Fry

In cases like this, you may want to Check the Windows event viewer for any weird errors. Sometimes that can give you a clue about what is going wrong.

Not to send you down a rabbit hole because I’m not sure but Sometimes a virus scanner will quarantine files and break things. Do you have any antivirus that may have run? If so do you have a log of what it might have picked up?

Thanks @C-Beats!

xdmanalo, Some basic troubleshooting that might help you identify what's going on is to look at your LaunchBox configuration around the games that are not working properly. In LaunchBox, select the game that's giving you trouble and press CTRL+E to open up the options. Things to look for: Click on the Launching tab and check if there's anything there other than the ROM file. Are there any command line parameters or configuration paths specified? Click on the Additional Apps tab. Are there any additional applications on this game? Low chance that this is the problem but I've seen cases where an additional app or AHK script was not configured properly and messed things up. Click on the Emulation tab. Are there any custom command line parameters? Click the edit button on the emulator. Is the application path pointing to the same location and application you're running when you run it outside of LaunchBox and it's working fine? I feel like this is the most common mistake I see when people say it's working fine outside but when I run via LaunchBox something's messed up. 99% of the time they forgot they had a 2nd copy of the emulator and they were using a different one. Any command line parameters specified on the emulator? This could be overriding your config that you were getting from standalone Retroarch. Check associated platforms and make 100% you're using the same core Check the Running Script and Exit script to make sure nothing in there could possibly interfere - low chance on this but I've seen cases where additional apps or AHK scripts mess things up I agree with Neil that this is generally a Retroarch issue and LaunchBox doesn't have anything to do with how the bezels are shown in Retroarch but some of the configuration values that are setup in LaunchBox could cause this.

The latest release mentioned an improvement added a random game property bind for theme development. Is there any documentation or detail on what this is or how this works?

What problem are you having with the plugin documentation? You edit any view that you want to use the plugin on. Add the xmlns line toward the top and add the other chunk at the end just inside the canvas on any view. which theme are you trying to add the plugin to? I can try it and show you the specifics of the theme code change.

I've released an update to the plug-in that is now supported on the latest version of launchbox. This update has several bug fixes but is otherwise pretty much the same as the 0.0.1 release that I put out a little while back. You can find it here along with instructions on how to get it installed: https://github.com/AtomFry/Eclipse/releases/tag/v0.0.2 Now that I've finally ironed out the issues that kept me from working on the latest version of LaunchBox, I'm hoping to add more improvements. Any feedback is welcome!

You could start by creating an automatic playlist where title contains Sonic. Then once it's created, edit it, uncheck auto-populate, and go to the games tab and delete out the ones you don't want. You'd want to come back and add any new sonic games to this playlist if you add one in the future but that works fine for me since the last sonic game game that was released was almost 5 years ago. Another option, puts some more effort on you to maintain your metadata but if you go through all the games that you want to appear in that playlist and set the series to Sonic The Hedgehog then you can use the series field to drive the automatic playlist.

@Hazuki I think you want to use relative sizing of your grid rows and columns using * as you mentioned otherwise you're specifying absolute sizes and it will stretch off the screen like you said. I'm not 100% sure but can you try with VerticalAlignment set to stretch and remove the MaxWidth and MaxHeight properties? That should scale the height of your image to fill the vertical space as much as possible and then scale the width as much as possible while still keeping the original aspect ratio in tact. If you use * on those row/column sizes and then run at 1080, then column 1, row 1 would be at 4K: 2000x1418 at 1080: 1000x709 Then minus the 50 pixels off the top for your margin, your image would fill the height of 659 pixels and would scale the width accordingly. FYI - the designHeight and designWidth won't matter in the final result, that's just for how the preview is displayed in visual studio.

@MetalRaven, would you mind sharing your LaunchBox data folder so I can see how you have some of these additional apps configured? All of the additional apps I use are things that automatically launch in the background when a game is opened or close like xpadder, setting up key mappings for systems that require keyboard input. I'm curious how you have your additional apps setup. Is it launching an external video player application to play your videos and then pointing to the video file with a command line argument? If you wouldn't mind zipping up your data folder (I don't think there should be sensitive information in there?) and sending it to me, that'd be a huge help just so I can understand what you're doing with your additional apps.

Hi there, When in Big Box running most any theme, if you go a game details and select View Manual, it opens this PDF viewer embedded in Big Box where you can scroll up and down using your controller and close it with the back button. I am trying to do the same from a plug-in running in Big Box. I see there is an API for IGame.OpenManual: https://pluginapi.launchbox-app.com/html/ee870656-62a3-14af-b575-ac01a8e1d099.htm#! When I call this, it launches a web browser outside of BigBox with the manual PDF loaded in it. Is it possible for a plug-in to launch the manuals in that embedded PDF viewer to keep a more seamless experience? Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

That's great, I'm glad it's working well for you! Out of curiosity, about how many games do you have and about how long did it take to scale the images the first time opening it up? Regarding additional apps and settings in the general options, this is true. Almost none of the big box settings are honored for this plug-in because the whole thing is coded from scratch. For videos, would you be looking to launch those in an external video player? What other types of additional apps do you have? It looks like the plug-in interface does have the ability for me to just launch an additional application so I think I could list the out on the game details screen and let you select one to launch from there. You're right, there is a bit of a problem where every time you go into the big-box options and come back, it reloads the plug-in at which time all of the game lists are regenerated and the images for the lists are re-cached. I don't really have control of the fact that the plug-in is getting reloaded, that's what Big Box is doing. I do need to look into options for optimizing the loading process. I have played with it a lot and I don't have any concrete plans for it at the moment but as I get back into this project, I'm sure I can come up with something.

I'm on a fresh installation of LaunchBox version 11.15 and am rebuilding my library from scratch. I have been having a problem while importing ROM files where randomly some of the files that were specified don't get imported. I did the following: Tools > Import > Rom Files Click the Add Files button Navigate to my LaunchBox\Games\Nintendo Entertainment System folder Select all - there are 135 zip files selected - Click open All 135 files are listed in the files Files to Import dialog - Click next Select platform - Nintendo Entertainment System - Click next Choose an emulator - selected Retroarch - Click Next Click on "Use the Files in their current location" Check "Search for game information in the local metadata database (recommended)" - Click Next Would you like to download images for your games - Click "Check None" button - Click Next Did not configure EmuMovies - Click Next Check - "Force importing duplicate games", everything else unchecked - Click Next All 135 files and titles display in the "Ready to Import" dialog - Click Finish The success dialog states that 130 games were imported successfully Weird - so pull up the file explorer side by side with the list of games in Launch Box and compare to find the missing 5 games Start over at step 1 but only select those 5 files - Click Finish The success dialog states that 4 games were imported successfully Weird - ok so check those last 5 games and identify the one missing file Do it again - 1 game imported successfully I remember having something like this happen before so I thought to try again, I deleted all 135 of the games from LaunchBox and did the process again. Similar results but after the first round it imported 131 files and the 4 missing files were different. Is anyone else experiencing this problem? Can anyone see anything that I'm doing wrong? I deleted everything again and turned on the debug logging option, restarted LaunchBox and did the process again. Similar result - 131 files imported successfully and a different 4 files that were not imported. I do see some exceptions in the log but it seems unrelated. I've included the log file but I don't think the logging is verbose enough to give a clue as to what's going on. Any experts have any thoughts? I feel like I've seen this before but my google-fu or launch-box-forum-fu wasn't working and I couldn't find anything on it. Thanks in advance if anyone has ideas! Debug 2021-08-21 11-36-53 PM.log

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by work per platform. The default view does group games by platform like this: If you hit esc then you can choose other options to group games by Platform, Genre, Series, Playlist, Play mode, Developer, Publisher, and Release year. Yeah, it scales the box front images to the height of that row. I mentioned it in the release notes but this takes quite a long time on the initial load of the theme as it makes a copy of the box front images scaled to the right size so that it doesn't hurt performance, trying to scale the images on the fly while you are moving around in the theme. It's a one-time terrible cost which might put most people off of using this theme. Kind of yes and kind of no. As also mentioned in the release notes, it's not working on any version of launch box released in the last year since the update to .net core. I need to get my act together and iron out those issues so it will work on the latest version. That being said, it completely overlays and in a way replaces the default big-box functionality so any updates to LaunchBox/BigBox shouldn't really impact it in any negative way once I'm able to port it to .net core

This project is always in the back of my mind but due to time constraints, I'm not sure when I'll be able to finish it up. If anyone is interested in picking up this project or just reviewing the code, it's out here: https://github.com/AtomFry/Eclipse It's not great, I was teaching myself .NET and WPF with this project so I'm sure there are tons of best practice violations and better ways to do things. Anyways, if people want to play around with it, I've put out an initial pre-alpha-release with installation instructions over here but please read the warnings! https://github.com/AtomFry/Eclipse/releases/tag/v0.0.1 Please read the warnings. This only works with LaunchBox version 11.2 and prior. It works great on my laptop and on my powerful gaming PC. I have an older desktop in my arcade cabinet and it doesn't perform so great there so your mileage may vary! I'm going to keep working on it here and there when I get time.

Will do, it's getting close on 11.2. I have some work to do to get the voice recognition working in 11.3 and later due to the .net speech recognition changing to an azure function in .net core. It's an online paid service and I'd like to keep it offline and free so I'm going to have to look into some hacky approaches to calling .net framework from .net core.

That works great and helped me avoid checking the big box settings XML file. Thanks again, @C-Beats!

Thanks, I'll give this a shot! The short answer is that I want the dimensions of the monitor where my theme will be running so I can prescale box front images to improve the performance of moving around in my plugin/theme. The long answer is that I am creating a theme that is entirely run by a plug-in. My theme shows game box front images in a row, all scaled to the same height so they fit neatly. I wish I had your game wheel code (haha) because my game wheels were performing pretty poorly. I tried a lot of things but nothing got my wheel performing very well until I found that if I pre-scaled the images to the size that they will ultimately display then WPF doesn't incur the performance hit of scaling them at runtime. So when my plugin starts up, it duplicates all of the box front images that do not exist in my plug-in images folder and scale them to the right height based on the monitor height. Basically, my list of box front images is set to stretch uniformly into a row that takes up 5/18 of the screen so I can use the monitor height to determine the desired image size and then pre-scale the images properly on startup. The result is something like this and should work on any size screen Thanks again for your help!

I think you’re right that there is no API for this and that if there was one, it’d probably do the same thing but the difference in using an approved API is that I don’t have to care how they get the value. They can change the underlying folder structure, XML file structure, or any other change all they want and it won’t break plugins using the API.

I had some trouble with the update to .net core so I’m still running on 11.2 until I can iron those problems out. On 11.2, this gives me the directory with the BigBox executable.

public static class Helpers { public static string ApplicationPath = Path.GetDirectoryName(System.Diagnostics.Process.GetCurrentProcess().MainModule.FileName); public static string BigBoxSettingsFile = $"{ApplicationPath}\\Data\\BigBoxSettings.xml"; public static string GetMonitorIndex() { // get the index from the big box xml file var bigBoxSettingsXmlDocument = XDocument.Load(Helpers.BigBoxSettingsFile); var setting = from xmlElement in bigBoxSettingsXmlDocument.Root.Descendants("BigBoxSettings") select xmlElement.Element("PrimaryMonitorIndex").Value; return setting.FirstOrDefault(); } } I'm doing this for now. I'm not sure if there's a better alternative way to handle it.

Is it possible to get big box settings via the plug-in API? I looked around and couldn't find anything but I wanted to make sure. I'm looking to identify which monitor big box is set to run on from my plug-in. I can query it out of LaunchBox\Data\BigBoxSettings.xml file but wanted to see if I was missing anything like this in the API before doing that since going directly to the file could lead to problems if underlying implementations change. I'm looking to get this setting:

I'm working on a plugin/theme for BigBox that I'm calling Eclipse. It's meant to mimic the look and feel of Netflix. It has a random game and a voice recognition feature that I'm excited to add to my cabinet. It's almost ready for release but I'm still tweaking things here and there. I thought I'd post it in case anyone is interested and I can get some feedback on any improvements that others see. One big improvement is just cleaning up the metadata. Grouping games by anything other than platform is a bit messy since there are so many similar variants in genre, series, play mode, etc... I am trying to decide if there's a programmatic solution to this via a mapping utility or if I just want to go clean up the data in my launchbox installation.

Took me a bit to figure out how to add WPF user controls in a .net core class library project. In case anyone is trying to do the same thing, you'll want to do this. I think just the WindowsDesktop and <UseWPF> part. Targeting netcoreapp3.1 is working fine https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58836149/how-can-i-add-wpf-items-into-a-c-sharp-class-library-project-in-vs2019 Right-click on the class library project, choose "Edit project file" and copy the following contents into the .csproj file: <Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk.WindowsDesktop"> <PropertyGroup> <TargetFramework>netcoreapp3.0</TargetFramework> <UseWPF>true</UseWPF> </PropertyGroup> </Project> This should give you the ability to add WPF specific items to the project using the menus.