Jason Carr

Yes. You'll end up with two images.

You're mistaken.

Alright, so first off, people who want to update their library with newer images do not have to redownload every image for every game. That's the point of choosing to update without replacing. You get all the new images without having to re-download anything. I understand though that you want an option that simply clears out all existing images for a category if the checksums don't match. It's not quite that simple since there's often multiple images for each category, but I get your request.

I see. So you want to be able to delete existing images in your collection that were deleted from the games database and replace them with new images that were updated. Currently once images are deleted from the games database, we no longer track them, so we can't really identify them after the fact, so we would have to make some significant changes to get that to work. I can see the value in that though. Thanks for clarifying it for me.

I wanted to update everyone here and let everybody know that the themes uploader now supports pause themes: https://www.launchbox-app.com/themes I also added a pause theme section here on the forums. Pause themes are just as easy to work on as the startup themes are; I'd love to see some themes if you guys are up for it. Thank you guys as always. ?

If an image does not match a checksum, then you have absolutely no idea if it's a different image or not. What do you want to do in that scenario? Just throw out the old image and trust that the new one is better? Images on the games database aren't often deleted, anyways. Most often, new images are added in addition to the ones already there, so deleting existing images wouldn't really do much for us.

@Theman8631 We already do calculate in checksums, which by nature already handles file size and dimensions. That's already being used. If you tell it to only update and not replace, it won't download anything that matches checksums and sizes.

Per metadata, the download is much, much smaller due to compression (30 megabytes rings a bell), so I don't think the metadata is an issue at all. One reason why we do it that way is because it saves CPU time on the server. We get a lot of traffic and if the metadata downloads started requiring CPU activity, it could bring the server to its knees. But for images, the problem becomes how do you tell whether an image is an updated (better) image and can replace an existing one, or if it's a separate image that should be added to your collection. The short answer is we can't. We do use checksums to determine whether images are the same, but we don't have any magic image processing code that helps us to determine similar images. We'd probably have to license the moon from Google in order to get something like that.

Did you reinstall the VB runtimes or the C++ runtimes? I believe the Visual C++ 2012 runtimes were the ones that were needed.

You mean disabling it on the pause screens? Rank and score makes sense. Disc swap is already available for the pause screens, if you add a script in there for it. We could use more default scripts for it though. Bezels are not planned and probably won't ever be added, because there's no good way to do it without horrible hacks. Generally, they're just much better done by the emulators themselves, and with Retroarch getting more and more cores all the time, you might as well just use Retroarch's bezels in most cases. It's actually not that smart. It won't hide or show based on whether or not it's a multidisc game; it will show up whenever there's a swap disc script populated for that emulator.

Yes, I believe box art was the main focus of the custom default images support. I state in the above post that I plan to tackle pinball support before the next official release, which will also be before the next poll. We already have an image type called "Arcade - Controls Information", so it seems like the only thing we need to do is just remove the Arcade prefix from it. There's currently nothing stopping anyone from using that category for non-arcade games, sans for the naming issue. Yeah, that would be cool to see, but it would be a huge effort and would also require a database of game controls which would have to be manually populated, so unfortunately I don't see that happening soon. Still, we do have that controls information image type that can be used, so we're pretty much there already, sans for the naming issue and maybe a lack of themes.

Really old threads like this generally aren't the best place for feature requests lol. What do you mean by randomizing the order of images in the details of the various titles?

It's not for the sake of leaving them open. It's for the sake of community-driven data instead of putting the "power" in the hands of a small handful of people. I don't want ranks, because I don't want any particular people to hold more weight than anyone else. That's a problem with some other sites. That is planned. I believe there's only a very small handful of issues, but those platforms do need to be renamed. Unfortunately I don't know of any algorithm that lets us identify "perfect" data that is 100% guaranteed to be correct, so that we can mark it as such and not allow it to be changed. I know we could have people go through and do that, but even that would be subject to errors because people aren't perfect, which ultimately brings us back to the problem with ranks.

Hey all, I have a new email going out with some of this info, but it may take a few days for everyone to get it. Wanted to open up discussion on two of the remaining items from the poll. First off, controller definitions. On the pause screens we put in a place to display the controller definitions images from EmuMovies for the Arcade platform. These images are available for free from EmuMovies (so you don't need a paid account). For example: They now display on the pause screens with the default pause theme for the Arcade platform. To be honest, I don't know of a better way to do this than to just use images like this. It would be great if images like this were available for other platforms as well, but I think arcade is the important one because it has all of the different games with different controls. Based on this, I'm considering crossing the "Control Definitions" item off the list. I know there are other things we could add, like Big Box navigation icons and such, but those are so theme-specific that it's probably best to leave up to the theme developers anyways. Thoughts? The other one to discuss is "Retro Achievements Further Integration". I added the retro achievements list to the pause screens, so you can now view your achievements while the games are running, which technically does cover the item from the poll. There are other things we could do, such as leaderboards and such, but honestly I'm fairly doubtful that there would be much interest in those types of features. I know that the #1 thing that people want is live achievement popups (in the game as you get the achievements), but there are a number of hurdles in the way there that pretty much make that impossible, including a lack of features with the Retro Achievements API. So considering all of that, I'm also considering crossing off the retro achievements item as well. Thoughts? What I do plan to tackle next are "Custom Default Game Images for Each Platform" and "Proper Support for Pinball", which hopefully will both make it into the next official release. I'm trying to push things forward here, because I believe there are some great items that we can put on the next poll that would probably be more popular than some of these remaining items to tackle. That said, if you have suggestions on either of these two items (or the other two that I'm looking to cross off), I'd love to hear them.

Yes, the pause binding that does not use automation only works with the keyboard. It's not expected that folks will be able to have a dedicated button on their handheld game controller, and most arcade boards use keyboard keys in the backend. We might add single button support for game controllers eventually, but as of right now you have to do it with controller automation.

It's unfortunately hard to determine what's causing your issues, because there's not a lot of details here and it's not very easy to understand. Keep in mind that both Big Box and LaunchBox have separate configuration options for key or controller bindings to show the pause screens. I'm guessing that's the main issue you're running into. You'll need to configure Big Box separately. Also, it would help going forward if you didn't end every sentence with a frown, lol.

There are some good examples provided by the community on Github: https://github.com/slipsystem/LaunchBox-Plugin-Examples https://github.com/daerlnaxe/LaunchBox-Plugins I know there's more as well, but those are what I could immediately find. The official API documentation is here: http://pluginapi.launchbox-app.com/html/4cf923f7-940c-5735-83de-04107a6ae0e6.htm The above documentation and examples are a good start. LaunchBox plugins are written either in C# (recommended) or Visual Basic (easier, but not a great language). Any .NET language is supported, and there are other options as well, but I wouldn't recommend them. So step #1 is to learn either C# or Visual Basic.

If this is still happening, I should definitely take a look at it. I'll get on it soon.

Hi @Codeman, I will be putting an item on the next poll to do some work on the games database. However, a lot of your requests here are not in the plans for the games database at all, such as dedicated help, data protection, and moderator ranks. The LaunchBox Games Database is the most open games database available on the web, and that is by design. I wanted to create something that was completely maintained and moderated by the community, and I believe that we've succeeded in that. I don't want the direction and the data to be determined by a small handful of people, I want it to be determined by everyone and anyone who's interested, which is really the aim for an open database. Of course there are drawbacks to that approach, but I'm not interested in going back on it and changing the whole objective. The item that I put on the poll will most likely focus on performance improvements and streamlining the processes rather than core changes like this.

I don't think that in particular is possible with themes, at least not without a plugin. We can probably add this in eventually but I can't immediately prioritize it unfortunately.

#1 is most likely because you're not using default keyboard binding settings, as I previously stated. You can change the key that the scripts send for MAME. #2 I've seen before, and it was always because I had another app running that background that was somehow conflicting. For me, instances of Remote Desktop were causing it for some crazy reason. We're just using Windows APIs, but sadly they can be finicky with some apps running in background I've noted. Do make sure you don't have forceful activation checked in your MAME emulator settings as well, as that should be unnecessary for MAME and could be causing it. #3 I've never been able to replicate this, and I just tried with those games and it seems to be working fine. So my guess would be that there's some kind of MAME configuration setting that is different that is causing it. If we can figure out what that is, I can look into it. Maybe try backing up your MAME settings and resetting them to the defaults to see if that fixes it? #4 Yes, both keyboard and controller automation do require the hold key. There are separate settings in both LaunchBox and Big Box for a single key press to trigger the pause screens (under Game Pause).

I've added the request to my list, but it's all about priorities. It's difficult to prioritize one person's request over features from the poll that have a whole bunch of votes. Something this custom may be best implemented via a plugin.

My guess at this point is that there's somehow a corrupt install of Visual C++.

Hmm, try deleting the LaunchBox\CefSharp folder while LaunchBox is closed, and then restart LaunchBox. That may fix the issue. If not, then there's some kind of really odd issue with the Chromium Embedded Framework on your system. Invalid access to memory location is not something I have ever seen before, but it doesn't sound good. My first guess would be that maybe it's a RAM hardware issue. Have you tried running a memory test? Other than that, here is one more thing to try. This article suggests that it could possibly be related to Visual C++ 2012: http://deepbot.tv/forums/index.php?topic=4488.120 Try installing (or uninstalling and reinstalling) it from here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-sg/download/details.aspx?id=30679

Yes, per @Retro808 I would guess that most of those issues are because of such an old version of MAME. Some of them may be due to unexpected (non-default) keyboard mappings though. You can check the pause screen script tabs in the MAME emulator settings in LaunchBox for the details on what keys it expects. You also don't have to use controller or keyboard automation. There are separate binding options in LaunchBox and Big Box for a pause key.