Jason Carr

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.

No worries, I can tweak that for the next beta.

Beta 4 is out now with the following: Improvement: When editing an emulator and setting it as the default for a platform, LaunchBox will now prompt you to update all additional apps to use that emulator as well (in addition to the main games that it was prompting for previously) Improvement: Additional logging has been added to the debug logs to assist GreatStone with debugging hi2txt issues The former issue should help solve problems that some people were having with updating their emulators on the main games but not the additional apps. Just set the platform as default for that emulator and you should be prompted to update the additional apps if any are found that don't match already.

Thanks @CriticalCid. I'll have @C-Beats review. He may ask for your data for testing.

@GreatStone So I was testing Centipede with the updated logging, and it just so happens that I ran into an issue with some corrupted scores. This includes the additional logging I've added for the next beta:

@GreatStone I added some extra logging for the next beta version, both to use -rd and to log the commandline that is run. Looks like that should help quite a bit.

I can certainly change that up to always use -rd. Will that get in the way of regular use? Is that a good idea? I can add some logging to report the command that is run as well.

Thanks, I'll get those scores removed. I have thought about adding a "score" type thing to Top Players, but we need to move on to other things for now, so it will probably be a while before we come back to adding things for the MAME high scores.

Hmm, the log files are saying that hi2txt isn't outputting anything at all, which is quite odd (first time I've seen that). I looked at the code and I'm not sure why that would be. Any ideas @GreatStone?

Bingo, thanks Neil. Sucks that it's enabled by default, but it's probably better to use that than to hack in a way to hide it.

I remember that issue from years ago, but hasn't come up in ages iirc. Where are you seeing a problem with that? That's pretty normal for apps these days, especially apps that use so much media. We can always reduce RAM usage, but performance is likely to suffer as a result.

Thanks, we're looking into that. Stupid Origin. This is mostly out of our control I think. I checked on my system and it doesn't appear to be doing that, but it's entirely controlled by Windows and WPF/XAML. It could be due to any number of things, from your video card or monitor drivers to your ClearType configuration, or even your resolution if you have a small resolution maybe. Previous versions had added in the new image types from the various integrations (Origin, Uplay, etc.), so that's my guess as to what's going on. We've cleaned all that up now though so that there's less stuff added and the defaults are much more paired down.

Beta 3 is out now with the following: Improvement: Buttons have been added to the image priority settings that will allow you to easily revert them to the defaults Fixed: Issues with the Origin import not showing any games Fixed: Rare issue where if you imported and combined MS-DOS GOG games into existing DOSBox games, Use DOSBox was checked on the GOG additional apps, which made them not work

Usually this happens when things fall behind, and it eventually will update with the correct view. Could be something I haven't seen before though. But unless I can replicate it, I can't really do anything to improve it.

So I've heard. Not sure if the LaunchBox community commonly uses those services or not. They're not my cup of tea, but maybe I'm not typical there. We might look to add something similar eventually if it becomes a common request.

I see. What theme are you using to get around that problem? Is it a custom one you've built yourself?

@C-Beats found some things that *could* be the problem. You'll have to test and let us know.

Beta 2 is out now with the following: New Feature: An import process for Origin has been added under Tools > Import > Origin Games, also working similarly to the latest Steam, GOG, and Epic import processes Improvement: The default image priority settings have been streamlined; you may want to review your image priority settings under Tools > Options > Legacy > Images in LaunchBox to make sure that you don't have any unecessary/unwanted image types selected Fixed: Introduced in 10.14, running another instance of LaunchBox or Big Box was always showing the already running message box, even when using controller automation to focus LaunchBox or Big Box Fixed: If a recent or favorite game was selected when Big Box entered attract mode, it would incorrectly launch the game Fixed: Big Box losing focus no longer closes certain popup dialogs that should stay open Fixed: Big Box background music was not respecting the shuffle setting in all situations

I see. That dialog should be coming up pretty quickly, so I wouldn't think windows should be open under normal circumstances. But I agree, it'd be better if the update notifications weren't done in a popup like that.