Jason Carr

Responded in your other thread. Please don't double-post in the future.

@Cronos74 Removed that score as it did look corrupted. We'll need to report the samsho issue to @GreatStone. Please see this thread:

Thanks @nullgolem. Unfortunately the current Retro Achievements API doesn't really allow us to do a whole lot more with the Retro Achievements data. We could maintain a local copy of the data, but it would easily get out of date, so could be cause for lots of issues. The API currently doesn't allow for any kind of batch download of the data, and if we tried to just force it, we could end up bringing down the Retro Achievements servers. The Retro Achievements team is working on improvements to the API, but we're not sure when they'll be released. For the MAME high scores, we could implement those things for custom playlists, yes, though we would need to add a lot of pieces for it. I do really like that idea though.

Can you revert to the official release to see if you can reproduce it with 10.14? I'm doubtful that anything has been added recently that could cause any new crashes. I could always be wrong though. It may end up being data-related (or driver-related for that matter), which is why I'm curious if it works correctly with 10.14.

Beta 7 is out now with the following: Improvement: New "NavigationInProgress", "NavigationStartedCounter", and "NavigationEndedCounter" property bindings have been added for Big Box theme developers in order to provide better triggers for animations and improve performance (see the updated theme documentation) Fixed: The Origin issue that @CriticalCid posted above

What Big Box theme are you running? This is on our list. Not sure the timeframe for it though. Thanks for catching this, Cid.

There was a poll, but it was a while ago. It turned out that lots of people were interested in a Linux version, but very few were willing to pay for it, which unfortunately is a common theme at this point. So it was clear that it was not a good business decision. I will say though that if development tools were up to snuff on Linux, we would have already attempted it regardless, because I would love to see it personally myself as well. Microsoft's development technologies are just light years above everything else though, so it would be a major challenge for us to bring it to Linux. The main piece that is not available currently on Linux is WPF, which we use for our theming engines for both LaunchBox and Big Box. So currently, moving it to Linux would require rewriting the theming engine completely (as well as dropping all existing themes and requiring all new themes), so that is currently largely a deal-breaker.

For anyone reporting issues, please update to the latest beta. There are fixes to both the high scores in LaunchBox and an update to hi2txt, which should fix many issues. Let me know of any issues that you're still experiencing with the latest beta release (10.15-beta-6). Also, just as a reminder, keep in mind that we won't be able to help with much of anything without a debug log attached. Please see the first post of this topic for instructions. @Elhora @Ateb @alnyden @nicr4wks

Beta 6 is out now with the following: Improvement: A new "NavigationInProgress" property binding has been added for Big Box theme developers in order to provide a better trigger for animations and improve performance Improvement: The LaunchBox Big Box Custom Themes Documentation has been updated (available here: LaunchBox\Themes\Documentation.pdf) Fixed: @C-Beats' above-mentioned fixes for the Origin import Translation updates

Thank you all. I have the translations updated for the next beta (beta 6), which should be out shortly.

There are some unfortunate known issues with the pause themes and any Big Box themes that use eatkinola's themer plugin. This was a recent discovery. I'm guessing if you switch to a theme that doesn't use that plugin, the issues will likely go away. Can you test?

Lol, I wouldn't have just lopped off the discussion like that @Lordmonkus, but I suppose it is rather off-topic. I do think it's pretty silly to argue that mobile devices are real competition with PC hardware performance-wise. Ultimately that's a moot point either way though and doesn't really have anything to do with our decision to stop Android development.

Yeah, I can see the appeal there. I know there's a vocal group of current LaunchBox users that would love to see something like that, but unfortunately I think the audience would be too small for us to tackle.

I agree that most likely the emulation scene will continue on Android in one way or another; I'm sure ways will be found to get around any further limitations that Google introduces. After all, anything can be done by simply rooting the device. But that's not really a business model we want to pursue (one that requires hacking or tinkering in order to get anything to work), mostly because traffic will likely be fairly minimal in that case (or at least even less than we were seeing on Android already). Windows and Android definitely are two different use cases; our vision was not to create "LaunchBox for Windows" on Android, even though ultimately that's what most customers request and will eventually expect. If we were tethered to the PC in any way, that would significantly reduce our audience on Android to even less than it was previously, which is again a deal breaker. The interface that we had built really didn't have anything to do with the problems on Android. I agree that it was close, and we weren't far off from good enough, at least. But it's a launcher, and if you can't launch games, then who cares. Most of the issues stem from launching games and returning to the frontend. We did also have major issues with the import processes however, due to some terrible stability issues and Android having a tendency to kill apps that use large amounts of resources.

The problem is that it's all convoluted garbage and no one knows what will or will not hold up in a court of law. But yes, the general understanding is that if you're willing to release the source code for your paid product, then you can do it, but that's hardly a good business model. As far as I'm concerned, the GPL's stipulations between dynamically linking to GPL software vs. just launching it is completely absurd. Legally it's just a huge mess. The market on Android is significant, but it is less than we thought going into it, that's for sure.

Unfortunately this is impossible to do legally. Most open source licenses very clearly ban integrating things like Retroarch cores directly into a paid product. It *is* done quite a bit on Android despite this, but it's not legal, so it's definitely not something we're interested in pursuing.

Beta 5 is out now with the following: Improvement: The included version of 7-zip has been updated to version 19.00, which provides some significant performance improvements when extracting files and creating archives, especially on 64-bit machines Improvement: The included version of hi2txt has been updated to version 1.12, which adds support for new games and fixes various issues. Huge thanks to GreatStone for all his work on hi2txt!

I'm just confused as to why that popup would show up after an update, because a successful update should be impossible if LaunchBox or Big Box are running in the background. I guess we'll see what the log file says for the next update. Is anyone else running into any issues on updating?

I don't think that has been requested, actually. But noted.

Ah, I didn't catch that you mentioned platform fanart. Currently, I think the only way to not do that is just to remove any platform fanart.

On top of what Neil said, I'm sure you're not alone in your opinions, but the difference in quality of life between Windows and Android is enormous. One of the biggest issues is that we just felt like we were fighting with Google every step of the way. On Windows we have the control and the ability to produce an excellent product, but on Android, we were forced to cut way too many corners and forced to put out a product that we were not fully happy with, and the proper vision that we had in our head turned out to be impossible. It's impressive what some of the other frontend developers have been able to do on Android, but if you compare them to what's available on Windows, it's a night and day difference. And I don't buy that it's because it's a handheld platform; it's not. It's because of poor OS design decisions and artificial limitations.

Yeah, looks like a glitch happened there somehow. I've removed that score. Unfortunately to troubleshoot it though, we'll need a debug log so that @GreatStone and I can look into it.

You're saying the install runs and completes while Big Box is running? That should make the install fail if Big Box is running in the background, because it won't be able to copy the files. Confused here. As far as I'm aware, the latest beta should fix any issues with Big Box not closing. If you're still seeing that issue, can you send me a debug log? There are actually many more third party stores, not just Rockstar unfortunately. There's Blizzard, Humble Bundle, and a bunch of other stores that I'm forgetting about for right now. We may add them eventually, yes, but there's so many of them that "for completeness" feels impossible unfortunately. Yes, LaunchBox saves XMLs for a bit after closing the window, so do make it sure you give it time to do that before killing the process, or you may end up with corrupted data. We're hoping that any closing issues have been solved with these betas though. If not, please send me a debug log. I see. I'm not sure if our installer has a solution for that or not. I'll put it on the list.

Yes, background image priorities. You can just turn them all off.