C-Beats

@xevidroid Could you PM me the file that had that character? Want to take a look at it if I could to try and get this corrected.

Think you are grossly overstating the complexity and time required for the task at hand. The following steps can be used for a large majority of your use cases and takes very little time: 1) Select the correct platform in LaunchBox (all if there are several involved) 2) In the search box type the name of what you would want in the "Contains" field of the Auto-populate playlist 3) Select the first game in the result set and then press "Ctrl-A" to select them all 4) Quickly make sure you don't have any that don't belong and deselect them by holding Ctrl and clicking on the item 5) Press "Ctrl-E" to bring up the bulk edit 6) Select the "Series" field 7) Add the series you are wanting to tag the items with 8) Create an auto-populated playlist using Series - Is Equal To - (Series you added in step 7)

We use relative pathing so if the roms/emulators are on the same external drive as the LaunchBox install it should all work fine. Relative pathing should effectively tell the computer something like, "Go back 3 folders, then look for this folder path from that spot". It shouldn't be using drive letter at all if the two items are on the same drive.

Can you open LaunchBox and make sure that you have debugging turned on, then send me the log generated from Big Box when you see this behavior? I've not been able to replicate it at all but you aren't the first person to report it. Would love to see if we can find the cause.

You can select multiple games, then press edit, and add the series value to them en masse. When trying to create series playlist I typically just set the series to the correct value and then build an auto-populated playlist where series is equal to that value.

Cool, thanks for confirming.

Do the following to get your custom url that you need for this: Open Steam Go to your profile page in Steam (click your username, then profile from the drop down) On the right hand side of your profile page click the "Edit Profile" button On the page that button opens to there is a textbox labeled "Custom URL" Enter that text into the steam import

Thanks all for the reports regarding the Old Default based themes. Believe I have a solution and will get a beta out to correct soon. @sundogak Many of the items listed as fixed came from your reports, could you confirm the issues you reported were fixed in this beta release? @RULLUR Anyway I can get a status report on your FlowControl issue in this beta? Still have some changes we want to make but I'd like to think this beta should help you some (assuming the original issue wasn't caused by corrupt images like you were beginning to think)

I sincerely doubt that lack of space is causing as significant of a performance hit as you are seeing, but you are well over the recommended max usage of your SSD if you are looking to gain peak performance from it. Generally you want to keep it under 80% utilization if you want max read/write speeds. Do you have debug logging on? If not could you turn it on (in LaunchBox) and then load Big Box and just let it open, run it a minute or so and then close it and send me the log it generates. May get some more pertinent information that way.

@Blaster2001 much appreciated. Let me know how it goes with the cab, I've not seen a design like that before, looks really interesting. Have to let me know how it does.

If clearing your temp files helped speed up your load time it would typically indicate that your drive is getting full which is affecting the ability of the OS to index the drive or you could be on a SSD in which case they just read slower when full. I would run a checkdisk scan to ensure you don't have any bad sectors on the drive as well. On start up we do a lot of file loading to help cache information to help Big Box run better, wondering if we are running into any issues with that read process taking longer than usual because of a faulty or failing drive (though I have my doubts it would be the cause for all of you at the same time)

Anyway you can copy and paste the entire error here so I can read it ?

@Blaster2001 I'd check out my FauxVert theme here on the forums then for your playfield monitor. A theme I built specifically for the type of use case you are asking. Just need to make sure you use rotated images/videos for the background to play nice with the theme (most of the time the media you can find online for VPin are already rotated this way). FauxVert download:

@Blaster2001 I assume you are referring to the bottom pinball playfield screen? Is that screen going to be set to portrait or landscape orientation via Windows?

While efficiency is a great goal that one should always work towards unfortunately in the real world there are times it has to take a back seat to overall progress. You could spend a serious amount of time making one sub process extremely efficient, but in the end the net gain just isn't enough to justify the amount of time it takes to gain that efficiency. We do our best to make the software as efficient as we can but we also have to measure the efficiency of our time, effort, and monetary spend as well. We are for-profit business and need to make sure we are maximizing returns so we can continue to work on the products we all know and love. I'm sure you understand, though I'm as equally sure it can be irritating at times as a both an end user and fellow developer. Hope you do, always fun to see what tools the community puts together to fill each others needs. You run into any issues building a particular plugin, don't be afraid to reach out. Will do my best to answer any questions you have.

select one title, hold control and click on the other. Both should now be highlighted. Right click on either and select "Combine Games" pick which you want to the primary (the one that launches by default) and you should have what you're looking for

Because a hash system is pretty terrible for ROMs and a true rom file isn't even needed to add a game to your LaunchBox library. Heck a FILE isn't even needed. Hash would be different for any variation of the ROM in question. Also would be different depending on any archival file format used for the rom, some could be extracted to get the hash on the contents but not all could be (things like CHD) The GamesDB was built before we had a lot of the storefront integrations. We'd like to get some more things added to the database, but given that you can scrape directly from Steam for any Steam metadata and media this isn't a HUGE priority, especially since the current solution (title search) works for the majority of games (though there are occasional mistakes because of the data in the database). This would have the same issue as the issue you are running into with title searching. A good ole fashion case of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). If we have bad data in the database the matches are going to be inaccurate. Currently you are experiencing issues scraping because of title/alt name discrepancies, adding those fields just means that you could then have the same error with the storefront ID information being incorrect. We also would need to add extra logic in the database to handle the same storefront ID being assigned to several games. We'd also have issues if the storefront changed the ID/association at any point as it would make all the data points in our database invalid. Our data integrity would depend on third parties not making any changes to their platform, which is not a bet I'd happily make. Also have to deal with the fact that some IDs ARE correctly tied, but not publicly visible, for example if Steam pulls a game from the store, the ID is still valid, but if you would try to navigate to it's URL you get sent to the Steam store home page. This could cause confusion for end users as well as DB moderators. The scrape process is the same both for free version and paid and we do our best to make that very clear to all so they can evaluate the product before making any purchases, specifically for cases like yours. If you are unhappy with your purchase you can contact support@unbrokensoftware.com and see what they can do to help. As stated previously, achievements are not a static data point. They change quite a bit. Achievements are added, removed, and modified through out a games life cycle and so if we DID add something like a simple boolean we would also need a cache time and regularly check the id's after the cache is over a certain age, and even then we would get complaints because the data isn't real-time as people expect it to be. Not saying all your points are without merit. I'd love to get an association system in place within the DB for things like storefront id's and third party associations but we have to weigh the development time and resources carefully between both the websites and the applications we develop. Since the dev team at the moment is two people, there isn't a ton of time to move around to make things happen though. Since the database system works right now for the majority of games it goes up against the decision is usually that our time is better spent elsewhere where there are more pressing obvious flaws and needs that demand more attention, or offer a better "bang for our buck".

Do you have a screenshot of what your seeing? Big Box by default uses some maths behind the scene to scale font appropriate to the monitor height and DPI best it can. This was done to reduce what it sounds like you're seeing. Themes CAN override that logic though and force the menus to use other font sizes.

Thanks for the explanation. I'll take a look.

I've not seen that happen before. First two things I'd look into is: 1) Make sure you don't have a firewall blocking the traffic for some reason 2) Make sure you don't have the "Nahimic" service running on your computer

Do you have another instance already running but hidden in the system tray or no? Sounds quite a bit like the second instance is trying to open while the first instance is doing its "Save on Exit" logic and because the window is disposed already we can't switch to that process. Though we SHOULD be displaying a prompt saying something to that affect. I don't think this is directly related to the beta, but I will take a look and see what we can do to help make it more clear what is going on in those circumstances.

Could be. Here is a list of names you can post in there (as well as their hex code) that is supported by WPF/XAML

I just copied the above images, put them in MS Paint and then used the eyedropper tool. It only shows RGB though so you have to convert it to hex. I'm not sure what color chart you're referring to, maybe @faeran has it somewhere.

Also make sure you don't have any hidden settings set. Settings like "Hide Games Missing Boxes..." as they may be causing your games to be hidden from you.

@MadK9 @PixelDragon Can you explain what you are doing to see this? Are we talking about opening another LaunchBox instance right after closing one, or something else?