Jason Carr

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.

Internet connections are really finicky things, unfortunately, especially now with Internet neutrality abolished in the US (what a ridiculous mess that is). I've already proven that the LaunchBox traffic is being throttled by ISPs, so I wouldn't be surprised if EmuMovies traffic was as well. It sucks to have to pay money for a VPN, but that may be worth trying, as that gets around ISP sniffing and throttling. If only big corporations weren't screwing everybody over...

Yeah, per Neil, the first thing to try is to select all your arcade games, and then right click and Edit. Then select the emulator field to update it. This will make sure that all your arcade games are using that Arcade copy of Retroarch. My guess is that's the likely problem.

That is correct.

It's a very simple solution currenty, which should work well for most users. Currently there's only one save state accessible and it always saves and loads that state. We may come back to it at some point in the future to add extra functionality, but it's not an immediate priority. Unfortunately more extensive solutions will be a major challenge due to all the differences between the emulators. Yes, this is certainly possible, but it is still a challenge, so it's not something I plan to tackle immediately. I'll take note that you guys want this feature expanded though. It may end up on the next community poll.

I know this can be a problem for multi-frontend compatibility. It doesn't come up often but it is on my list to add an option for. Currently there's not really any way to prevent media files from being renamed when renaming games. It shouldn't be an issue though except for in that specific scenario.

Makes sense. I can see that being useful; I'll add it to the list.

Can you explain this? What settings is it unchecking exactly? In LaunchBox or Big Box? Once you create a save state, you'll never run into a situation where a save state doesn't exist again, so it's not much of an issue. Regardless, there's no good way to tap into all emulators to retrieve this information generically, and with some emulators, it would be impossible. It's not nearly as crucial of a feature as you're implying here. You can turn them off on a per-emulator basis. Just edit the emulators. For PC and non-emulator platforms, you can batch edit the games.