3dlollo

Thanks; here are the info CPU: Intel Celeron J4115 Video card: Integrated Intel 9th gen UHD Graphics 600 Storage: M2 256 GB internal, the app is on this drive; while some roms are on the other internal storage, which is on eMMC. Both drives are half full OS: Windows 10 latest update (as the week of 4/11/2021) Video drivers updated? Yes, I am using the intel driver tool so everything is always updated How many systems/games are in your collection?: 15 systems, 12K games in total Do you have these issues with the default theme? Launchbox works fine, Big box does hang. I am using CoinOP theme (3.0) and Retrotastic theme (3.11). I did not try the default theme. What version of Big Box are you running? 11.10

Not sure exactly if nobody care about this report or if I am missing important info to convey. As now, I can't use reliably Big box (launchbox works fine); and I have no way to troubleshoot this. Considering I paid for the BB extra features, feel a bit disappointing to not be able to actually use it. I don't see issues in the machine running LB/BB; it is running fine with LB, emulators run fine; so it does not seem to be an issue at hardware level. I don't recall minimum specs for running BB, so I am just stuck trying to understand what is causing the hang. Any help would be appreciated; unless you have a support email which I could use to track the issue, instead of posting here in the troubleshooting forum. Thanks!

I can reproduce this consistently; got a small mini pc that use a celeron, as mini emulator pc; installed LB on it and I am using BB. It runs fine, but then it just freeze at random, and I need to kill the BB process. Sometimes it freeze when you let it be for a while, which means leaving it be for 10-20 minutes (does not matter on which platform I leave it be), some other times it freeze and hang while you are switching platforms. I don't see this issue with my other computers running BB, but those are more powerful machines. Not sure what is the problem here; I will try to switch themes and see if the problem is tied to a specific theme; or maybe to the amount of memory (this mini pc got 6 GB total of RAM). Did anyone experience something similar? My BB is stock, minus the theme which I changed from the default; and I have a bunch of videos and screenshots for each game and platform (including the theme videos); so my setup is pretty much standard, nothing special.

Trying to use my arcade stick (1 8 way stick and 8 buttons connected to an Ipac-2 in keyboard mode), which works great for arcade games, but for anything using analog, it does not work. I went through the process in retroarch to set the controls; and left the analog controls empty since I just have the stick and buttons. Now when I play any game that require an analog stick (Playstation, Gamecube, Dreamcast); nothing happens when I move the Dpad. In the retroarch input settings I set the controller as joypad, no analog; but that didn't work either. How do I set up my iPAC-2 based controller so I can use the stick for games that expect the analog input?

Looks like screenshots works great; I get the prompt to add it to the current content and that works fine. Videos does not seem to work as in the video. OBS launch and the video is recorded in the "videos" folder; but I get no prompt when I quit the emulator, to add it to the current content. Going to try with different emulators other than retroarch. Is there any gotcha that I should be aware of? I am also using a 2 monitor setup BTW; but OBS is set to record on my main monitor (the one where the emulator view actually open up). Thanks

Awesome, exactly what I was looking for. Is there any problem in having the videos in "recordings" folder, instead of the parent folder? I noticed from the video you posted that they are not added as video snap but as recording; but I assume it should not make difference. Thanks!

Thanks! So when I take the screenshot; it is added automatically to the content I was playing, and it will display as image when not in list mode? Same for videos; do I have to manually assign the video after I do the capture? Cheers!

If there is such feature, I must say that I could not find it easily. If there is no such feature, I would really like to see it implemented eventually. I have a lot of products (like demos for old computers); that does not have an entry in the database, so they just show as blank square. I would like to be able to take a screenshot while playing this content, and have it saved and used as image to be visualized, instead of the blank square. Is this something feasible? I am aware I can take screenshots and then go in the screenshot folder and assign that manually to each entry in my platform, but we are talking of a lot of entries; so if there is a way to automate this process (like pressing a button to take screenshot and assign that image to the currently running content), that would really be great. Thanks in advance

Well, I am saying what I saw: I had a perfectly functioning install of LB; I copied the files into the new install of LB; and I run it; the option was not selected before, otherwise I could not use retroarch at all; or if that option was selected before, it means that something changed in LB in the new version, which would cause my retroarch to not launch. There is not much in terms of assumptions there; those are the facts I brought up; sadly I do not have your source code so I can't check nor debug the issue; so I am just reporting what I see, and leave to the developers the investigation part. Understood; I assume when you launch an emulator you are not communicating with the PID of the emulator and collect any data coming from it, since LB act as frontend. I may disagree on the completely unneeded; since you want to know why something goes wrong when you trigger another app. I am not sure how it works in the frontend world, but in my company, you want to get data that show if your app is the source of a problem, and why; which is the reason why logs exist. I didn't try to deal with Retroarch or other emulators so can't say how hard it is to get its output and interface to it; but I am sure you have evaluated the efforts, so I rely on your evaluation of benefits vs efforts. Thanks for your reply and for the help; I've learned the basics about what to look for when I hit an issue with LB. Cheers!

I think I solved it. For some reasons; when I updated; the option "don't use quotes" was selected; I removed that and now retroarch is working again. This is insane to be honest... spent 6 hours trying to figure out what was wrong; and it did end up being an option reset (I assume that value is set as default somehow, but it was not default in my 2018 version of Launchbox?). Just for the records; it would be good to have that option off by default for retroarch; in this way if someone else is experiencing my same issue; they know what to try to solve their issue. Also can you please tell the devs to add a logging for launching emulators? In mame it takes me 5 minutes to figure things out because I can see the logs; but with Launchbox I have no way to tell what is going on; even turning on the logging debugging in the options (which BTW show a lot of exception "FIRST CHANCE"; no idea what is the context since it is referring to ImageSourceConverter; posted the full line here) 2021-03-14 10:16:17 PM FIRST CHANCE EXCEPTION: ImageSourceConverter cannot convert from (null). at System.ComponentModel.TypeConverter.GetConvertFromException(Object value) Logs are vital to figure things out; I've been writing code for more than 20 years and every time I am troubleshooting anything, I almost always rely on logs. Thanks for the help; now I can finally update the arcade machine and get back to business. Cheers

Hi, I tried with retroarch by itself and it works fine; I can right click on "decathlon" for Atari 2600 and select "open retroarch" and it open retroarch no problem. I then tried to run the game by double click on it and it didn't start. I then opened retroarch and loaded the same "decathlon" game and it runs correctly. triple checked the paths; they are correct; - Games folder in the root of the Launchbox folder contains my roms - Retroarch is in its folder, in the Launchbox root folder; this is how I had the previous Launchbox set up and has been working fine for all this time, until I updated I tried with a different emulator (mame) and it does run fine; I just had to change the permissions so it can run as admin. I tried the same with retroarch.exe but it does not run; so the issue does not seem to be permissions. You will find the images as requested below; please let me know if there is anything I can try. Thanks

Thanks, I did as you suggested and I am getting the same issue. I see no logs created; there is no error, nothing. Neither in retroarch nor in the logs folder of Launchbox; so I am clueless about what went wrong. I kept from the data folder the xml files for platforms, emulators and inputbindings; since those are the ones I am using for the existing platforms; on top of the playlists and platforms folders. I tried to delete all the games in a playlist and add them again; and it does the same. At this point I have no idea about what is going on. Launchbox starts fine; it can find the images, movies, music and playlists; if I right click on a game to show the game folder it can find it no problem; the paths are all correct and if I run retroarch by itself it launch, but it refuse to run any games. I just wish I kept the previous install folder from the working directory; because now my arcade machine is basically stuck in this state Possible that there is no log whatsoever anywhere?

Just renewed my license last night, since I had a 2018 version and wanted to get the updated version, and after installing launchbox I copied all the games, images, data and videos folder over to the new installation location. Then after doing that I removed the old folder (it was on an external drive) and renamed the launchbox folder as the original folder with the older version, so all the paths are exactly the same as before. Now when I run any platform; nothing start. I can run the emulator no problem, by right clicking on a game and starting the emulator; and I triple checked the paths and they are fine for the games and for the emulator; but when I double click on any game on any platform; the loading image appear, then nothing happens. This is happening with Retroarch; I have the latest retroarch version and everything was working fine while I was using the old Launchbox version from 2018. How do I fix this? I can see all the games and playlist; I can see images, boxarts and videos; I can launch the respective emulators but when I start a game nothing happens. Is there a log I can check to see what is going on?

I actually found that the playlists used by Launchbox are actually XML; so that simplify things. I wrote a simple function that compare 2 XML playlists and return the unique entries and common games/files. In this way I can pass 2 xml playlist and get the output I desire; I can always create new playlists to compare to each other, so this approach scale pretty well even with large collections of roms. Thanks!

Thanks. Not sure if it is planned but would be great to have "management" features on playlists. I am pretty handy with XML so with other frontend I wrote my own XML parsers for the various playlists and wrote queries to filter data and export it as xls or csv files. But with Launchbox I was hoping there was an easier way to do that. I can also audit each "platform" (agree, they are not apple to apple as comparison), and copy/paste in excel tables and then do the rest programmatically. Not ideal, but if that is the only way to do what I want, I guess I have to do it myself. I would love to have management tools in LB itself. Being a frontend, I think that there is value in having features to export different lists created with different filters. It may not be your focus of course, since it is not something that many may use; although I wanted to put it on the table, just in case it may be implemented at one point in time. Thanks

I am looking for a way to compare games across platforms. For example I have Arcade, NeoGeo and FBA, and would like to see which games are in common on those platforms and which are not. So far the only way I found to do this is to add all the games for each of the platform I want to compare, to my favorites, and then change visualization to favorites and scroll through all the games, clicking on each of them to read which platform is from, and then by hand, make a text file that has the games not in common and the ones in common. Is there a better way to do this? Thanks

This is awesome! I was deleting everything and re-importing everything, which takes forever (including download videos and screenshots and meta data for each game and platform); will give it a spin!

Thanks, so there is no plan for LB to have a setup with all the platforms on it, that works out of the box. It is understandable, since LB is a front-end, so it has no clue what happens behind the scene with the emulators. And it is also legit to not want to waste time troubleshooting issues that someone may have on their "custom" build of LB, because so many things could go wrong. I tried... it will take me a while to get everything set up, thanks for offering help with the setup. So far the hardest part has been setting up computers like the amiga, C64 and Atari ST; just using the joystick from the arcade cabinet. On my computer I am using a setup from one of your guides, which involve using PS-UAE, create links to the UDID of the games that point to the ADF games (I think, I did that like 5 years ago?), although copying the folder with the roms won't fix the issue, since I need to generate the UDID for all the amiga games sadly. Same for the ST and C64, which require to setup things to boot automatically a tape or disk.

Cheers! Have been using LB for a while now; got a license for the premium and used it on my computer. Now I am ready to move to a stand-alone cabinet; and I want to add more systems. Thankfully just copying the folder where LB lives, on my computer inside the arcade cabinet was all needed to keep things running, but now all the paths are messed up, since on my main machine my LB folder was on my desktop of my C drive, while now I have everything on an external drive. Nothing that a bit of patience can't fix, by re-importing all the games for each platform. Although, adding new platforms has been a pain; mostly to have big box set up correctly to work with the arcade joysticks (player 1 and player 2), display a nice theme that looks good with animations and info, and set up systems so I can launch games without the need of the keyboard and mouse. Is there any good soul that made a version of big box with all the systems set up? Not talking of adding roms of course, or bios; but getting everything ready so I can just grab the folder, put in it my roms, my bios, run a scan and have everything already set up and good to go on my arcade cabinet? I get that the beauty of BB and LB is that it is totally configurable, but I wish there was a way to get everything sorted out and configured; which is a pain especially for systems like old computers (amiga, atari, C64, Archimedes, ZX spectrum and so on), or old import machines like the Sharp 68000 and similar. Thanks for any info you could spare!

I found it; it is in the audit tools. Not sure why such info like the file name didn't make it to the list view in the main app, but that's OK.

Tried to look in the options but could not find the answer. Basically I have different platforms; and I would like to export each platform as game name list and file name list. I was able to work around the game list by changing view to list, and copy/paste the list as text, but I have no way to display the actual file name, at least from what I can tell. Is there some workaround to get such list?

I have the option to remove the roms when I delete an entry in launchbox. It works for all the systems where the roms are in the launchbox games folder; but it seems not working if the roms are on the desktop I have a folder with some FBA roms; that I wanted to check; I don't need to add them to my games folder, so I imported the roms and picked the option to leave the roms in the original location (on my desktop on windows) I deleted games, and I don't get the prompt that ask me if I want to delete the associated rom. It works with all the other sytem, so I guess the problem is in the roms being on the desktop?

Yes, although one is the Japanese version and the other is the world version, right? FBA has 2 folders: one for PCE and one for TG16; so I assume they have different games for different region?

Thanks, the option you did mention works!

I am having some problems with few FBA romsets; the roms names used are not the usual full name; so they have names like "aburner2", "acrush" and such. When scraping those files, launchbox can't find a match; so I end up with a ton of games that are not scraped correctly. Why is that? Isn't Launchbox using also the various xml and dat files from different emulators to find the correct names? These names looks like the mame names, although they are for PC engine (which does not even have an entry in Launchbox; I can see the turbografx-16 but not the Nec PC-Engine); so I can't scrape them as mame. Is my only option to change every game entry in launchbox? These are the names from the reference set so I assume they are correct.