Jason Carr

Next month, LaunchBox for Solaris.

The sky is falling! Y'all, how many times have people freaked out because they were convinced that the "golden age" of LaunchBox development was over? It happened when Music Box Alpha first came out, it happened when .Next was in development, and it happened several times before that for various unmerited reasons. Nothing changed for the worse on any of those occasions, despite various people's concerns. This time it will be no different. So you can "no longer expect any great enhancements" all you want; I guess you'll just continue to be pleasantly surprised. I would appreciate it though if you guys would try not to spread unnecessary panic and fear, and try to be more positive instead.

Just to update everyone, I am currently focusing on Android development. The Android app ended up in the top ten in the poll, and over 30% of users want it, so I definitely think it's worth tackling at this point. I plan to spend the next month or so mostly focusing on Android development, including the desktop features that will also be needed. I tweeted out this image as a sneak peak:

These are the features we'll focus on for the foreseeable future, yes.

It's been like ten years since I jumped out of a plane; I'm waiting to take my son when he gets old enough. To be honest, I will probably eventually improve the marquees regardless, at least once I finally get my own marquee screen in place on my cab.

I think it is possible, but honestly I'm no longer the greatest XAML guru around here. It would probably take me a couple of hours to figure it out, all considering. I know @eatkinola has done some pretty advanced stuff like this in the past.

The platforms list is not nestable like this; however, I believe if you use the platform categories list, and edit your platforms not to be in a platform category (put them in the root), then you should be able to pull off what you're looking for here.

This is a really neat project created by @Echoshard1: Back when this came out, I was really excited about it and wanted to head more in the direction of VR, but honestly the community wasn't really all that into it, so we didn't end up taking that direction any further.

The top half (#1-20) are planned to be tackled before the next poll. The only way they won't be is if I run into some kind of problem that makes it not feasible, but that's unlikely. Some of the bottom half I will likely tackle as well, but they're not guaranteed.

Hi @topdog5050, this error looks to be happening because of a file permissions error, or some other issue reading that particular "E:\LaunchBox\Data\Platforms\Cave.xml" file on your hard drive. I'm not sure what would be causing that, but something on your system is preventing LaunchBox from accessing the file. I would guess that it's most likely an issue with file system permissions.

The poll is closed! The results are below. I posted them on the first page of this topic as well. # Item User Votes Percentage of Users Who Voted 1 Xbox Controller and PS4 Controller Home Button Support 1,062 62.54% 2 Icons for Types of Controls (Keyboard/Mouse, PS4/Xbox Controller, Wiimote, Nunchuk, etc.) 746 43.93% 3 Backup and Restore Options for Data and Settings 687 40.46% 4 Video Clip Grabber for Missing Videos 608 35.81% 5 Indicator/Icon for Games with Multiple Versions Available 594 34.98% 6 Filter to Games with Missing Media 590 34.75% 7 Retro Achievements Gamer Score, Profile, and Leaderboards 567 33.39% 8 Add Alternate Names, Game Type, Max Players, Wikipedia Link, and Video Link fields from the LaunchBox Games Database to LaunchBox 544 32.04% 9 New Paid Android Version (Select Games on the Desktop, Export to Android) 539 31.74% 10 Visual icon/indicator for Broken Games 535 31.51% 11 Media Cleanup Overhaul - Review/Change Items, Move to Folder or Delete 525 30.92% 12 Option to Manually Check for Updates 524 30.86% 13 Integrate MAME High Scores and Show Community Scores 499 29.39% 14 Bulk Edit Platform and Move Media to Proper Folders 497 29.27% 15 Big Box Theme-Specific Settings (Save and Restore Settings for Each Theme) 474 27.92% 16 Automatic Multi-Disc Playlist Creation for Retroarch 470 27.68% 17 Integrated Retroarch Netplay Lobby Browser 458 26.97% 18 Big Box Wall View Overhaul 451 26.56% 19 Option to Force Update Games Database Metadata 446 26.27% 20 Auditing Overhaul - Add Missing Fields and Allow Full-Library Audits 434 25.56% 21 Add Sort By Options to Big Box (another item in the alphanumeric list) 433 25.50% 22 Marquee Video Support, Customization Options for Placement and Image Types 422 24.85% 23 Steam Achievements in Details like Retro Achievements 422 24.85% 24 New Document Fields for Hintbooks, Cheats, and Maps 417 24.56% 25 Game Screenshot Grabber 410 24.15% 26 Proper Support for MAME Software Lists 392 23.09% 27 API importer for GOG 387 22.79% 28 Previous and Next Buttons in LaunchBox Edit Window 365 21.50% 29 Platform-specific Zoom and Aspect Ratios for LaunchBox 332 19.55% 30 Per-Game AutoHotkey Script Support 329 19.38% 31 Display Platform/Playlist/Category Information in the LaunchBox Game Details Sidebar when No Game is Selected 327 19.26% 32 Amiga WHD Name Conversion (Like MAME) 325 19.14% 33 Bulk Edit Additional Apps 294 17.31% 34 Allow Launch With for Additional Apps/Versions 282 16.61% 35 Big Box Parental Restrictions (Use Pin Code to Hide Games with Certain Ratings) 251 14.78% 36 Proper Support for Year-Only Release Dates 250 14.72% 37 Option to Name Media via ROM File Name instead of Game Title (where possible, won't work for non-ROM-based platforms) 235 13.84% 38 Disable Certain Controllers (such as Flight Sticks), Multiple Controllers with Different Bindings 222 13.07% 39 Option to Reverse Sort Order in LaunchBox 217 12.78% 40 Parsec Integration 173 10.19%

The way the results are displayed above are misleading, because they are displayed in relation to each other, instead of relation to the number of users that voted for that particular feature. For this use case, that would make much more sense. If you look at the number of users who voted on certain features on the right though, you can see that there are some major differences between items. The #1 item has received 1,062 votes, which is 62% of the users who voted, while the last item only received 173 votes, which is around 10%. I'll be closing the poll very shortly and then posting the final results; I'll include that information.

What sort of VR are you looking for @Detran?

Putting it in the Start menu Startup section is how we typically recommend doing it, and I haven't heard of startup times being problematic like that, so I'm still lost on that. There is a way to boot into Big Box as the shell, but we don't generally recommend that. There are threads around here with instructions for that, but I don't have a link handy, so you would need to search, but that might be a good test at least.

Honestly I don't know why that is. I have several similar setups and I've never seen anything like that. How are you starting Big Box on startup? The Start menu's Startup folder?

Do you have a spinning hard drive or an SSD? How fast is the spinning hard drive? I'm guessing startup performance is so slow because of your hard drive, and you probably have lots of things competing for load time on boot up, which ends up slowing it down more.

I brought this up in the poll items brainstorming live stream, but unfortunately there wasn't much interest. So for now, at least, it's not yet available.

There are strengths and weaknesses to open source projects, but I personally don't believe that open source would suit this project well, neither from a development perspective nor from a financial/business perspective (the latter being the most negatively affected). I know I'm biased, but I see the issues that so many open source projects struggle with consistently that we have never struggled with, because of our different approach. The plugin system is powerful, but not likely extensive enough to create an entire profile system. But regardless, if you're sharing your system with other people, all you have to do is create separate instances/copies of LaunchBox for each person. You can even just copy the entire LaunchBox folder.

Yeah, the Emulation section is fine. I wish I could comment on this stuff, but I don't know much about Ultimarc 360 controllers or setting up ipacs.

The first step would be to answer the original question I posted above:

Also, I dare say that this is one benefit of a paid software solution over an open source donations-based project: I get to work on what the community wants as a whole, instead of a small handful of more wealthy users with money to spend.

The point is that LaunchBox is profitable right now, at least as much as I need to continue development for a long time. I don't take bounties because I don't need to, and I would prefer to do what the community as a whole wants, and not one particular user.

There might be, though it would be cludgy, if possible. I don't think it's something we can build into LaunchBox, but you can certainly experiment with batch files or something like that.

I feel you @^Manu, but unfortunately this is more of an issue with Steam than anything else. As far as I've found, there's no way to switch Steam accounts without actually logging out and signing in to a different account. It's actually been such a pain for my family that I mostly stopped buying Steam games a long time ago, as the DRM is just way too restrictive. I haven't fully tested the scenario, but I don't believe that using runas would get around Steam's logins and allow you to have two Steam users logged in at once.

Ah, yes; that has come up before a few times. It would be pretty awesome to have game streaming built-in, though I can imagine it would be rather difficult. I'll add this to my ideas list as well.