Fry

Any plug-ins installed in your Launchbox\Plugins folder? Also you might look into your windows event viewer and see if you can find any clues.

Also are any plug-ins or custom themes in use? They can always cause problems

Big Box Voice Search View File BigBoxVoiceSearch BigBoxVoiceSearch is a plug-in for BigBox that enables searching for games using your voice and a microphone via microsoft's speech recognition. To make use of this plug-in, the plug-in components must be installed to the LaunchBox plugins folder and a few lines of XAML code must be added to the themes where you wish to use it. Demo Installation 1. Download the latest version of BigBoxVoiceSearch.zip from the LaunchBox forums or from this github repositories Releases 2. Extract BigBoxVoiceSearch.zip to a folder. Inside the BigBoxVoiceSearch folder is a folder called LaunchBox. Inside the LaunchBox folder is a folder called Plugins. Copy the plugins folder 3. Go to your LaunchBox installation folder and paste the copied folder 4. To verify the installation - confirm the following files exist in your LaunchBox\Plugins folder - BigBoxVoiceSearch.dll - System.Speech.dll 5. You can delete the downloaded zip file and extracted folder once the files have been copied into your LaunchBox plugins folder Adding the voice search element to a theme In order to use the voice recognition function, a few lines of XAML must be added to the views of the themes that you would like to use this with. Since it's easy to make simple mistakes while tinkering with XAML, it's strongly recommended to make a copy of whatever theme you plan to use this with and make your changes to a copy of the theme so that you can revert to the original theme if mistakes are made. Inside your copied theme there is a views folder. Inside the views folder are xaml files that correspond to the views that you use in BigBox. Select the view(s) for which you wish to include voice searching functionality and edit them in a text editor like notepad or visual studio. XMLNS Each view starts with a UserControl element. The user control element will include several lines that start with xmlns. Add the following line to the user control element along with the other xmlns lines. xmlns:BigBoxVoiceSearch="clr-namespace:BigBoxVoiceSearch.View;assembly=BigBoxVoiceSearch" Examples of adding the voice search user control to a theme Once the above XMLNS line has been added to a views user control element, you can add the BigBoxVoiceSearch:MainWindowView anywhere inside the theme that you would like it to appear. There are a few properties that you can set on the voice search control to specify how it should behave. First, here are some examples of how it would look to add the voice search control inside a theme: <!-- Trigger voice recognition with page up, the control is always displayed --> <BigBoxVoiceSearch:MainWindowView ActivationMode="PageUp" ShowInitializing="true" ShowInitializingFailed="true" ShowInactive="true" ShowActive="true" ShowRecognizing="true"/> <!-- Trigger voice recognition with page down, the control is only displayed while recognizing --> <BigBoxVoiceSearch:MainWindowView ActivationMode="PageDown" ShowInitializing="false" ShowInitializingFailed="false" ShowInactive="false" ShowActive="false" ShowRecognizing="true"/> <!-- Activate the user control with Up - you will need to press enter to trigger the voice search, the control is always displayed --> <BigBoxVoiceSearch:MainWindowView ActivationMode="Up" ShowInitializing="true" ShowInitializingFailed="true" ShowInactive="true" ShowActive="true" ShowRecognizing="true"/> <!-- Trigger voice recognition with page up, the control is always displayed, override default images with theme specific images --> <BigBoxVoiceSearch:MainWindowView ActivationMode="PageUp" ShowInitializing="true" InitializingImagePath="Plugins\BigBoxVoiceSearch\Media\MySpecialTheme\Initializing.png" ShowInitializingFailed="true" InitializingFailedImagePath="Plugins\BigBoxVoiceSearch\Media\MySpecialTheme\InitializingFailed.png" ShowInactive="true" InactiveImagePath="Plugins\BigBoxVoiceSearch\Media\MySpecialTheme\Inactive.png" ShowRecognizing="true" RecognizingImagePath="Plugins\BigBoxVoiceSearch\Media\MySpecialTheme\Recognizing.png"/> ActivationMode By specifying the ActivationMode property on the voice search user control, you can control how the voice search control is activated and how the voice search is triggered with the following options: Off The plug-in is effectively disabled No button will activate the user control or trigger speech recognition Up The up button will activate the user control The down button will deactivate the user control Once activated, press enter to start speech recognition Down The down button will activate the user control The up button will deactivate the user control Once activated, press enter to start speech recognition Left The left button will activate the user control The right button will deactivate the user control Once activated, press enter to start speech recognition Right The right button will activate the user control The left button will deactivate the user control Once activated, press enter to start speech recognition PageUp The page up button will trigger voice recognition immediately You do not need to press enter after pressing Page Up You do not need to press any button to deactivate the user control PageDown The page down button will trigger voice recognition immediately You do not need to press enter after pressing Page Down You do not need to press any button to deactivate the user control VisibilityMode The VisibilityMode property from previous versions has been replaced with individual boolean properties ShowInitializing, ShowInitializingFailed, ShowInactive, ShowActive, and ShowRecognizing. ShowInitializing The ShowInitializing property accepts the values "true" or "false" to indicate whether the user control should be displayed while initializing. When the view is loaded, there is an intialization period where the titles in the launchbox game library are parsed to create the speech recognition grammar. Setting this property to true can give a visual indication that the speech recognition functionality is not yet ready to use. This property defaults to false if not specified on the UserControl. ShowInitializingFailed The ShowInitializingFailed property accepts the values "true" or "false" to indicate whether the user control should be displayed if initialization fails. Failures could occur while the user control is initializing if there is no default audio device for the speech recognition engine to use. Setting this property to true can give the indication that speech recognition was not setup successfully and is therefore disabled. If errors are encountered, check the log.txt file in the LaunchBox\Plugins\BigBoxVoiceSearch folder for any error details. This property defaults to false if not specified on the UserControl. ShowInactive The ShowInactive property accepts the values "true" or "false" to indicate whether the user control should be displayed while it is inactive. The user control will be inactive after initialization completes successfully. Setting this property to true can give the indication that speech recognition is setup and available to use. The property defaults to false if not specified on the UserControl. ShowActive The ShowActive property accepts the values "true" or "false" to indicate whether the user control should be displayed while it is active. The user control is put in an active state when you press Up, Down, Left, or Right and the ActivationMode property is set to Up, Down, Left, or Right. Setting this property to true can give the indication that the speech recognition user control is active and will perform a search of enter is pressed. The property defaults to false if not specified on the UserControl. ShowRecognizing The ShowRecognizing property accepts the values "true" or "false" to indicates whether the usr control should be displayed while recognizing speech. The user control recognizes speech when you press Page Up or Page Down and the ActivationMode is set to PageUp or PageDown or when you press Enter while the speech recognition user control is active (if ActivationMode set to Up, Down, Left, or Right). The property defaults to false if not specified on the UserControl. Default image paths If no custom image paths are specified on the user control, the plugin will look for images with the following path to display in various states: | State | Default image path | |--------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------| | Initializing | ..\LaunchBox\Plugins\BigBoxVoiceSearch\Media\Default\Initializing.png | | InitializingFailed | ..\LaunchBox\Plugins\BigBoxVoiceSearch\Media\Default\InitializingFailed.png | | Inactive | ..\LaunchBox\Plugins\BigBoxVoiceSearch\Media\Default\Inactive.png | | Active | ..\LaunchBox\Plugins\BigBoxVoiceSearch\Media\Default\Active.png | | Recognizing | ..\LaunchBox\Plugins\BigBoxVoiceSearch\Media\Default\Recognizing.png | Custom image paths Images displayed by the user control can be overridden or customized by specifying a relative path to the image file on the user control with the following properties: - InitializingImagePath - InitializingFailedImagePath - InactiveImagePath - ActiveImagePath - RecognizingImagePath Settings When BigBox loads for the first time, a settings file will be created that will allow you specify how the plugin should behave. Currently there is only one setting to configure { "VoiceSearchTimeoutInSeconds": 5 } VoiceSearchTimeoutInSeconds Specify the number of seconds that the voice search should stay open before it stops listening Link to GitHub repo https://github.com/AtomFry/BigBoxVoiceSearch Submitter Fry Submitted 12/29/2021 Category Third-party Apps and Plugins  

One way to do it is to bulk edit the games in the platform and mark them all as Hidden. For example, if I wanted to hide Sega CD, go Sega CD, CTRL+A to select all, CTRL+E to bulk edit. Select the Hide field and tick the check box: Then in BigBox under Options > General there is a setting for "show hidden games" Once you're done setting up your platform and ready to release it into BigBox, you can bulk edit the games in the platform again and mark them all as not hidden.

LaunchBox ROM Patch Manager View File LaunchBox ROM Patch Manager LaunchBox ROM Patch Manager is a plug-in for LaunchBox that intends to streamline the process of applying a patch to a ROM file and importing the patched ROM into your LaunchBox library Demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFBjIEwC-v4 Installation Download LaunchBoxRomPatchManager.zip Extract LaunchBoxRomPatchManager.zip to a folder. Inside the LaunchBoxRomPatchManager folder is a folder called LaunchBox. Inside the LaunchBox folder will be two folders: LaunchBoxRomPatchManager and Plugins. Copy these two folders. Go to your LaunchBox installation folder and paste the copied folders Included Patchers - Floating IPS The plug-in includes Floating IPS by Alcaro to be used as IPS patcher. This patcher should be automatically included when following the installation instructions and can be found in your LaunchBox folder under LaunchBoxRomPatchManager\Patchers. By default, the plugin will be configured to use Floating IPS to patch games for the following platforms: Nintendo Entertainment System Nintendo Game Boy Advance Nintendo Game Boy Color Nintendo 64 Super Nintendo Entertainment System Sega Genesis Sega 32X NEC TurboGrafx-16 Included Patchers - Paradox PPF The plug-in includes Paradox PPF 3 by Icarus of Paradox to be used as a PPF patcher. This patcher should be automatically included when following the installation instructions and can be found in your LaunchBox folder under LaunchBoxRomPatchManager\Patchers. By default, the plugin will be configured to use Paradox PPF to patch games for the following platforms: Sony Playstation Sony PSP Managing ROM Patchers The plug-in includes a menu item called "Manage ROM Patchers" under the LaunchBox Tools menu. The plug-in uses these configurations when applying a patch to a game. Name - Specify a name for the patcher File path - Specify the path to the patcher Command line - Specify the format of the command line that should be used when applying a patch to a game file. There are two special values that need to be included in the command line field for the plug-in to know how to apply a patch to a game file. {patch} indicates the patch file and {rom} indicates the game's rom file. Platforms - Select the platforms that the patcher can be used with Importing a ROM Hack The plug-in includes a menu item called "Import ROM Hack" when you right click on a game. To import a rom hack, right click on a game and select "Import ROM Hack". A file dialog will open prompting to select a patch file. Select the file that contains the patch file. The "Import rom hack" screen will be displayed with information about the selected game and selected patch file. Enter values for the imported ROM hack as desired and click OK. The plug-in will make a copy of the source game, extract files as needed, apply the selected patch file to the source ROM file, and import the game into your LaunchBox library. Source code https://github.com/AtomFry/LaunchBoxRomPatchManager Submitter Fry Submitted 12/28/2021 Category Third-party Apps and Plugins  

For key mapping, I like xpadder. For bezels, you might take a look at the ReShade manager plugin that nohero and I built. It will let you add bezels to Dolphin and a few other emulators/applications. It’s still a bit rudimentary, I want to go back and take a 2nd pass at it to improve the user experience but it gets the job done.

Big Box Auto Play View File https://bigboxautoplay.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html BigBoxAutoPlay BigBoxAutoPlay is a plug-in for BigBox that can automatically launch into a game when BigBox starts up Installation Download the latest version of the plugin Copy BigBoxAutoPlay.dll and Prism.dll into the LaunchBox\Plugins folder Settings A new menu item is added to LaunchBox under Tools > Configure BigBox AutoPlay. Enable Check the box to automatically play a game when BigBox starts. Uncheck the box to disable the auto-play plugin. Select game Check the box to have launch box select the game in the UI before launching it. This should allow the marquee to display properly for the selected game. Only favorites Check the box to filter the randomly selected game to only include favorites Hidden games Check the box to include hidden games Broken games Check the box to include broken games Platform Optional. To filter the randomly selected game to only games in the selected platform. Playlist Optional. To filter the randomly selected game to only games in the selected playlist. Game Optional. To specify a specific game to auto-play. This list is filtered based on the selected platform and/or playlist. Delay Specify the number of seconds to delay before launching the game. When a startup video is used with BigBox, this delay can help the auto played game from launching behind BigBox by giving BigBox a chance to fully initialize before launching the game. Link to GitHub repo https://github.com/AtomFry/BigBoxAutoPlay Submitter Fry Submitted 12/23/2021 Category Third-party Apps and Plugins  

I think I need to build my own PDF viewer. I wouldn’t be able to use the game manual viewer as is because it’s implemented as a big box game details menu item and my plugin builds its own game details menu and doesn’t show the standard one.

@eatkinola Is the source code for AoBigbox.Customs available?

Any additional apps on your game? If so, I’d try disabling those. Any startup theme setup? If so, I’d try disabling it. Any autohotkey on your emulator? If so, I’d try getting rid of that.

Somehow it's looking for a file in D:\LaunchBox NoIntro\LaunchBox\Core\Themes\Unified\Styles\ListBoxItemStyle.xaml. It's strange that it's looking for theme data in the core folder. You can try deleting the unified theme folder at ..\LaunchBox\Themes\Unified and redownload the unified theme.

Makes sense. My playlist names are unique and match the unique names: I've also tried with "Include this Playlist with Platforms" checked and also unchecked.

@C-Beats I'm still seeing a (slightly different) issue when trying to show playlists using IBigBoxMainViewModel.ShowGames. I'm not sure if there's something on my end that's going wrong when trying to show a playlist? I've updated to latest beta 12.2-beta-6. When I supply a filter value of a playlist name, previously the screen was going black and BigBox seemed to hang. That's not happening now with the latest beta. But I'm getting an empty list now with "no games were found". I tried with all of my playlist names. Maybe I need to give a playlist guid or something? My playlists that I'm testing with: Sample code - I put in a little hacky cycle so I can test each of my playlist names: Result: Anything I may be missing or screwing up on my end? Thanks again for your attention on this and all your hard work! Really appreciated! FYI - The related issue that I reported with ShowGames where I provide a platform name and it shows all games regardless of platform is resolved. If I supply the filter value of "Sega Genesis", that's working great now.

Is Launchbox installed on G or on H? The import ROMS wizard prompt in your original post is asking if you want LaunchBox to copy your ROM file to the ..\LaunchBox\Games folder. So if LB is on H then it’s going to ask if you want to move it to H. when you say you’d like to make your LaunchBox installation portable but you have the files spread across two drives, what do you mean exactly by portable?

I’m on it. Super busy the next few days but I should be able to make some time by the end of the weekend at latest. Thank you for looking into this!