Jason Carr

A couple things... Region priorities only affect media. If you import games from other regions, LaunchBox won't skip them if those regions aren't checked in region priorities. It's assumed that you want to import them anyways if you import the files. Yes, the region is required to be in the file name. It probably should use the folder name if you check that box, but even still, it's not going to skip importing games that you've told it to import.

Yeah, from what I hear Pinball FX and Pinball Arcade do not work well with frontends at all, but I feel like if you're gonna go pinball, you might as well let them create an immersive experience inside their own apps. It sounds like they're dropping support for actual pinball tables though, but it's not like we're going to be able to support that any time soon anyways. The thing is, the item on the poll was "proper support for pinball". But I'm not even sure "proper" support is possible currently, at least in the way that emulated games work in LaunchBox. It seems like it would be a lot of manual work for the end user no matter what we do.

Alright, so the more I dive into pinball, the more problems I find, unfortunately. It makes sense that artwork would be more sensitive if someone created the entire table (that has to be a ton of work), even if the artwork was ripped from a movie or TV show, etc., so yeah, I can see that being a nightmare. I also spoke with @circo, and while EmuMovies does have some media available for download on the website, it isn't available in the download app or for searching via the API. Apparently pinball does not do well with consistent file names, so that's part of the problem there. So this can of worms seems to be getting worse and worse. Furthermore, I hear that the best approach for pinball these days is Pinball FX and Pinball Arcade, which are paid solutions, but there's certainly nothing wrong with that. But they have their own interfaces, so all you would need to do is just add them as games directly. So perhaps this isn't a path worth taking...

It looks like EmuMovies has pinball artwork, so for starters we can just recommend that people use EmuMovies. We just won't worry about it on the LaunchBox Games Database if people are gonna have problems with it. @circo to the rescue. Again.

I think first off, imports and launching are the goals. Unfortunately I think I'd need an actual cabinet to go for full-fledged cabinet support, so at this point that's not likely to happen. I can definitely use your help though. You mean the actual creators of the media (companies that create the tables) or the folks just ripping the artwork? I very much appreciate the work that the community does scanning and removing backgrounds and such, but I have to admit that I find it ridiculous for someone to demand credit for ripping an image that isn't theirs to begin with. If the community is likely to have a hissy fit though over ripped images, then perhaps this might not be a hurdle worth jumping... Obviously, we need images in order for this to work at all.

This isn't in the current plans for this release, but that could change depending on feedback.

This is a known issue that sometimes happens, sometimes doesn't. The issue is that WPF can occasionally be a jerk about letting go of references to image files. I've solved it in the vast majority of cases, but there's still a few areas that can be problematic.

The first 9.10 beta is out now here:

Hey all, the first 9.10 beta is here with the following: New Feature: You can now specify platform-specific default images for boxes, 3D boxes, carts, and 3D carts. Do this under Tools > Manage Platforms in LaunchBox and add images under the respective categories. Then refresh your game images and any games with missing images will use the default images that you've specified. Improvement: New Japanese translation thanks to @k_kutsugi The last thing to implement from the poll is proper pinball support, which I'm currently working on. I'm rather new to pinball emulation so it's taking me a while to get everything going, but the plan is to get that in for the 9.10 release, and then we'll put out a new poll after 9.10. If anyone has any hints or tips or walkthroughs on the various pinball solutions, let me know.

Pretty strange. Yeah, I'd try a previous Retroarch version to see if that's the problem. It wouldn't be the first time Retroarch has put out a broken release, and I'm probably not running the latest myself. Looks like I'm running 1.7.7 without issues though (which appears to be the latest official).

@k_kutsugi I finally have the translation in for the next beta, which should be out later today. My apologies for the delay on that. At first glance, everything looks great. Once the translation comes out, you can take a look at the screens and let me know if you see any issues. Thanks again.

I assume you mean how do you put a category inside of a platform? You right-click on the category in the LaunchBox sidebar and then click Edit. Then go to the Parents tab and check the box next to the platform.

Unfortunately that error doesn't really help us much, though it might help the Retroarch developers. To clarify 100%, I know you may have answered these questions, but it's hard to tell: Are you installing a completely fresh copy of Retroarch on each computer, with a default configuration? Does the problem happen if you run Retroarch outside of LaunchBox or Big Box? The other thing that could be happening is that maybe you have another app that is installed on all of your machines that is conflicting with Retroarch. Trying closing all other apps and processes to see if that could be the issue, especially any anti-virus or anti-malware software.

I assume the issue still happens when you run Retroarch without LaunchBox or Big Box? I will say that not every release of Retroarch turns out to be stable, and I have run into versions in the past that had various/consistent issues across several different machines. If all else fails, try a different/older version of Retroarch, and make sure that you reset your settings to the defaults.

For what it's worth, you can treat the GPD Win 2 just like a laptop and just shut the lid when you're not using it, which will put it to sleep. There's no need to even close LaunchBox or Big Box, which really makes those 40 seconds moot unless you're looking to use the device for productivity as well (or something like that). Regardless, I get it now, thanks.

It can be a timing issue, depending on the machine. Try editing the pause scripts under the MAME emulator settings to increase the Sleep times.

DOSBox and ScummVM take up almost no space at all (it's like 40MB total), so removing them wouldn't really make much difference. The majority of the space requirements come from Chromium and VLC, both of which are fairly integral and required to run the apps. What's your reasoning for running so many instances? My GPD Win 2 startup times aren't bad at all with 50K games. I haven't timed it though. I would think that running more games than that would run you out of space on the GPD Win 2 anyways.

For what it's worth, @Agent47 is spot on with just about everything above. Thanks for that. Yeah, I'm sure I'll be back to save states at some point. What particular features did you want to disable?

Cloudflare is just a caching/anti-DDOS service that EmuMovies uses. I'm not quite sure how it all works, but I would guess that it would jump back and forth between the two sources from time to time. We may add multiple download threads here at some point. I added that recently for the app downloads but haven't put them in for media downloads just yet.

Honestly I'm a bit clueless when it comes to pinball at this point, but it is one of the few items left to tackle from the last community poll. So I will be looking at it very soon to come up with an easy solution.

It was very helpful for me. I understood it. Thanks again @jayjay.

If all you're looking for is to be able to save to multiple slots, then some emulators would make that easy, but some wouldn't. Not every emulator is that easy to change slots. On top of that, multiple slots would get immensely confusing without being able to tell where slots are saved...which is the problem that @jayjay is trying to figure out how to solve. This isn't all just obvious and easy.

Thanks for sharing all that research. I figured it would likely be annoying, to say the least. I believe the best idea currently is to just take a screenshot of the screen before taking the save state, which would be a rough way to determine if a save state exists, and could be done (mostly) generically across emulators. There are several problems though, one being that the screenshot wouldn't match the timing of the save state perfectly, and another being that if the save state failed for some reason, it would still report it as successful with the screenshot. So it really is a mess. Even still, I probably will come back to this to tackle it at a later date, but it will be a while yet.

Yes, unfortunately this is caused by running a version of MAME that was released before they added the Direct Input keyboard functionality.

I think generally when there are inconsistencies like that, it has been a cache issue or something like that. I'll contact circo to see if he can try updating the cache for PS1.