MrSco

you can scan your video files with a powershell 7 script like the one I used above. Another thing of note, over all these years and all the crashes I've had over multiple different systems, windows 10 and windows 11... never did the bigbox attract mode crashing also crash or freeze the computer. I was always able to just alt tab and pull up task manager to kill bigbox.exe or the mere act of alt tabbing would kick in the windows (not responding) alert asking to wait or kill bigbox. After killing the frozen bigbox.exe, I've always been able to just start bigbox again immediately. So that leads me to believe you have some other system stability issues with your system hardware and system os... maybe also run a windows memory diagnostic on your ram...

Have you checked that WMP is selected in both launch box and big box settings? There are settings for both. Also, have you checked the video files for corruption? Also, have you tried letting attract mode run with videos disabled? Also, there is a debugging log option in launch box that may shed some light on things too…got a log file to look at?

Yea that prompt is probably only good if you actively change the setting. Not if your setting was already set to VLC from last year when it was the recommended stable setting. So whatever update rolled out that deprecated VLC, silently made everyone’s setup less stable without warning them their current setting is not recommended. was it mentioned in the release notes that pop up on new versions to warn users their video setting may need to be changed for stability?

so I guess i switched my bigbox video setting to use VLC a year ago as directed by @C-Beats ... and more recently when I checked the setting, I only checked in LaunchBox settings, not also in BigBox and BigBox had it still set to VLC from last year's testing... So now BigBox AND LaunchBox are both set to WMP for video playback and I've had BigBox attract mode running for over 24hrs and no issues or crashes. Its the longest it's ran without crashing in a long time. I'm gonna let it go for another couple days over the weekend to be sure, but it seems like the code base has fully switched back to VLC being garbo and wmp being stable now. ... maybe pop a warning to users who have VLC still set in their settings warning of instability with a check box to not remind again if they wanna keep vlc garbo... cause if thats really the issue, thats pretty bad to allow users to make their settings unstable by having updates roll out without warning the user their settings are no longer ideal... they'd have to go into the settings and see that VLC is now labeled (Deprecated)... which I'd argue is useless to most users who have no idea what that word means lol

This has been happening for years. Tested after every update and on multiple systems. Always running the latest version. You can see the history in this post and others

Tested many variations over the years. Even this one. Crash city. Such a shame cause it’s an amazing app otherwise. It just can’t play videos for shit

I wouldn’t hold your breathe. It’s been busted like this for many years now and across many devices. Lots of others having the same issue. The only workaround is to use a theme that has attract mode not play any videos. Super lame in 2025 we can’t play some videos without crashing.

that didn't take long... crash again... The program BigBox.exe version 13.21.0.0 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Security and Maintenance control panel.

crashes have started happening very frequently in attract mode now. even with default theme. within minutes or an hour at most. It used to at least run for some hours before crashing. I can't believe this has been busted like this for so many YEARS! In an effort to get to the bottom of it, I asked chatgpt for some incite based on the event viewer errors (not very descriptive most of the time). I also wrote a powershell script to test all the video files for corruption... it found two corrupted videos even though the videos played fine... I'll attach the script and the busted videos in hopes it will shed some light... Application: BigBox.exe CoreCLR Version: 6.0.3624.51421 .NET Version: 6.0.36 Description: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception. Exception Info: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at SharpDX.XAudio2.VoiceShadow.VoiceVtbl.OnVoiceProcessingPassStartImpl(IntPtr thisObject, Int32 bytes) Faulting application name: BigBox.exe, version: 13.18.0.0, time stamp: 0x670d0000 Faulting module name: unknown, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x00000000 Exception code: 0xc0000005 Fault offset: 0x00007ffccad25773 Faulting process id: 0x2154 Faulting application start time: 0x1DB5B7A6AF92289 Faulting application path: H:\Arcade\LaunchBox\Core\BigBox.exe Faulting module path: unknown Report Id: 13e25831-29f3-4802-83a5-84da61c57c95 Faulting package full name: Faulting package-relative application ID: The program BigBox.exe version 13.20.0.0 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Security and Maintenance control panel. i'm getting these errors randomly while bigbox is running in attract mode idle... just randomly stopping on different games to play their videos and display their artwork It appears that BigBox is encountering an unhandled exception within its audio processing code—specifically in the SharpDX.XAudio2 layer—while it’s in attract mode. The error message: > **System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.** > **at SharpDX.XAudio2.VoiceShadow.VoiceVtbl.OnVoiceProcessingPassStartImpl(IntPtr thisObject, Int32 bytes)** suggests that something in the audio “voice” processing for your media playback isn’t being properly initialized or is being prematurely disposed. In practical terms, when BigBox rotates through the various games and their associated videos or artwork, an audio callback (or a resource that the callback expects) is missing, leading to a crash with an access violation (0xc0000005). I'm gonna run another attract mode test and see if it crashes now. will report back. Check-VideoCorruption.zip corrupted_videos.zip corrupted_videos_found.txt

same issue here on 13.20... attract mode usually doesn't crash for some hours, but now it crashes within minutes every time. please fix

Adding a delay of 5 seconds in a ahk script that launches demulshooter instead of launching the exe directly from additional apps fixes the issue.

did you ever find a fix for this? I'm having a similar issue but it seems to happen randomly and almost every time if I launch demulshooter as an additional app before the emulator... no demulshooter and black screen issue never happens

After I kill launchbox and big box, I can just start them again and it works without having to restart the computer

Oh I completely understand. Besides that the software is amazing and I recommend it to everyone. The crashing is the one pain point and stands out for me since everything else works so great. one thing that seems more unique to my crashes then others is 95% of the time when it crashes there is no error message. Others seem to get an error message. I’ve had error messages and Event log entries and posted them in this thread above I believe. But most of the time, The bigbox process just locks up and all videos freeze and controls are unresponsive. I have to kill from task manager.

Default theme. As you can see from the multiple threads, many people are having the same issue for a very long time now.