arcademode

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.

Did more things, still crashing: - Ran BB and LB as Admin - Compatibility mode for BB and LB, Win8 and Win7 - Fresh installation - .net framework repair tool - manually doubled the default windows paging size - sfc repair in command prompt Googled up the dll error which brought the net framework repair and sfc scan ideas, didn't help of course. EDIT: Here's a kicker - tried a fresh installation on a different Windows 10 computer using the default theme. Still throws the ntdll.dll error as before. I'm going to try a full delete and reinstall on this other Win10 machine, just to make sure I'm not missing something.

Come join the fun! Here's a thread with more users having this same problem and there's no solution. Scroll up a few posts where I linked a thread dating back to 2019 where users are having the same issue:

Another thread and more users with this attract mode crash issue. Mentioning here because other users in this thread have mentioned removing the videos with no improvement. It would be good if we could all get on the same thread to aggregate the issues and testing.

Just tried removing the video folder, still crashes in the same way. Are all of your various PCs running the same version of Windows? Sidebar I also tried updating net framework. Crashes with and without video folders, so no change basically. @MrSco is the OP on the older thread which was started over 4 years ago now. It seems crazy to me that in 4 years none of the devs could replicate or remedy this fatal problem.

Yeah it's a bummer man. I'm starting to side with @faulkkev here, Bigbox is a paid product and the fact it's crashing while using attract mode isn't good since it's a pretty basic feature. This thread hasn't been updated in nearly a year so is this crash problem just not a priority or what? One would think such a crash would be high priority. EDIT: Good gracious, it appears to be some kind of ongoing issue and in some cases for several years. It seems there have been fixes along the way, no telling what or why though. Here is another (older) thread reporting attract mode crash issues:

Going from a 2 minute wait between to a 5 minute wait extended the life by about the same proportion as the ratio between 2 and 5. Similarly I decreased wait time to 2 seconds thinking it would proportionally make the crash occur faster, and it did. Crashed in under an hour with that setting. Another interesting note is that on a single boot, by the 3rd crash BigBox refused to relaunch completely. Attaching the error log for that. Tested with Slipstream and Default, same behaviour on both. So... memory issue? What can I do about that? I'd like to keep attract mode enabled if possible. BB wont open 1.txt

Which setting might that be exactly? Sorry, it' s not obvious to me what an override setting even is here let alone how to change it.

Experienced my first crash, a google search brought up this thread. Looks like it hasn't been touched in almost a year, how's everyone getting on these days? I had the default attract mode wait times and movement times set to default, trying the @divetravis settings above as previously suggested and hoping that works. EDIT: Event viewer says I'm out of memory after crashing about 3 hours or so into attract mode. I'll try a longer wait setting I guess? I'm on Win10 with 16gb RAM btw. Attaching error logs which shows memory issue. EDIT no 2: Still crashing with wait of 5, time between 2. Now testing 10 and 5 AND switched to Windows Media. Would more RAM help? Kind of a bummer that 16gb isn't cutting it. I'm pretty disappointed this isn't fixed actually. Coming from Hyperspin where crashing is a problem due to a Flash memory leak, I was hoping to avoid a similar problem with BigBox. At this point BigBox crashes way faster than HS. BigBox Error 2.txt BigBox Error.txt

@C-Beats Thanks for your help so far man! Related to this, I wanted to use the Game Details view from one theme so I tried copying that xaml into my current theme's folder but nothing happened. Can you give me any insight as to why that's happening?

Thanks man, making a copy of the discoveryview xaml into my current theme fixed things right up!

Well, now this is the absolute damnedest thing. So in another thread I started @C-Beats was answering some questions on changing up the on-screen button graphics. In particular I wanted to change the Discovery Center buttons. And now we've killed two birds with one stone in my case. This thread below says to copy the discoverypageview.xaml file from the default theme into your current theme. Well I did that, and by placing some new icons in the Image/Controller folder of the current theme I now have new icons at the bottoms AND Discovery Center is backing out using the BACK button. Pretty great!

Yeah ideally it would be cool to return back to exactly where you entered from, but again nothing is happening for me when I hit BACK within discovery center. The only way to get out was to "start over" in a sense and return to my home page of Platform Categories using a hotkey.

Dug into the forums a little, found this post: Disabling 3D boxes in the section: Game Details. Untick "Use 3d models for box images"

Tried swapping those icon files in the Default theme but they're still showing as A and B on screen. This is true for discovery center as well as using the standard default theme, not sure what I'm doing wrong here. I take it there's an edit process using visual studio for that code line?

Sometimes the PNG shows up correctly with transparent background (this is true for both Arcade Cabinets and other images in this slot) and sometimes there's a black background. Switching views removes this issue, you can see the transparent PNG arcade cabinet on the bottom right in the image below. So I know there's something right. Any ideas? CriticalZoneV2 and Default vertical views shown here. PNG with no black background at the bottom right:

In case anyone else comes across this issue, I still couldn't exit discovery center with the BACK button. The solution for me was to map a specific key to return to platform categories in the key binding settings. This way one button "opens" the discovery center and other "closes" it.

Poked around a bit couldn't find which file contains this line...

My default view on startup is set to Platform Categories. Shouldn't it exit discovery center and return to platform categories if I press "Back"?

I can get back to the system menu, I suppose I need to reframe the question. How can I return to platform view after opening the Discovery Center? It seems once Discovery Center is open there's no way to return to regular browsing. Pressing "back" isn't doing anything and returning to the system menu then selecting "Back" in the system menu just returns to Discovery Center instead of the default Platform view.

Oh lol that's funny. I'll try it, thanks!

Hmm, actually looking specifically at the Discovery Center I don't see the icon in my default folder for "back" which is an arrow pointing to the left. Where do I find the images for the controls in Discovery Center?

I can't seem to exit discovery center using my keyboard. Tried remapping the back button to a few different things, once Discovery center is started I can't get out of it.