Jason Carr

The startup delay is the amount of time between when the emulator's EXE is launched and the game is displayed, not the amount of time that the startup screen will be visible.

Beta 2 is out now with some big improvements: I decided to start a new thread, mostly because this is such a popular discussion subject. Closing this one out.

Hey again all, beta 2 is out now with the new startup screens very much improved. Each emulator now has separate startup screen options: In addition, I've fixed the various issues with Project64, so I expect that the issues with the majority of emulators can be resolved by tweaking these various settings on the emulators. Please let me know what emulators you're still having issues with after playing with the above settings. Here are the known issues that still exist: There's currently no way to abort the game loading process (during file extraction, etc.). Implemented in beta 5 Key/button presses (spamming) can still hijack focus on game startup and cause the game not to be displayed or focused properly. Fixed in beta 4 Game-specific startup screen settings (for Windows games for example) do not yet exist. Implemented in beta 6 Steam games cause weirdness, but do still work. This may be a tough one to solve, so we may just disable the startup screen for Steam games. Fixed in beta 5 Edit: Mouse cursors are still visible; not doing anything yet to hide them. Implemented in beta 3 And here are some additional features that I still plan on adding: Better window hiding for some emulators (window hiding is already in place and works for most emulators already, including Dolphin) Implemented in beta 5 Game shut down themes instead of just a black screen on game shutdown Implemented in beta 4 Full plugin support Implemented in beta 3 Edit: Automatically populating the above settings with known-working settings for known emulators Implemented in beta 6 Enjoy.

Yeah, I'm in agreement that we could use a separate image type or category for the startup screens (which I think is basically what you're saying). The Unified themes basically do exactly this already from within the theme itself, so what you're looking for is already possible if someone just imitates the Unified themes. For that reason, I'm torn on adding a completely new image group and image type to LaunchBox itself, but I'm considering it. Edit: Lol, I just noticed that @ed20910 is basically making the same point.

The vast majority of the videos available are 16:9, so unfortunately this theme wouldn't really be a good fit for 4:3. There are other themes that would, though, and some that do work well for 4:3.

Sadly it looks like we missed re-implementing this when the new interface was being developed, and apparently no one brought it up, so I didn't realize it. I'll add this to my list. Unfortunately it may be a bit yet though as it's not as simple as it should be.

Thank you all; I've noted the issues thus far and I'm diving back into development. The next step of course is to add emulator and game-specific settings for the startup screens. I've also noted the couple of issues with playlists due to the number of them with the auto-generated playlists.

This does work already as-is, sans for the fact that there's not a specific new image type available in LaunchBox for it, so you'd have to hijack an existing one. But, for example, if you just put those images in as fanart on your games, then they would show up just fine in the default startup theme, and it's easy to remove the extra stuff if you want to. I'm not sold on the thought that adding images directly into the startup theme instead of XAML would be the best solution here.

Yes, I'll look to tackle this at this time. The play game stuff will need restructured somewhat for the plugins anyways, because currently the existing methods won't use the startup screens at all. This has been a major thorn in my side. It seems that Windows will actually change the window focus strategy if you're pressing keys while the game is loading. I still have to come up with a solution for this before the official release. I want to make sure that no matter what you do, you can't start multiple copies or mess up the active window by just spamming keys. The latter is the difficult part. I'll review this and see what I can do to improve it. I am looking forward to seeing it. Especially since I'm learning how much of a challenge all of this is lol.

System RAM could be an issue, or it could be a bunch of other things. @neil9000 did just bring to my attention that sometimes there's an issue switching themes immediately after a platform is loaded; I was unaware of that, so I'll look into it. Crashes are odd though; that makes me think it could be running out of RAM or something of that nature, which makes sense since it has to quickly load and unload a bunch of resources. That's just a guess at this point though.

Ah, that's good to know. That's how I thought it was working. If you use the popups, it will not reset everything. The only time it should be resetting the themes for all your platforms if you change the theme through the Options menu.

This is the first time I'm hearing of issues like this on changing themes. What themes are you switching between? What version of Windows are you running? What are your hardware specs?

This post looks to be very old lol. As far as I know, there shouldn't be any server errors these days, but it can take a bit to search. But yeah, the search just isn't always going to be fast because of the vast amount of data that it's searching (and we don't have the money for a Google farm).

Troubleshooting this in the other thread here: https://forums.launchbox-app.com/topic/48025-launchbox-wont-even-open/?do=findComment&comment=304499

@Mr_x92 Please let me know if you're getting an error message. If it's not opening, it may be running in the background already, so a reboot may do the trick.

@rafaelfndev Sorry to hear that you're experiencing an issue on your machine with 4K resolutions. I can say with certainty that both LaunchBox and Big Box work just fine with 4K resolutions, so I believe whatever issue you're running into is likely unrelated to 4K, and more likely related to pushing your machine to its limits or running out of RAM, or something of that nature. I do know that 8 gigs of RAM is quite limiting for 4K games, and overall your hardware is also extremely low-powered for 4K gaming in general. Are you seeing any kind of an error with LaunchBox or Big Box? What is the error message?

The structure has never once been changed with the themes. We still have themes that work from the first Big Box betas that first supported themes. So no, things are not "constantly changing". That said, the new structure will be *optional*. Things won't just break.

@bundangdon You would change the RowDefinition height values here to make the boxes bigger: <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="10*" /> <RowDefinition Height="2*" /> <RowDefinition Height="16*" /> <RowDefinition Height="2*" /> <RowDefinition Height="10*" /> <RowDefinition Height="20*" /> <RowDefinition Height="40*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> You can see in the Image object for the cart that the row is "1", which actually means the second line because it's zero-based, and Grid.RowSpan="3" means that it spans three rows: <Image Grid.Row="1" Grid.RowSpan="3" Grid.Column="3" Source="{Binding SelectedGame.CartFrontImagePath}" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center" RenderOptions.BitmapScalingMode="HighQuality"> <Image.Effect> <DropShadowEffect BlurRadius="10" Direction="-90" RenderingBias="Quality" ShadowDepth="1" /> </Image.Effect> </Image> The height values with the stars on the RowDefinitions are basically like percentages.

Speaking of themeing the startup screens, I should clarify a few things as to how the new startup screen themes work, as they do work a tad bit differently than Big Box themes. In the LaunchBox\StartupThemes folder, you'll find a Default folder that represents the default startup theme. As with the Big Box themes, you can simply copy and rename this Default folder to create a new startup theme. What's different though is how the XAML files work in the theme folder. The startup themes can easily have separate themes depending on the selected platform, category, or playlist, and/or depending on the platform of the game being run. These files currently exist in the default startup theme folder: Default.xaml Nintendo GameCube.xaml Nintendo Wii.xaml Sony Playstation 2.xaml Sony Playstation.xaml This means that Nintendo GameCube, Nintendo Wii, Sony Playstation 2, and Sony Playstation all have custom startup screens, and the rest of the platforms will use the Default.xaml view. Currently, the custom platform files are only there in order to add spinning discs for those particular platforms, but each one can be tweaked however is needed. It's also worth noting that if no specific view is found in the file system for a particular category or playlist, the startup screens will then look for a file that matches the parent platform. You can certainly add a separate view for each child playlist though, such as a separate startup screen for Nintendo Wii Strategy, or each available genre for a platform, etc.

A single static image would be a pretty boring way to start games, and it would be missing the progress bar, so I'm not sure that that's really worth implementing on its own. Right now the default startup theme just uses the game's fanart background, but it would be easy to tweak the theme to display any image type you want in the background. So long as you can get the images into LaunchBox, it should be fairly easy to use them as startup screens with a simple theme tweak.

Thank you all. Once we get emulator-specific and game-specific settings in place for the startup screens, we'll be able to tweak all the little issues. Also, mouse cursors are not being hidden at all from within LaunchBox right now, so that's something that just hasn't been tackled yet. Next week I'll start on the emulator-specific settings, and we'll start perfecting the startup screens.

@alnyden I have plans to change the theme system to better support different themes and views for each platform. For example, for Unified Refried, I plan on adding an option for @RetroHumanoid to be able to use one theme instead of so many. Stay tuned for that. Regardless, an easy workaround is to simply back up your LaunchBox\Data folder before experimenting. It's small and easy to back up.

After closer look, they're doing it with brightness (such as in the CriticalZone theme), but not with opacity. So it looks like that would indeed require coding on my part. Yes, I do need to update the documentation in a number of places.

Closing this thread as the first 9.2 beta is out now here:

Thank you all. I have the first 9.2 beta out with the beginnings of the startup screens feature: I am closing this thread now in order to move discussions over there. Please be sure to read the known issues and the planned features sections of the first post before posting. Thanks all.