Jason Carr

We'll probably need to see your LaunchBox MAME emulator configuration (screenshots).

Did you figure out the controller not saving thing? I saw your post and then saw that you quickly deleted it. I've never seen controller stuff not save.

I've discussed this further with the moderators, and I think the general consensus between us is that we should just not download images for different regions. The only issue with that (and the reason why it wasn't initially implemented that way) is that we often don't know the proper region for the game on import (usually all we have to go on is the file name, which may or may not have that information). In the case where we don't know the region from the file name, then the general LaunchBox region priority settings are used. So the main potential issue here is that if you change the region for a game later on, you won't have the proper media for that region unless you re-download. But I think that's a good tradeoff. Thoughts welcome.

I've done a whole bunch of research on this this morning, and I have some surprising results, though it makes perfect sense. As best I can tell, nothing is broken or bugged. However, we may want to change some of the logic as to how we download images. First off, if you run a Download Metadata and Images process for a handful of games, and select only stuff from the LaunchBox Games Database (no EmuMovies), you'll probably get a lot of new images. But if you run it twice in a row, you'll get nothing new the second time. So that right there pretty much confirms that duplicates are not being downloaded from the LaunchBox Games Database. Please let me know if anyone gets additional images to download running the wizard twice in quick succession, as that would prove my theory wrong (but honestly I'm 99% confident in it already). So then what's the issue? In my testing, it appears to be caused by the fact that the Download Metadata and Media wizard (in addition to game imports) will download all images for all regions for the game. Since the Clean Up Media process will get rid of images that are not used (images where the regions don't match the game's region), those images are then deleted. Then the download wizard will re-download them the next time it's run. So I wouldn't call this an urgent issue, but it looks like we have two options; either we change the Clean Up Images wizard to keep images that are for a different region, or we stop downloading images for a different region during the import and media downloads processes.

FYI, the controller settings have nothing to do with in-game controls. They're only for inside of LaunchBox.

The issues that you're having are either emulator issues, or somehow they're misconfigured in LaunchBox. LaunchBox does not auto-configure the emulator setup for you; the only thing it does along those lines is put in the correct command-line parameters to launch the game, in most cases. Our recommendation would be to watch our YouTube tutorial videos. There's a link in the header called Tutorials. I would love to say that emulation never requires any tweaking, but that's simply not true, and you're not likely to find any other method that doesn't require tweaking.

It's possible that the checksums got messed up when we had to do the restore due to the hard drive on the games database server dying. I will review. It was an issue in the past but I believe it had been fixed a long time ago. @peterrrjr Do us a favor and try not to completely fall off the handle. If something is broken, all I need to hear is that it is broken; not that it's the end of the world, because it really isn't. I am very sorry for the trouble.

Both of those things are indeed possible, but unfortunately I can't dive into it right now to actually do it. That said, with some experimentation you can probably figure it out by editing the theme's XAML files in a text editor. This is certainly possible, but I don't believe anyone has done it yet, and it would be a more major change for the theme (it would take quite a bit of work). Feel free to dive in and see if you can figure it out though.

Unfortunately I've never seen one, though they may be available somewhere. Some of the videos are actually recorded Hyperspin themes, so probably not in that case.

Thanks guys. I'll add this to the list for the next poll.

@harryoke I'm not quite sure what happened, but it looks like something went wrong with the uploads of the PSX Memories and Atari ST videos (they're giving 404 not found errors when you try to download them). Can you re-upload them?

I honestly haven't played with FS-UAE. Does FS-UAE use exclusive fullscreen mode? Check that Nestopia is actually closing. When I press Escape in Nestopia, it pauses the game but does not close it (which I'm sure can be fixed with different settings or something). Alt+F4 does work for me. It also could be the video settings in Nestopia if it's not using exclusive fullscreen mode or something of that nature.

If you're using MAME via Retroarch, it may an issue with the startup screens. Try disabling the startup screens in Big Box under Game Startup.

Yes, everything should be fully resolved at this point (it's been resolved for over a day now).

Just confirming that we're all back up and running with no missing images. It likely finished around 2:00 AM PST last night.

Thank you @harryoke. Looks awesome. I'll let @ETAPRIME know about it.

Quick update for everyone; believe it or not images are still restoring, but it does look like the vast majority of images are there. I'm sure by the morning everything will be restored. SSD technology has improved many times over, and I currently believe it to be the best option available for our needs, for many reasons. Appreciated.

Yes, Tools > Download Metadata and Media should bring you up to speed.

Ugh, sad day. Sorry to hear.

We're at about 60,000 of the 800,000 images restored, so it does look like it will be a while yet, though it certainly should be done today.

Hello all, as many of you probably noticed, our data SSD drive in the games database web server slowly started dying yesterday, which was wreaking havoc on the games database website and downloads in LaunchBox. It took us a bit to figure out what was happening, but we've since had the drive replaced and everything is back up and running, sans for some images that are still being restored. There are approximately 800,000 images to restore from backups. Until they are fully restored, you will likely see missing images on the games database website, and many image downloads in LaunchBox will return 404 Not Found errors. It may take a bit to finish restoring all of the images, but I will update everyone here when all is completed. My apologies for the trouble and thanks for bearing with us.

I am fully aware of this, per the 404 Not Found errors I mentioned above. Images are still being restored from backups.

The website is back up, and the problem has been fixed, but I'm now restoring the ~800,000 image files from backups. That could unfortunately take a few hours. Right now, everything should be working, but many of the images will return 404 (Not Found) errors.

The disks in the server are hot-swappable, so in theory we should be able to get the disk replaced very quickly. My host is already working on it.

After further research, I was wrong. There appears to be a hardware issue on the server with one of the two hard drives. I'm getting it replaced. I'll update with a schedule as soon as I hear back.