Jason Carr

Beta 10 is out now with the following: Fix for closing the Download Platform Theme Videos window before the initial population is complete Fixes for some Origin issues reported above Fixes for various Audit issues reported above Various additional fields added to Audit Download Metadata and Media will no longer prompt about storefronts that you don't have in your collection

@mcfilmmakers Okay, first off, why do you have 837 platforms? It seems like you have platforms that should probably be defined as playlists instead. I've never seen that many platforms before in any collection, so who knows, maybe you've reached some kind of upper limit that we've never seen before. Your total number of games though is only 34,000, which is nowhere near the largest number of games that I've seen. That's why it's puzzling though having that 837 platforms. That said, in the past with collections like this I've seen massive issues with platform names not matching the XML names, and similar issues like that. By chance, have you manually altered the XML files by hand, or used any third-party tools? To be honest, this collection is a real doozy.

At this point, nothing can really be looked into from that front. Could have been caused by a million and one things, including killing the app or a related crash to the above.

I'm seeing a couple of concerning things in the logs: 2020-05-15 02:02:56 PM FIRST CHANCE EXCEPTION: The given path's format is not supported. at System.Security.Permissions.FileIOPermission.EmulateFileIOPermissionChecks(String fullPath) This means that somewhere, somehow, there's an invalid file system path in your data. That could cause these issues, so we should look into that. I'm seeing a lot of this in the logs. 2020-05-15 02:02:56 PM FIRST CHANCE EXCEPTION: Pixel format not supported. at System.Windows.Media.Imaging.ColorConvertedBitmap.FinalizeCreation() This means that there's most likely at least one corrupted image somewhere in your collection. I doubt this is the cause of these issues though. I've really only looked at the latest log, but I think the first issue is a likely culprit. I'll dive in deeper with your data to see if I can figure anything further out.

@mcfilmmakers Clearly something is wrong, but it's tough to figure out what's happening without being able to replicate it. First things first, are you on Windows 7 or Windows 10? Make sure you're all up to date with Windows updates. Beyond that, I'm not quite sure where to go from there. Perhaps if you can zip up and send me your Logs folder, I can search through it and see if I can find any clues. The error messages you posted above are normal and shouldn't be causing any of those issues.

Okay. Are you on Windows 7 or Windows 10? Are you all up to date with your drivers and Windows Updates?

Hi @MrSco, that is possible. Sorry if you've already answered this, but are you using the VLC or the Windows Media Player video playback engine?

Force quitting LaunchBox can and will cause you to lose any and all data changes; it can even just straight up corrupt your data. That's the nature of a force quit. You've somehow got all kinds of issues on that machine, most of which I have never seen before. At this point I'm wondering if there's something fishy going on with the system somehow. I have your data to do some further testing, so I'll see if I have any issues. So far though I haven't run into any issues with your data.

We added a check on additional apps. It didn't do that previously.

You do have a LOT of arcade platforms lol. If it's asking you to confirm, then it means that you have some games or additional applications that are not set to MAME.

Thanks, good to know. I could be wrong, but the above log file doesn't look right either. Let me know if you can reproduce it with a definite log file. I suppose it's possible that a log file isn't created when that happens. You can look at the date/time on the file to know if it's new or not though.

I see. We fixed an issue related to controllers that happens only when first starting up Windows (Windows glitch). I'm guessing it's fixed in the betas. Can you update to the betas and test?

Just read that these issues are happening with 10.14. We have specific fixes in place for issues closing in the 10.15 betas. Please, if you post in the beta thread and aren't using the latest beta, please note that in every post. Otherwise, it's too easy to get confused as to what's going on. It would be really helpful if you could update to the betas to confirm whether or not you still have these issues @mcfilmmakers.

You mean not closing and staying open in Task Manager? This baffles me, because I've never seen anything like that, unless it's a new issue with recent betas. Guess we better do some further testing on that to confirm. Did you have any issues like that with 10.14? I see. This is starting to make slightly more sense. Perhaps we're not always saving a platform properly when moving it into another category. Is that the *only* thing that you've seen not being saved? The other possibility is that there's somehow an issue with your data that is preventing certain platform XMLs from being saved. Can you zip up and PM me your data folder?

That's a new issue that I've never heard of. The log file you posted though shows that LaunchBox loaded up the main window and was running it, so it doesn't look like it's the correct log file for that instance. It would be good to see the correct log file if you have it. Have you ever run into this issue again? If LaunchBox eventually disappeared on its own, that means that most likely it was still saving things in the background. Unless Windows magically killed it, idk, but I've never seen that happen. What changes did you make that didn't save?

Sorry, yes, I misspoke. If you delete the ThirdParty/7-Zip folder, you have to reinstall over top in order to re-create it. I don't think anyone will need to delete that folder after all. Yes, we can add that before the official release. This is probably because the Scrape As value is being used. It's still using the platform name, though it uses the Scrape As value if it's populated. Got it, thanks. I'll put that on the list. What theme are you running? It sounds like I'm going to have to do some further testing on this issue. I haven't seen it since I made the changes in the beta, but I have seen it reported a few times since.

The reason why we use the game's region is for correctness, really. Most No-Intro ROMs these days have the region listed in the file names, so we can accurately follow the region in during import. If you import European ROMs, you should get European boxes if they are available. To be honest, I don't think we'll be changing that, but I suppose we could add an option to override that eventually. Regardless, yes, you can always either change or empty out the Region field on the games, or just move the media. But honestly, at that point, you're technically making things less correct/accurate.

@natedog Very cool, and good to hear. I don't really have a solution for the issue of it re-downloading artwork that you don't want, other than to just uncheck those categories so new media doesn't download for those categories. In theory, you can just put your default image into the XAML directly, and then if the image is available it can just put it over top. That might have some issues though with the transitions. Otherwise, there are some more complicated solutions, but I don't have the XAML for them readily available (I'd have to hunt through all the themes on the forums).

It appears that there are some slower-than-normal speeds going on for some reason, yes. @C-Beats has also been experiencing slow speeds yesterday and today. Hopefully it's just because something went down somewhere in the Internet infrastructure and so things are taking an alternate route for some people. I've got full speeds, but apparently not everyone does. But first off, sorry for the trouble. It is unfortunately not true that downloading things from the games database will always max out every connection from everyone in the world. Sadly, that's impossible. We don't control every node from the servers to everyone's PC. We've never moved to a distributed system, no. We're just not that full of cash, unfortunately. Building a distributed system across the world is crazy expensive. Amsterdam is the *only* node. In the past, we've been able to fix some speed issues by tracing routes and contacting our host. But it is an extensive process and requires running a bunch of tests on the destination network. However, I have a hunch that this is only a temporary issue. We can contact our host and pursue this further though if it doesn't resolve itself soon.

Beta 9 is out now with the following: Fixed the Retro Score in the Game Details Sidebar not hiding if unchecked Fixed a potential null reference error when playing games Audit should now be up to par and ready to go (various things fixed and added) Fixed the 7-zip wrong version issue (but it's not force-updated for this version so you may need to delete the LaunchBox\ThirdParty\7-Zip folder in order to fix)

I believe that popup depends on the platform name for the game. What platform is it? Not really sure what would be causing it then, but it does sound like it's somehow performance related. Any chance it's still populating the cache in the background when this happens? How long have you waited for it to update? I'll review the CEF closing thing again then to see if there's anything further I can do.

This looks to be the same issue that should have been resolved in the betas, caused by the Chromium Embedded Framework refusing to shut down. Are you running 10.14 or the betas? I'm wondering if this is somehow a driver issue or something weird like that. If anything, it's probably related to video drivers. I know that doesn't likely help, but I haven't been able to reproduce it so I don't really know how to solve it. Do you feel like it's a new issue in recent versions? Can you go back and test an old version to see if it's only the new versions?

So apparently we included the "7za" version of 7-Zip, which apparently doesn't extract as many formats as the normal version. That was my mistake; thanks for bringing that to my attention before the official release. I'll get that fixed for the next beta. Version is available currently in the Arrange By drop down, but I see that it's not currently available in the filters side bar. Is that what you mean?

To be honest, I think that's a glitch. I checked to make sure that no pending items were left before I archived them. I'll have to look into why that's not updating.

So the gaussian blur process that blurs the backgrounds does require some heavy processing, but I've never seen it cause severe performance issues. Are you using a USB drive or anything with slow disk access? It does write a new temporary image file to the drive to do it. It also uses multi-threading to attempt to do it quickly, but it should only use the number of cores available on your CPU. Still, I suppose older CPUs could be more affected by it.