Jason Carr

I believe this is because the KnownPlatformOrPlaylistTitle property is returning the full name instead of the nested name in that case. We could get around it immediately by just making sure that there are files named "Arcade Midway Classics" instead of or in addition to "Midway Classics". I can probably tweak the property though for future versions to make up for this regardless. Thanks Retro.

Yes. Rocket Launcher currently does this with an overlay that requires windowed mode, but I believe I'll be able to do it by switching windows.

@Kondorito Thanks for those bug reports. I am able to replicate them so I'll look into them for the next release. Unfortunately, there currently isn't an option for that. I will look into a solution for this soon.

That is good to know and also good news in general, as I'll be taking the opposite approach for at least the first release; this way people will be able to choose between fullscreen exclusive mode support and actual fading.

@eatkinola I do really appreciate you working on WootLauncher. We should probably have a discussion on features as we might be able to reduce overlap and change priorities.

Well that is good to know, and also pretty weird. Can anyone else here test this to see if it makes any difference?

I think there are likely other editors available for the .resx format, but it's been years since I've looked. I'm sorry that you're running into that issue. I guess we could report it as a bug to the Zeta project and/or look for an alternative app.

@vertigoelectric Just run the LaunchBox installer once on the PC that isn't working. You can install to a completely different folder; all you need is for the required DirectX libraries to be installed, and the LB installer will do this easily for you.

The overlays used in Steam and such hook into DirectX and/or OpenGL, and are used in exclusive fullscreen mode, so that's a completely different thing. None of them fade one window into another, which is what fading requires. Almost all Steam games use exclusive fullscreen mode.

Exactly. Please read the first post of this topic.

Thank you all very much for the feedback. If you haven't already, please read the first post of this topic as it goes over the tradeoffs that are the reason why I wanted to bring this up for discussion. Here's the current plan that I posted a page up: Feel free to drop more feedback here, of course.

Unbind Escape from unload and bind it instead to Exit or Quit.

Apparently the tutorial is wrong in this regard. Neither me nor ETA Prime are perfect, so I guess he got that wrong. There unfortunately may not be a good way to shut down Higan gracefully with AutoHotkey, depending on how the emulator was written. There may be a good way too. Regardless, all that is needed is to map Escape to exit the emulator, which you might be able to do in the Higan interface. Once that is set up, the controller shortcuts should work fine.

@Clunker My apologies for the trouble here. That script is not a default for the Higan emulator in LaunchBox; I'm guessing maybe it was just copied over from another emulator. LaunchBox actually doesn't recommend Higan by default, but we did put out the tutorial video of course. Did the script come from the video? By default if you create the Higan emulator there won't be any script attached to it, so it shouldn't be a problem by default.

Thanks for all the feedback guys. What I'm gathering from people is the following: We should implement and release startup and pause screens without fades and bezels first, for the majority of folks who just want a clean and easy solution that doesn't affect performance. We can come back to fades and bezels in the future, with the performance and configuration/stability caveats. In the mean time, folks who insist on them can keep using Rocket Launcher. We'll make all new features in both stages optional, of course. My initial goal will be to get themeable startup screens going. I'll focus on that and hopefully get a beta out soon.

Yeah, that makes sense. We can probably add a minimum startup screen time. Per GIFs, Big Box does support them in custom themes, so they can be used. They just haven't been used very commonly in themes and do require a specific method to implement.

@mcfilmmakers Remember that the performance difference has to do with gameplay and controller lag, not startup performance. I'm not fully following you here. My current plan is not to have a specific amount of time that the startup screen stays up, but rather to just keep it up until the game is fully loaded, and then immediately show the game (which is fairly easy to do if the game/emulator uses exclusive fullscreen mode). My current vision is similar to this as well, but it will be themeable, so what is displayed will be completely up to the theme.

The timing depends on a lot of things, including what we decide to tackle on the first go. If you look at our past release schedule though, you'll get a good idea as to how long the next release will probably take.

Thank you guys. If you haven't, please do read the first post of this topic, as I go through some of the tradeoffs. Both the startup and pause screen features were on the last poll, and also were actually very high up at the top, so that's why I'm tackling them. This discussion is just about *how* we're going to tackle them. Pause screens don't require you to overlay anything on top of the game, so those are mostly non-issues, so long as the game allows you to alt-tab out of it. That said, we're not going to be able to automatically pause every Windows game out there, of course. We'll be focusing primarily on emulators for that.

Do read the first post if you haven't yet, regarding some of the tradeoffs.

Great ideas there @nadonate. Thanks for that.

Hi colpipes, very interested in your thoughts here. Please read the first post though.

That is a good thought; we could add easier support for Retroarch and/or MAME bezel support directly through the LaunchBox interface. That would be a separate feature to develop, but I think it does make more sense than hacking bezels over top of emulators.

I hear you, but I'm out to get an average of the thoughts of people here. One thing I've learned is that it's straight up impossible to please everyone; that just doesn't happen. So yes, we will aim to please everyone, but often times it's not worth developing something if the percentage of the people who are interested in it isn't high enough. Why would I develop feature X if *more* people want feature Y? It's all about priorities, not throwing everything into the mix, popular or not. Of course, Rocket Launcher already makes all of this possible, and there's nothing wrong with people choosing to continue to use it as well. My goal is mainly to gauge how many people find fades and *external* bezel support (outside of MAME and Retroarch) to be absolute requirements for the new startup screen features, to try and figure out if it's worth delaying the rest of the development. Either way, we may come back to those features at a later date.

It's also video card and driver specific. I did some Googling and found that some users have reported big performance drops when using windowed mode in Retroarch after some of the latest Windows updates. So it's supposed to work properly, but doesn't get as much performance tweaking love as fullscreen exclusive mode does by nVidia and/or AMD (or at least that's what I would assume).