SiriusVI

I tried your Setup. I don't see any difference in performance to the previous method, though. The games that worked with @Darkshade's method wh your setup. The ones that didn't work before, don't work with our new setup. I also don't know why you need the shortcuts from the "Game Shortcuts" folder. The games work fine without them. I may have put them in the wrong folder though. Your tutorial was a bit confusing on that part. You wrote: Take the Game shortcuts folder that has been produced in the root folder of your emulator [...] and place it in the folder where you stored your command line folder from step 3. Closely following your instructions gives me the following paths: 1. L:\LaunchBox\Games\Nokia N-Gage\Command Lines\ ---> here are all the files from your command line archives. These files were imported into Launchbox. 2. L:\LaunchBox\L:\LaunchBox\Games\Nokia N-Gage\Game ShortcutsGames\Nokia N-Gage\Game Shortcuts\ --> here are all the shortcuts that your batch created. But nothing points to these files, so they are basically useless. Again, I don't know if this is the correct setup. Maybe you can tell me what I did wrong.

Wow, thank you so much for your answer. Let me go through your points in order: 1. VLC player is set in LauchbBox as well as in BigBox. I Also tried switching to Windows Media Player, which didn't solve the problem. 2. I don't think that the CPU is the issue, since BigBox does not stress my CPU all THAT much. But I downloaded the Intel CPU tool and launched it. The tool set that my CPU passed all the tests, as you can see here: 3. I downloaded CrystalDiskMark and checked the result against other results online. I think the results are comparable? I've added a screenshot, so maybe you can confirm. The 2 results on the left are from a website, the the window on the right shows my benchmark. 4. I wil enable the iGPU then. However, I've read online that if you have a dedicated GPU you shouldn't really enable the iGPU. I'm actually not really sure how I would use the iGPU in combination with my regular GPU. All my displays are connected to the Nvidia GPU anyway. So how would I even use the iGPU? 5. I've tried both the the 4k as well as the HD versions of COLORFUL videos. I switched them out again, because @viking originally suggested that maybe my PC couldn't handle the 4K videos. What I do know now is that the videos are not the issue. All videos, COLORFUL or not, work with other themes. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to answer =).

Great to hear =). Will I have to remove my imported platforms and playlists from v.9 or could I just use your tool to "update" the collection?

What you could do is extract them each in their own folder named after the original Archive. I'm almost 100% certain that there is a way to batch rename files after the folder they are placed in. I can't point you to a bat file like this, but over the past years there were multiple times where I had to google for bulk renaming scripts. I always found what I was looking for. SO, Google is your friend, I guess.

Sadly, that didn't work. Now I'm completely out of ideas. I'm sure it has something to do with the large number of games in my collection, but I cannot figure out why other themes work and colorful does not. I guess I'll just have to live without colorful (sadly...) Thank you for all your effort.

Thanks for replying. Hope you're alright. Covid is a mess. I've done some more testing and I found something else out: I redownloaded Launchbox and set up a test version of Launchbox with Platforms with only one game per platform: - SNES - Apple II - GBA - Arcade When I launch Bog box with this setup, Colorful runs smoothly. So far so good. Then I copied the platforms and parents from the Data Folder of my Main Launchbox setup over to the test setup. This setup has all my games listed. When I Launched Big Box again, the lag returns. In conclusion, Colorful runs smoothly, when there are just a few games imported. As soon as the number of roms increases, the lag returns. There must a some kind of difference between colorful and other themes, that make it lag when the number of games gets too high. If you want to test this, I can send you the contents of my data folder and you can try if you experience the same kind of lag that I experience.

That's great to know. So if this is the case, we might be able to change analog stick settings in retroarch for specific appleIIGS games that need them. Will have to test that =). Thank you! EDIT: scratch that, I just read in my original post that I'd already tried that.

Thanks for that! I was worried that I might have to convert my .cso ps2 library into .chd, but it looks like there is no significant gain in doing so. CHD is my preferred format whenever it's supported, though.

You are correct, of course. Nothing's disappearing. Anyway, my point was that collecting roms, for me personally isn't about archiving them out of fear for them to disappear or for actually playing a large amount of them. I just like having a collection that I set up and browse through. Occasionally I will play a few games, but that is not the reason I build this collection.

Sure, if you know where to look, they are still plenty of places where you can get them. I don't think they'll be gone any time soon / ever.

Well, Nintendo roms aren't as accessible as they used to be, but I also don't think they will disappear. Nonetheless, it's just cool to fire launchbox up and scroll through a game collection. Launchbox itself plays a key role here. I wouldn't be interested in collecting games if launchbox didn't give me the ption to display and launch games in a unified way.

That's not what this is about, haha. Its about collecting and having the opportunity to play anything you want if you ever wanted to. I have a collection of over 100k games. And the only one I ever SERIOUSLY played was Ocarina of time 3D for the Nintendo 3ds on Citra, because I wanted to play this game on the big screen. I'm not sure that I will ever finish emulated games in my collection. Still, I've spent years building up my collection. I don't know why, but it's just fun setting up a functioning collection of every released game in history (up to a certain point). I'm currently working on PS3 and Xbox 360. These are the newest systems I'll try to add to the collection (besides Nintendo switch). I don't plan to ever delve into ps4 or xbox one emulation. Besides that, older computer systems will take up a lot of my time for the next couple of years.

One more thing I thought I should mention: Once I've scrolled through all the platform categories once, the lag disappears / is drastically reduced when I switch through them a second or third time. I've also noticed the mouse curser turning into the blue wheel indicating that something loading. I contacted the author of the colorful theme about this, because I had a theory that the theme will count all the games in a certain platform and that's what causes the lag. However, the author said that Colorful isn't counting anything. So I'm not sure. What else could be "loading" while scrolling through platform categories for the first time?

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Let me go through your suggestions one by one. please keep in mind that the other Themes work fine, it's just Colorful that has this issue: 1. I do have the latest geforce drivers. I always get the latest updates from geforce experience. So I don't use the ones from the MSI homepage. 2. I do have some MSI apps related to the motherboard installed. I will try uninstalling those and get back to you. 3. My main display (smart TV) is at native 1080p 60hz. I do have two other monitors connected. DIsconnecting them does not solve the issue. 4. The Launchbox app with all images and videos is stored on a 2 TB SSD. All the games are stored on an external HDD. is this a problem? 5. I haven't benchmarked my SSD. I never had a problem with it. it reacts super quickly and has no issues running themes other than Colorful. 6. I use VLC player. 7. I have never tried iGPU. I don't know anything about it. I might try this out. 8. All my drivers are up to date. I use the drivers form the MSI homepage for everything except for the GPU. Should I get different drivers? I was under the assumption that the MSI drivers would be the best ones for the hardware. EDIT: uninstalling MSI software has not solved the issue. EDIT 2: According to Intel, all my drivers are up to date

Still trying to find a solution. Does anyone know what further steps I could take to troubleshoot this issue?

Thanks for trying. I really don't know why my setup won't work with Colorful =(

The thing is that everything works fine with different themes. It's just Colorful. My input devices work fine.

This thread has been viewed a number of times now, isn't there anyone who might have a guess at what's causing this behavior with the colorful theme specifically?

Awesome, ? !

Just FYI, the new update Flashpoint 10 is available =).

In principal the tutorial should still work. I recently tried it and found that newer versions of mame might cause problems. I'm planning to delve into CD-i emulation again and revising the tutorial, but I wanted to let some time pass, so that mame might solve the issues.

Just in case you are interested. This is the thread where the idea was originally posted:

Don't give me too much credit. This part here has been known since way before I even joined the Launchbox community: -rp \"L:\LaunchBox\Games\Arcade\" -cass \"%romfile%\"" That's why I said it was "simple". I was just referring to sending commands like "F2" via autoscript. That's also why I did not write up a complete guide to accomplish all of this (yet). You are correct that it will take a lot of tinkering to apply all of these commands to various mame machines. That's the very reason I started this thread. I'm not sure what you are referring to when you talk about fast forward not working correctly. When I launch the 3D Start Fire Apple II game, I can get RetroArch to Fast Forward with my controller hotkey just fine. Is this an issue only with certain mame machines or does it appear with all machines? I've just tested Apple II for now ...

OK, so I just had kind of a personal breakthrough when it comes to autobooting apple2 cassette tapes It's so simple that I'm baffled that no one else posted about it before. As an example, I'll use the cassette tape game "3D Star Fire", which runs from Apple II's "Monitor" mode (but I'm sure this will work with other types of cassette games, as well). All you have to do is activate custom command line parameters. For my setup, it looks like this: -L "M:\LaunchBox\Emulators\RetroArch\cores\mame_libretro.dll" "apple2 -autoboot_delay 2 -autoboot_command "30.3FR" -rp \"L:\LaunchBox\Games\Arcade\" -cass \"%romfile%\"" This part automatically types the correct command to launch the specific game: -autoboot_command "30.3FR" The second thing you need to do is to open the emulator settings for the emulator connected to apple2 cassette tapes (in my example it's a second instance of retroarch called "RetroArch CLI Cassette I"). In the "Running Autohotkey Script" tab, enter: sleep, 8000 SetKeyDelay, -1, 110 Send {F2 down} sleep, 100 Send {F2 up} Send {Enter} Return This will wait 8 seconds (enough time for "30.3FR" to be typed out by the autoboot command). It will then send "F2" starting the tape and then "Enter" to launch the game (credit to @deadfraggle) This is really cool ?

Hey man, great find! Say, how would these lines look, if instead of mame standalone I were to use the mame core in retroarch? SetWorkingDir ..\MAME\ ;My MAME folder relative to Autohotkey Run, mame64.exe zx81 -keyboardprovider dinput -ui_active -skip_gameinfo -autoboot_delay 5 -autoboot_command "j""""""\n" %1% I'm guessing something like this: SetWorkingDir M:\LaunchBox\Emulators\RetroArch\ ;My MAME folder relative to Autohotkey Run, retroarch.exe zx81 -keyboardprovider dinput -ui_active -skip_gameinfo -autoboot_delay 5 -autoboot_command "j""""""\n" %1% However, I don't know how to target mame_libretro.dll