the data you have for golden axe in sms and try to reproduce the issue.

There should be a LaunchBoxRomPatchManager folder in your LaunchBox folder and in there any errors would be logged to the log.txt file. Could you check if there is anything in there and if so send it to me? Also do you by chance have the bad data file where your platforms got messed up? If so I would love to take a look at that. And if possible could you send me your good data file so I can see how you have stuff setup, if anything sticks out to me? lastly, when you say you went out of specs, what do you mean by that exactly? I wasn’t clear on what you did there.

Yeah man until I can optimize it, I probably wouldn’t recommend this theme for a setup with 10k games. To turn off, select another theme. You can delete the plugin files if you want to completely clear it from your system.

Oh god that’s horrible. Did you see any error in the log? Really sorry to hear about that. I would like to try to reproduce this issue and figure out what happened. I don’t play master system so I’ll need to set that up. I’m glad you were able to use a backup of your data file to resolve this

That’s interesting, I have not experienced that yet. I have let it idle for a few days and haven’t had any locking up yet. Can you describe the hard lock? Are you leaving it on for long duration? Are you playing and it locks up or just idles? Is windows totally locked up and you have to do a hard shutdown?

Good suggestions @launchbox_saropa. They all look pretty doable. I will look into them. - the startup behavior is intentional. It picks a random game from your favorites. I think we should add a setting that lets you specify what list you’d like to start in and whether you would like the first game, a specific game, or a random game from that list - for the settings pane, I think a simple change can be made so that it won’t open when held. I will think about a configuration for this behavior - for the additional categories, I think highest rated, most played, never played, recent editions are good ideas. For single player that would be a play mode so you should be able to see that from play mode. What might be nice here is to give a configuration screen that lets you pick and combine lists from different categories. I need to think a bit more on this. - disable voice search (while it hurts me to hear such a thing), I should look into ways to make sure it doesn’t cause any problems if you don’t have a mic

I investigated this and found that I've mistakenly delivered this funky "FilterView" with the Eclipse theme along with several other views when really all I should be delivering is Platform Wheel 1. I need to delete all the other views from the theme so that they properly fall back to the default when Eclipse is not in use. What happened is since the plug-in files weren't there, the theme blew up (probably showed an ugly error message) and then switched to the platform 1 wheel view from the default theme. When you switched to "show genres" it was still on "eclipse" and loaded up my funky FilterView which had nothing but that hard coded string in there (not sure how it got in there like that). I'm going to remove all the other views from Eclipse except for the PlatformWheel1FiltersView which is the only view that is used by the theme to avoid this in the future.

You've done an outstanding job with this theme. Thank you for sharing it!

I haven’t really considered Alexa, I’m just using Microsoft’s .NET speech recognition library for this. I did think about adding more features like having it always listening so you could say something like “hey big box, play Zelda” or something. I’m mostly interested in search to quickly find games. The voice search is pretty accurate but for me it isn’t accurate enough to launch directly into a game from a search. I like to have the search results as a nice intermediate step to make sure it found the right game. My next iteration on this project will be to improve the themability so that it can integrate seamlessly with any theme and look like it belongs there but I got a bit busy with work and family needs so it may be some time before I’m able to release any updates. The source is published on my GitHub if anyone wants to take a stab at modifying it.

Yes I mostly download patches from romhacking.net. You could also get them from other places like smwcentral or anywhere that you can find IPS or PPF patches.

Thanks @Retro_Rage @Wally Please let me know if you run into any problems or have ideas for new features. A few enhancements I’m thinking about for this plugin: Option to patch an additional app Patches often need to be applied to a specific version of a game. LaunchBox can combine different revisions of games into one game where the game points to the default revision and additional revisions of the same game are added to the game as additional apps. It would be nice to be able to select from the additional apps if you need to patch one of the revisions instead of the default rom. Option to add patched the game as an additional app An option on the import rom hack screen that would allow you to specify if the new patched game should be added as a new game (current behavior) or if the game should be added as an additional app to the source game. Search/Download This one, I’m not sure if/when it will ever happen but long term hope is to provide the ability to search and download rom hacks directly from the plugin.