Hifihedgehog

Sorry for the necro but someone made a TV Guardian like filter for games recently. I use their other tool (Cinema Guard) and ran across it on their blog. I cannot speak to it since I do not play games with strong language. However, if you have a game with profanity that you want to make more presentable for your children, this tool sounds like it should do the trick. The way it works is it uses OCR on a game's subtitles to remove and mute the profanity in real-time. C# Software: Game Guard (csharpsoftwareza.blogspot.com)

I am noticing this behavior as well on the latest release on my arcade cabinet build and my ROG Ally *without* any ASUS bloatware installed.

I just noticed today that there is some sort of hard limit in place preventing copying and pasting a list larger than about 1600 (messing with filters) or so of games. So if you are collector completionist like and want export an entire list of your 1000s of games to Excel, bear this in mind. @Jason Carr, is this something that I should submit in a bug report? I can confidently say that Windows at least can easily hold an export in the 10,000's in the clipboard as I copy and paste from SQL Server with tables much taller and wider in my day job.

Did you also make sure that you have the displays lined up so they are left to right and their top edges align like so? Outside of ensuring 100% scaling on both displays, this is another step that is also commonly missed.

This. The tool converts to the compression format that WUA uses. However, it does not know how to organize the files appropriately nor does it understand how to batch through the files either or most importantly identify one game from another for that matter. Ultimately, bulk support will need to be done upstream in Cemu since that is only what has the necessary bits for the archive file organization and metadata. ZArchive exists because they invented a new compression format that is insanely fast at finding and decompressing a single file at a moment's notice from a pool of tens of thousands of files (hence the billed support for "random-access reads"). It is able to instantaneously decompress a file without having to decompress the entire archive contents, making it much faster than traditional methods like .ZIP or .RAR given the high file counts of some games. Therefore, it is purpose built for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild that is a game with tens of thousands of files that can't easily live and run out of a slowly decompressed zip file.

I would insert the term: with all due respect, just no. Stop while you’re ahead of yourself in that train of thought. Besides the colossal amount of overhead of migrating and reimagining a codebase on Linux knowing that some things just won’t port over nicely or at all (for example, the Windows BigBox theming system), pure and simple economics is the driving factor here. Even if the Steam Deck is relatively popular in the eyes of some users here, perspective is helpful. Valve informs us that Linux accounts for just over 1% of Steam gamers compared with Windows’s over 96% and that closely reflects the status of Linux as a gaming platform. Further, EmuDeck, RetroDeck and other tools have fast become the go-to choices among Steam Deck users, meaning there is entrenchment and acceptance of these free offerings that make that market more resistive to purchasing a paid product. Conclusion? Maybe when Steam Deck 2 or 3 comes out and the Linux has miraculously cracked 10% of the PC gaming market will it then be worthwhile for them to explore a Linux version in more depth with a faster development that more closely mirrors the cadence of their Windows and Android products. As it is though, Linux is far less lucrative than Windows or Android and therefore will stay on the back burner for the foreseeable future. If I were to peg a price tag on this pipedream, provided you could prove they’re were enough people interested in purchasing at that point, I would wager a price of at least double if not triple for yearly and lifetime licenses would be the absolute minimum price given the Herculean amount of work involved and significantly smaller user base. So if the price paid for the time and effort and if waiting five years more until Steam Deck 2 or 3 when maybe, just maybe Linux becomes more mainstream, then I will believe that Linux is worth us developing for. But until then, it is simply not realistic to push so much for Linux support.

For what it is worth, I voted for this feature as well just now. It is surprising GIF support isn’t there yet when @Jason Carr himself expressed interest in it about seven years ago in conversation of this BitBucket issue/feature request. At this point, though, as @Lordmonkus rightly brought up, implementing this feature might require significant refactoring to accommodate it depending on how the codebase is currently structured. I do think it is quite doable though as .NET Core does have support for GIF rendering.

I do not think it is a matter of ignoring the Steam Deck but picking battles, allocating limited manpower, and then hedging bets accordingly hoping that it will be the most profitable choice in the long haul. Recall too that ETA PRIME has a stake in LaunchBox and also is an expert himself in SBC, APU gaming, and handheld PCs and so he keeps a very watchful eye on the market more than us enthusiasts. I think if anyone there at LaunchBox might clue in the team to what he sees as a tidal wave of revenue in the emulation market that makes it worth the opportunity cost of development time, it would be him. All I know is right now, anecdotally, Steam Deck users are clamoring for a decent all-in-one emulation experience that scrapes halfway decently and is easily tweaked and tuned. No shocker, Steam ROM Manager’s built-in scraper is pretty bad right now, but commits and issue logs are hitting warp speed thanks to Steam Deck in stark contrast to the years of snail’s pace development. Meanwhile, even more exciting, EmuDeck only came out a week ago and is like a roller coaster ride, going from nothing to everything in a week’s time. Talk about breakneck development cycle and overnight viral sensation. EmuDeck leverages Steam Rom Manager and EmuDeck is seeing as much as hourly commits everyday now. Emulation is a top consideration for many if not most Steam Deck owners and EmuDeck’s Reddit announcement thread that blew up overnight much to everyone’s surprise including the developer is proof of it: EmuDeck already supports several dozen consoles now with no sign of slowing. It somehow now even supports Cemu which itself is not native to Linux. https://www.emudeck.com/

Wait?!? You already got it working? I am right now copying my Launchbox files over that’s great news if you did.

Mild correction here. Others including myself who have been closely following the Steam Deck long before when we just knew of just an obscure quote from Gabe Newell in mid 2021 and we pieced that together with AMD’s enigmatic Van Gogh, find SteamDB’s numbers to be a bit off the mark in this case. We are looking at annual production in the millions, given the fact that Valve is going for production totaling in the hundreds of thousands of units per month by April. That easily dwarfs the 110,000 preorder estimation and proof positive why SteamDB is often an educated guess at worst and sometimes a wildly off the mark guess at worst at that and not necessarily gospel truth. EDIT: That 110,000 number was for just the first 90 minutes. The total preorders as of late February are 810,000-900,000. That said, having spoke to a user who has been following this very closely, SteamDB’s algorithm is tuned to Steam software and not hardware and so preorders are likely already at 1 million-plus. Link: https://steamdb.info/app/1675180/graphs/

This is incredible work! I will be referencing these scripts over the next week as I get my Steam Deck configured to run all my roms. I wonder if a plug-in could be created to use these Linux scripts. Right now, the only option for rom management on the Steam Deck is Steam Rom Manager. When used with the Steam Deck’s UI, it at best just presents collections of roms by console. It displays box art, title, and not much more—very drab and droll. It is not at all granular, pleasing or robust like BigBox is. Right now, we have an incredible opportunity to grab a good chunk of Steam Deck users who want to emulate their games. I think if we concentrate on getting scripts written and we curate them and publish them, that should be a good starting point. Perhaps eventually a more user friendly option will present itself. I will focus on getting scripts adapted and made that use the Discover Flatpak emulator path locations for the emulators as well as rom file paths that point to either parent “Roms” folder under the “Deck” user home directory or a “Roms” folder under the MicroSD path. Offering ready-made scripts for these two folder paths schemes, that should make this as plug and play as possible for the Steam Deck users who want a slick interface with scrapping capabilities leagues better than anything else out there.

Likewise! I have a Steam Deck right now and while the Steam Rom Manager is alright for basic game launching, it is way behind LaunchBox and BigBox in navigating and managing a library.

If you ever feel adventurous, Discourse (the forum software founded by Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame) is very fun and flexible to use and comes highly recommended. (For one, it encourages using read time, meaning listening, instead of post count, or talking, to establish user reputation, and boy how many talking heads would this get to straighten their act up! 🤣) I am using Discourse right now as the new home for a well-frequented forum (forum.TabletPCReview.com community members are migrating forum.TabletPC.review which I operate) after the controlling interest, the tech marketing company TechTarget, decided to pull the plug on it and all the rest of the TechnologyGuide family of sites (bye, bye, Brighthand and NotebookReviews).

That’s true too, but there is something else too: unless both monitors have the same scaling factor, LaunchBox will only show up on monitor 1 in Windows. I adapted a script that launches BigBox that will change the scaling factor to the same for both monitors to overcome this Windows limitation.