Jason Carr

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.

Great to hear guys. It's definitely a feature I've enjoyed a lot myself as well.

Weird, looked at the log file. All I can figure is that those scores were saved previously in nvram and MAME moved them to the hi score file? I honestly don't know what MAME is doing here, or why this is only happening on your machine. At least they're scores that you actually achieved though, I guess. @GreatStone I see no reason to believe there's any issues with hi2txt here, but since I can't explain what's happening here, maybe you have an idea. Before launching MAME, we run hi2txt to pull and save the current scores. Then after MAME closes we compare the new scores to the old ones and remove any scores that were already there previously, so that we only upload supposed "new" scores. For some reason MAME seems to not be reporting those scores before launch, but after launch reporting them all as new scores. I don't think this is a big issue, but certainly a weird one. I haven't seen MAME behave that way any other time. I guess it could just be a custom MAME setting or something, idk.

Gotcha, I'm guessing what happened is that the score uploaded yesterday when you were testing out aspect ratios. It is possible for previous scores to upload if for some reason the process that reads the existing scores from hi2txt fails. That should be extremely rare, but we are still seeing one-off situations where the scores aren't read correctly, so I guess that can happen. @GreatStone has a bunch of fixes into hi2txt though, and we'll be updating it with his fixes for the next version, and that should help a lot. Regardless, even MAME itself sometimes goes haywire with scores, which obviously we can't 100% fix. All to say that we can get this system near-perfect, but it's probably never going to be 100% perfect, unfortunately. It is emulation after all.

Is it official MAME? What throws me off completely is that you're saying that score uploaded without even playing the game, which to be completely honest is 100% impossible. So something isn't adding up there, though it's hard to say what exactly happened without a log file or anything. I looked at the database and that 76,460 score was uploaded yesterday.

What version of MAME are you using?

You know what though, there have been enough changes already that it might be good to get an updated version of hi2txt into a beta, before then. It won't affect everyone, but at least it will help for folks who update to the betas. Up to you though; we can certainly wait too.

I'm not 100% on the release schedule yet, but I'm guessing that we'll want to put out the next official release on Monday, May 11th. So that would be the best time to get the new version integrated.