Jason Carr

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Glad to hear at least the issue that was confusing me is fixed. I might be able to fix it for eXoDOS as well, but it will likely require a custom solution and it's always tricky to get that stuff working with batch files. It's on my list though.

Beta 4 is out now with hopeful fixes for some VLC 3.x-related stability issues.

@runsamok I think I know what might be going on. I think we saw it once in beta testing too but I forgot about it. You have the Minimize on Launch and Restore on Exit settings enabled, which I'm guessing causes the issue. Does it work if you turn those settings off? If so, I'll probably force those off if you have the startup screens turned on.

Make sure that Retroarch is the emulator on the games that aren't working. You can select them all and batch edit them, and choose Retroarch as the emulator. Also, make sure that the correct core is specified in the Retroarch emulator's platform tab in LaunchBox.

My guess is that this was actually not related to the theme at all, but rather was some kind of fluke or a rare/random glitch with VLC 3.x. I have put in a number of VLC-related fixes for the next beta though, so that may help as well.

Honestly I would never have expected people to have that many preferences regarding the order of the screenshots in the sidebar, but I'll add it to the list of features to add to the next community poll.

Generally, text in fanart backgrounds is frowned upon because it's just not very clean looking in LaunchBox and Big Box (and makes the actual text of the interface harder to read). However, I wouldn't delete fanart just because it has text in it, unless there is another better fanart background image available for the game.

Hmm, okay. Can you PM me your LaunchBox\Data\Settings.xml file? I'm wondering if there's a setting in there somewhere that could be causing it. The fact that Big Box works but LaunchBox doesn't is a good clue.

Yes, and that not regaining focus issue is one that I've tested back and forth and cannot replicate, regardless of how many or what other windows are open in the background. So that's not a normal issue, and I'm trying to figure out what might be causing it. Are you running Rocket Launcher?

I'm not sure about using OpenGL with WPF though; that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, since LaunchBox and Big Box are on the Microsoft/DirectX stack.

Hmm, that is possible. I verified that it was writing the file, and not writing the one in AppData, but admittedly I did not verify that it was actually using those settings. But would they really make it so that it would write the settings but not read them? I mean, really? Lol. I'll take a look. ?‍♂️

Cool, glad to hear it.

Okay; it may be something with the VLC upgrade. Try deleting the LaunchBox\VLC folder and then upgrading to the beta again. It's also possible that the new VLC code has caused some kind of different issue. Are you running it from a network drive, by chance? I'm glad to hear that the sound issue is fixed; at least that makes me think that we're not going crazy. I didn't do anything to fix it other than upgrading VLC, but VLC is used for the music playback, so I suppose it's possible that there was some kind of weird glitch with the previous version of VLC. Per the startup screen stuff, I'm more inclined to believe there's something going on with emulator settings or even video drivers or something of that nature. Since there were several reported issues with the startup screens, we'd have to take it one at a time. I guess I would start with trying to get Retroarch to work with something simple like NES. I never asked though, are you using Rocket Launcher?

The issue could be the same over RDP and TeamViewer; I'm not really sure. Crashdumps are a long shot; it could prove to be helpful, but it's not likely. There shouldn't be any dependencies on optional pieces of Windows. Windows Media Player is used optionally but it should start up fine without it. IE is not used. The error message in Event Viewer is probably the closest thing we'll get to useful info. It might not end up being useful either, but it's worth looking into.

I'm lost on a lot of stuff then with your system, unfortunately. It's really difficult for me to figure out what might be going on without access to the system, of course, but it seems like for some reason you're running into a bunch of issues that I haven't seen elsewhere. I know you've already talked about background processes, but I would try exiting literally everything to see if something might be causing it. Usually weird stuff like this is caused by anti-virus software or similar, but not always. Sorry I haven't been more helpful; I just don't have a whole lot to go on and haven't had any ideas as to what might be happening thus far.

The only thing I can think of is that maybe it's an issue with RDP. The files you're missing aren't there simply because they're extracted on startup, which leads me to believe that the EXEs aren't really even getting started. So it may not be even getting over the initial loading of .NET. Other than .NET, the only other requirement is DirectX. You could try manually running a DirectX 9.0c setup updater to see if that helps. That might be tough over RDP though, which might be the problem to begin with.

I just put out 9.4-beta-3, which upgrades VLC to 3.0.6. I've confirmed that LaunchBox and Big Box are not overwriting the settings file in the AppData folder. However, if you manually run VLC.exe from the LaunchBox\VLC folders, it will definitely use and update the AppData configuration. LaunchBox and Big Box make sure that this doesn't happen with custom command-line parameters that are fed to vlc.exe (and/or the libvlc.dll file) when they're used. The easiest way to manually update the proper VLC settings file is to go to Tools > Download Platform/Playlist Theme Videos, and then click Preview on one of the videos. From there, you can update your settings in the VLC app and save them, and it will update the correct file. However, as previously stated, if you just go into the folder and run the vlc.exe file, then it's going to use the default AppData settings file (that's just how VLC works). Long story short, it was not previously an issue as best I can tell, but the above confusion is probably what was misleading people.

Beta 3 is out now with one thing: VLC upgraded to the latest version. The VLC 3.x series was majorly restructured, so there was some major work needed to get the new version integrated. In addition, testing is appreciated, because it is possible that the new version could cause stability issues. I've run Big Box in attract mode all night long though, and haven't run into any problems, so hopefully we'll be good to go. The first launch of this beta will take a lot longer than usual, as the VLC folder will get removed and replaced with the new versions.

This is a known issue. It's not frozen (it will come back eventually), but when there are too many items in those drop-down lists it takes forever to load them. Honestly I probably should've solved that problem a long time ago; it's back near the top of my list. Unfortunately Windows does not have good control for a multi-select dropdown, and the custom control that we're currently using leaves a little bit to be desired. Are you certain that you have Auto-Play Music in LaunchBox disabled? The only other thing I can think of with this is that maybe the system just can't pause the music quick enough. I've never seen it do this before, and it's strange because your specs don't look like they're slow enough to cause those kinds of issues. Per your external hard drive, is it USB 3.0? The only performance issue I can think of with your specs is that maybe the hard drive is just slow.

It does sound like this is somehow related to the startup screens. You may need to disable them while tweaking that kind of stuff, or the MAME emulator may just need some different settings in the Game Startup tab.

@runsamok Good to know about eXoDOS and the startup screens. I'm not surprised there's an issue there due to there being so much going on behind the scenes (and yes, I expect the eXoDOS batch files to be the issue). I'll take a look; there may or may not be a good solution for the startup screens and eXoDOS games, sans for disabling the startup screens for those games, but I'll give it a shot. In the mean time though, it would be worth trying the various available options. It's not too difficult to move a few sliders and check a few boxes and experiment. We held off on implementing startup screens for ages because you're basically fighting the Windows operating system by definition for their implementation. As nice as they are, it's unfortunately not realistic to expect them to work perfectly in every single situation (at least not ones that I didn't predict). The other emulators you mention work perfectly fine with the startup screens if they're configured correctly (though most should be configured automatically). If you're seeing focus issues with all those emulators, then there's something different about your system that remains a mystery to me, unfortunately. System specs and OS details would be appreciated.

2 GB of memory is unfortunately less than LaunchBox requires, especially on Windows 10. 4 GB is the minimum. You might be able to get away with running it, but you'll probably run into those out of memory errors quite a bit.

Whatever's going on, at this point it's pretty clear that it's some kind of system-specific one-off bug. The VLC implementation hasn't been changed in quite a long time, and it's working great for a whole lot of people, so I'm certain that it's not a common issue. That combined with the fact that we're working on upgrading to the 3.x series of VLC (and the fact that it's likely a VLC bug and not a Big Box bug) means it's probably not worth figuring out since WMP is working fine for you anyways. That said, if it happens only after games are launched, my guess would be that it's some kind of odd conflict or something with having VLC paused in the background while that particular game is running. It could be a driver issue. Regardless, at this point it's really not worth troubleshooting for the reasons I stated above.