Jason Carr

Hey all, the first 9.2 beta is out now with the beginnings of the next major feature: startup screens. Startup screens are enabled by default with this new beta, and can be turned off under Game Startup in the LaunchBox and Big Box options. Please keep in mind that this new feature is a work in progress, and not everything will be smooth at this point. You may even have to disable it in order for some emulators to work properly. That said, for the vast majority of emulators it seems to be working great so far. Here are the current known issues with the startup screens: The startup screens currently do not work properly with emulators or games that do not use fullscreen exclusive mode (such as Project64). For most of these emulators, the startup screen overlaps the emulator and never shows the game. Pressing Escape should close the emulator and the startup screen to get out of this state. Fixes are coming in the next beta. If the game is closed too quickly (currently less than five seconds after it's started), then the startup screen will flash while exiting the game. There's currently no way to abort the game loading process (during file extraction, etc.). Key/button presses (spamming) can still hijack focus on game startup and cause the game not to be displayed or focused properly. And here are some additional features that I plan on adding in future 9.2 betas: Better window hiding for some emulators (window hiding is already in place and works for most emulators already, including Dolphin) Emulator-specific and game-specific settings to allow you to turn certain game startup features on or off for certain emulators or certain games Game shut down themes instead of just a black screen on game shutdown Let me clarify that these are only the plans for the 9.2 release of the startup screens. I've heard all the requests in the "Startup Screens, Pause Screens, and Bezels Discussions" thread and many of them will be implemented, just not for the first official release. Let me know how testing goes.

This was changed quite a few versions ago. I'm not sure exactly when, but it should be in the change log. I don't think it should do this with the popup views though (but maybe it does either way any time you change the main, non-platform-specific theme).

This is by design. When you change the main theme in the Big Box options, it resets the platform-specific themes. I know this could be more clear, though.

I'm guessing there was some other kind of weird input issue going on with the system, most likely some kind of input conflict. If a reboot fixes it, that's most likely the case. If it happens again, try looking at what programs you have running in Task Manager.

I can add this to my list, but I don't think there's a way to do it currently without me adding something to the code. I know that some themes do it with the wheels already, but I doubt that solution would work for CoverFlow. I'll add it to my list.

Can you explain exactly what you mean by this? We did have an issue at one point for users who use the betas, so I'm guessing this is a relic of a bug we had with a previous beta release.

This does seem to somehow be video card driver specific, so do try updating your video drivers. I am aware of this issue though on some machines and I'll be coming back to address it here soon.

Check your Big Box keyboard mapping options. Nothing has changed with that code recently and I haven't heard this reported anywhere else, so I'm guessing it's not an issue with the new versions.

Setting box sizes for each platform is planned. However, this is not part of what's in the works currently (will be a separate thing), and true separate themes for each platform in LaunchBox is not planned as it kind of flies in the face of a desktop-type interface.

I don't believe the ~ character causes any problems.

How/why does the theme change seem buggy? I'm not aware of any bugs with that feature and no issues have been reported on that in quite a long time. The settings for theme and view are all in the platform and playlist XML files in the LaunchBox\Data folder.

That's odd. I'll look into that. I've never seen it out of alphabetical order, but maybe it's a system setting that causes it. I think I should be able to override it anyways. By the way @RetroHumanoid @CriticalCid I'm planning to make some themeing adjustments here very soon to add better support for platform-specific themes/views.

Yeah, @CDBlue's advice is accurate and well said. Redux is also more streamlined, while Refried is a tad more flashy and contains more character art for each platform.

You can download them directly through LaunchBox, while you download game media. The EmuMovies "Video - Theme" option downloads the Hyperspin themes. The "Video - Gameplay" videos are the standard gameplay videos from EmuMovies.

The game details screen has been a known issue with the Unified themes for a while now; it is on my list to tackle.

This is correct and also mostly by design for the Unified Redux theme. Those genres were originally made for the arcade playlists, and thus most of them are relatively arcade-specific. For that reason, loading up an NES genre, for example, will simply use the NES theme media. If you'd like though, you can always add platform genre-specific media, or copy some of the existing media. For example, the new files would be called "Nintendo Entertainment System Strategy.png" for strategy NES games.

@azzajess I should indeed update the site. 8.1 is an automatic update to 8, so I doubt drivers would be an issue, but I know it is a major release. Unfortunately there's no way to install 4.7 without upgrading to 8.1, at least not that I know about.

For arcade, it's much recommended to use Tools > Create Missing MAME/Arcade playlists instead. Those genre playlists are much better suited for arcade.

It uses the exact same themeing engine as everything else. XAML is about as easy to understand as HTML, especially if all you want to do is move things around.

Are you using LaunchBox version 9.1?

I did want to update you all as well. Progress is going very well, though I do still have a fairly long list of things to complete. If we're lucky, I'll have a beta out with the initial startup screen functionality by the end of the week. Keep in mind that the startup screens are completely themeable, so the above is just a placeholder that's in progress for the default theme. Big Box fades into the startup screen and then jumps to the fullscreen game when it's ready.

Just to clarify this, we may end up collaborating here at some point, but as of right now we're developing them separately. However, @eatkinola is doing proper fades I believe, while I'm currently focusing on getting startup screens working with exclusive full screen support (I'll be tackling an option for fading into games later).

The video used depends on what you've downloaded for your collection. Those recorded videos of Hyperspin themes come from EmuMovies. There's also straight gameplay videos available from them. There are plenty of themes that just play the video fullscreen; I believe there's also a view in this theme that does the same. Just map a key or a button to "Switch View" in the Big Box options, and use it to cycle between the views.

Awesome! Those ghost characters can be an absolute nightmare. I guess the forums must add some garbage to the code; sorry for that. Great to hear that everything is working well now.

@RetroHumanoid Can you send me the XAML files? That error suggests there's just a syntax error in the XAML somewhere. Even though it references line 80, there doesn't appear to be even 153 characters in that line, so I don't think the line and position are accurate, but the quotes issue should be correct. Maybe there's a syntax error before that line?