Jason Carr

@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).

Good to know. One advantage of not doing fades is that it wouldn't likely increase startup time as much, and the game would pop up immediately when it's ready.

I think you're contradicting yourself here, but I think I get what you're saying. Still, as bezels can be implemented using MAME and Retroarch, I would think that there's fairly few systems that actually need external support, right?

Let me clarify that using Rocket Launcher certainly does not introduce performance issues. All it does is make the emulators run in windowed mode, which while it *does* affect performance and input lag, you may or may not notice any kind of a difference.

That is correct; if the bezels are implemented by the emulators themselves in the same process, then exclusive fullscreen mode can still be used and there is no performance degradation. The issue only comes into play when bezels are implement by Rocket Launcher or an outside application, because it requires the emulator to not be in exclusive fullscreen mode. Edit: It's also worth emphasizing that both MAME and Retroarch already have bezel support, so for many people that will already cover a majority of systems anyways, without any performance degradation, and it doesn't even require any further LaunchBox features.

Hello all, I wanted to start some discussions surrounding startup and pause screens, which are my next major tasks to implement for LaunchBox and Big Box. I've done some studying as far as what is and is not possible for them, looked into Rocket Launcher, and I've made some discoveries that I believe warrant some discussion. First off, I've discovered that there are two features that are impossible to implement for emulators that use exclusive fullscreen mode: Fading into and out of the game Bezels The advantage of exclusive fullscreen mode for emulators and games is primarily performance. In theory, performance should be at least slightly better in exclusive fullscreen mode than windowed mode, and will also likely result in less input lag. For those reasons, exclusive fullscreen mode is usually recommended for playing games, so without exclusive fullscreen mode support, features like fading and bezels seem to be lacking. Rocket Launcher gets around this issue by simply ensuring that all emulators are played in windowed mode, and the windowed bits are either off-screen or covered up by a bezel. This does work well (when it works and isn't broken by an emulator update), but can be immensely complicated because every single emulator (or Windows game for that matter) requires its own script, code, and settings, which is one reason why Rocket Launcher can be so complicated. And, of course, this means that if you use Rocket Launcher with fade screens and/or bezels, you're not using exclusive fullscreen mode, and thus not getting maximum performance. I do want to note that while it's not possible to fade into exclusive fullscreen mode games, it *is* possible and relatively easy to hide the window that pops up during the loading process, for the emulators that show the window during load. So the process can certainly be made smooth, sans for the actual fading into and out of the games. So now knowing all of that, here are my questions that are up for discussion: How important is it to you for the startup screen to fade into the game? Is it worth the performance sacrifice to you while playing the game? How important is it to you to use bezels? Are they worth the performance sacrifice to you? What features are you most looking for with startup screens? What features are you most looking for with pause screens? My current thoughts are in line with our typical development strategies; I want to create software that works out of the box, is easy to use, and doesn't break with new emulators that come out. For that reason, I'm thinking that we'll at least start by creating startup and pause screens without the fading and bezels features, as I can make these features work very well out of the box with no necessary tweaking. Then, potentially in the future we can come back and tackle fades and/or bezels, under the assumption that they do affect performance and can be hairy to manage. However, if we receive lots of negative feedback on this approach, I will re-evaluate. Finally, since I'm starting development on startup screens first, these are the features that I already plan to implement: Completely themeable using the same Big Box XAML theming engine (can be platform-specific) Support for all game videos and images, depending on the theme Much improved duplicate startup prevention Thank you all; let's discuss!

That's odd. I don't know of a better way to do it. Has anyone else here experienced any issues typing special characters?

I'm guessing this is probably a relic issue from a beta or something of that nature. See if you can find the playlist in your LaunchBox\Data\Playlists folder and delete it while LaunchBox is closed.