arcademode

Just emailed back and forth a bit with Brian again, my crash has returned - kind of? I updated to the newest version, then experienced the Attract crash, then reverted to my last stable install but the crash remains. The weird thing is I have an older PC upstairs and when I put my BB drive in there it will still run for days. So there's some hardware conflict of some kind happening somewhere. For now I'm just leaving attract off when I want to run it for long periods. Sucks that you don't get the attract mode but it's much better than having no front end active when you want to walk up and play.

Check out my comment a few posts up - I recommend getting in touch with the devs directly via email. You can exchange your Windows Logs to help them diagnose exactly what's going on. They're certainly improving the issue but without knowing any specifics from your logs there's only so much that can be done.

I figured c-beats was on the team, always coming in with informed assistance!

Prior to the fix I was unable to reopen Big Big without a computer restart after a Big Box crash - something to do with the .NET framework getting screwed up. I had a very long back and forth with LB dev Brian via email where I provided tons of logs and tests to him and he was able to make the latest patch with that. He mentioned the following; "...it's more likely a page filing crash of some kind that's all controlled by .NET. The way .NET is supposed to work is that it's supposed to take care of this stuff automatically. It's one of the benefits of using a framework like this. This indicates there's something inherently wrong with what it's doing here, and we'll have to see what we can do to patch this up." I recommend reaching out to the dev team directly so they can investigate your logs and (hopefully) get to the bottom of the issue. I think I may get a slightly sluggish issue people are talking about, but it's only after running for a VERY long time and there seems to be no crash for me anymore.

Heyo! Please check out the latest beta which has a patch to direct the .net memory issue. Big thanks to the devs for tackling this directly! In my testing it is much more stable so far.

Exactly that, yeah. If I add the badge asset in a custom theme the option to show my custom controller isn't in the dropdown menu.

I had some success implementing custom badges inside LB, but I can't get a grasp on the BigBox integration. The custom gamepad options aren't showing up in the theme creator, not sure where to go from here or what kind of workaround to try. Thanks in advance!

Hey gang, thought I'd chime in with some positive notes here on this somewhat bleak thread; Brain over on the LB dev team has been emailing with me back and forth trying to sort this out. He's narrowed it down a good bit and digging deep, so kudos to him and his efforts. I'll update here when I know more.

Starting to experience this one myself a little. Crickets in the thread

Quick interjection, at least 4 times in the last two weeks I've had a NEW crash source in libvlc.dll. The error dll is the one included with Launchbox. Anyone else having this issue? I was chatting with Brian a bit on email about the attract crash. He seemed to think it might be related to some plugins or CTC themes or custom themes or whatever, but it was still crashing with a fresh installation. So to recap the only long-term stable installation had the following characteristics; A completely fresh installation VERY small game list (29 games) No art assets added of any kind (no images or videos at all) All transitions set to NONE Adding some art caused a crash, adding more games caused a crash, having transitions on caused a crash. Not sure if this is helpful or leading to any progress but I figure it's useful to have more test scenarios and data. I'll keep trying stuff, different combos of setups. In the meantime I hope Brian comes through with a discovery!

Man is there like a Discord for Flycast or something? I can launch the game from a batch file sometimes but when I try to launch it from Launchbox (pointed to said batch file) I swear it just never boots. The green Naomi boot screen comes up but hangs. When it works its really cool. I was able to get F355 booting in Deluxe mode and got my 6 gear shifter working with it via emulated controller. Here's the video that game me the clues on how to set it up. This video is for Demul but the principal is the same:

Odd, the other thread where I was commenting about search was locked - and this just ahead of a search update. Would have been nice to close the discussion there, apropos of the search update. Excited to test it out!

Actually yeah, no dice. I set all my transitions to NONE and it still crashed. I should have known this would have no effect actually since running the ahk automated browsing with default transitions (various fade and slides or whatever) was stable. EDIT: Wait a dang minute - actually on my other PC with a perfectly fresh installation zero transition mode might be working. Previously this freshie installation was also crashing. 2nd EDIT: This merits further testing. The fresh install is done on my desktop with 48gb ram, so memory wasn't really a bottleneck and there was still crashing before with lots of testing variables - last of which included a fresh installation with only 29 games on the list and ZERO media added of any kind, so no logos, no videos etc. It was still crashing despite these restrictions! Turning off all transitions was stable for 12 hours with Default theme, and just now another 12 hours with Slipstream. I'm going to keep testing, running it for longer and with other themes, then test on my full installation to see what happens. Very interesting find @JimV! I'm curious if we can get some other users to test this out! 3rd EDIT: So far Default is the only stable theme. Tested with a couple others, both crashed. Also Default crashed when I added in more games and some art, so something isn't happy. Still testing...

Super interesting stuff @jimv thanks for the insight. The them I'm mostly testing with (besides some testing with "default") only has "Fade" transitions, no quick fade. I can certainly make an attempt by turning all all transitions, that's something I have not yet attempted.

Ok so I deleted my Launchbox installation on the other Win10 machine (which has 48gb ram, so there's not ram bottleneck here) and did a completely fresh installation. Setting attract mode to the fastest settings (10 sec wait, 5 sec between) to force the fastest crash and bigbox crashed in <2 hours. Ntdll.dll error, same as before. (EDIT: important detail excluded. This installation pulled my 30 windows games into the database and I didn't grab any additional media. So no videos, some gameplay screenshots, and maybe 20% of the list had a clear logo. So the issue doesn't seem to be media related) So what are the odds of it being a Windows problem? In my estimation, low. Testing with my other Win10 machine (which has all the ram headroom and an up-to-date windows install) against the not-so-up-to-date original PC and experiencing the same error seems more like a bigbox problem, right? Happy to provide any additional information to assist in getting this fixed. I was able to replicate the bug at random on my only other Windows 10 machine, so the devs should be able to replicate this issue. Is there any hope of this getting fixed, seeing as how similar issues seem to have been plaguing bigbox for years in attract mode? Another edit so I can stop blowing up this thread: Testing a couple more things now; 1.) AHK script to manually scroll down a list. I'm curious if it's related to the Attract Mode programming, or if simply scrolling through the list causes a crash. Obviously if it's the latter that's a big problem because the crash could occur during normal browsing if you look at enough games 2.) Way back in page 2 or 3 of this thread Jason suggested upgrading to Desktop Runtime 3.1.8. and a user said that helped. I had a slightly older version installed (and 6.0 which I think was installed by a game? not sure but I'm checking into it). So after the AHK test (which seems to be going OK so far) I'll test with Runtime 3.1.8. LATER THE SAME DAY (EDIT)... So the AHK script successfully navigated my MAME list for way longer than Attract Mode would have worked, around 4 hours. The thinking behind testing in this manner was to rule out any memory errors in loading media. I can test it longer but after scrolling through about 1800 MAME titles (all with video, png, screenshots - the works) everything was smooth sailing. This seems to indicate an error in the Attract Mode feature itself, no? I then tested the system with Runtime 3.1.8 and Attract Mode enabled and we're back to crash city.