Jason Carr

Beta 5 is out now with a fix for @kmoney's reported issue and a couple of other minor bugs. I'm calling this the release candidate so speak up if anyone notices any issues.

Unfortunately that's not conclusive; it could be either your particular hardware or drivers on that Windows 7 PC as well. But I'm glad you're up and running.

Yeah, unfortunately this is not currently possible, though it has been on my list for a while.

Unfortunately pause screens just require hacks, and that's about all there is to it. That's why I refused to tackle them for so many years. So what tends to happen is that driver developers have glitches in the drivers that only come out in these odd scenarios. So it can be very hardware-specific. I would also check for driver updates. I've pretty much done all I can do with them, and sadly we're never gonna get 100% perfect coverage. It works on the vast majority of machines, but there's always going to be a few here and there that have trouble with the startup and/or pause screens.

Ah, thanks. I've fixed this for the next beta so that the working directory changes to the DOSBox version that's being used. I need to know the language that you're using in order to fix the issue. Okay; can you screenshot me your background music folder? All I can figure is that maybe it's caused by file or folder structure.

It's possible that for some reason VLC was not being accelerated by the GPU.

During testing, do make sure you stick with the themes that are built-in to Big Box (available in the themes downloader), as they have been fully tested and are known stable themes. Sometimes themes from the forums can have minor issues. However, I'm not convinced that that's the issue that you're running into here, based on the themes that you've tested. Per Windows Media Player, it definitely sounds like a codec issue, or a theme issue, or a combination of those issues. There are some themes from the forums that do not work properly with WMP or VLC or vice versa. So first off, stick with a theme from the built-in themes manager, then try Windows Media Player. Per VLC, there is a known issue with some of themes from the forums that they can cause performance issues. It's possible that your system specs are too low, or that you're just testing themes that have that issue. If you use themes from the built-in themes manager, that should not be a problem, however.

This could be related to Windows 7, but also sometimes certain drivers can cause issues, as well as some background applications. The first thing to try though is going into your Retroarch emulator settings in LaunchBox and make sure "Forceful Pause Screen Activation" is checked.

This sounds like it could be an issue with a particular theme. What theme are you using @pomod?

This was on the last poll and I'll probably put it on this next poll as well. Unfortunately it wasn't highly voted for on the last poll.

I believe I've heard about this issue before, but I can't seem to replicate it. I just tested it on my machine and it shuffled at least 5 tracks correctly. Does it happen every time? Is there something you're doing in Big Box that causes it? Also, is it global background music or is it platform-specific?

Yes, I do plan on it. Most likely I'll announce the time in the next upcoming email (I plan to send it after the 9.10 release). Yes, it should recreate the folder. I really have no idea why playing music would cause a crash like that. Do you have the exact error message? Do videos play okay with VLC? It could be that whatever custom version of DOSBox you're using changed the command-line parameters (that would be irritating). What version of DOSBox are you using? Unfortunately bezels are still way out of the question. Displaying stuff on top of fullscreen exclusive mode emulators generically just isn't possible. I've discussed this many times, but Rocket Launcher forces windowed mode to do it, and that's not something that we're going to do. Bezels are much better handled by the emulators themselves, and considering that Retroarch covers nearly everything these days, I don't consider it to be much of a priority anyways. I've tested and fixed the startup sound hitching on all five of my test machines (with various hardware speeds and such), and it's fixed on all of them, but I suspected that it might not be fixed everywhere. Unfortunately it's not something that I can make perfect, considering that we don't really want to slow down load times to make 100% sure that it doesn't hitch.

I'll take a look at that bug. I suspect that maybe it's an issue with your particular translation? Can you try switching to English to see if it's still an issue? That would help me troubleshoot it. The platform info actually comes with LaunchBox, so it should be included from the beginning. There's not really any platform scraping available currently. I'm not sure if there's a way that you could end up with a platform that doesn't have info in it, unless it was created a very long time ago or something like that.

Beta 4 is out now with the following: New Feature: Game-specific custom DOSBox versions can now be used for DOSBox games, instead of always using the version of DOSBox that is built-in to LaunchBox. You can find a new field for custom DOSBox version under the DOSBox tab when editing games, and it is also available in bulk edits. Improvement: The Big Box startup sound should now do better at not hitching Improvement: Updated Japanese, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese translations This is a fairly small release overall, but I'm leaning towards putting out the 9.10 release here shortly, as I'd like to put out the new poll here sooner rather than later.

Have you tried deleting the VLC folder?

Thanks guys; I have those two translations updated for the next beta.

Ah, I see. So then that is most likely a no.

LaunchBox/Big Box can be streamed through the Steam Link. Do you mean streaming it to Google Stadia? I would assume that should be possible but you would have to use separate streaming software (LaunchBox and Big Box do not do this by themselves).

Thank you @k_kutsugi. I have the new pack integrated and that field fixed for the next beta.

Some of this would be possible, but doing it for an entire platform would not be possible, because we don't have images divided into sets on the games database. We could use an interface to pick and choose which images you want to download, but that would have to be done individually for each game, and isn't much different than what's currently available, as you can already just download them all and then delete the ones you don't want.

You can always mark games as hidden using batch edit, and then just change LaunchBox and/or Big Box not to show hidden games.

It may be an old version of that theme. Try using the CriticalZone v2 - Default version that comes with the latest versions of Big Box. If you can't get into the app, deleting the theme folder should fix it.

I haven't been able to replicate this. Try deleting the LaunchBox\VLC folder while LaunchBox is closed and restart LaunchBox.

Unfortunately this is an error with the Ao.Bigbox series of plugins. Most likely you're using an outdated theme for Big Box. What theme are you using?