Jason Carr

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.

@alfredolvera I'm in full agreement; thanks for stepping up and putting that out there. @ghostlost I can't speak for any users, but we do our best to credit original media creators as much as possible around here, and we appreciate everyone's work very much. I'm closing this thread.

Looking awesome @Mr. RetroLust. Unfortunately I don't currently have any automated tools to help you out here, and I need to keep focusing on app development. I hope you can get things going though; these are looking great.

The playlists will update automatically, but you may be missing some playlists for any new genres, etc. So after you add new games to a platform you can re-generate the playlists. Nothing should be duplicated that way.

Unfortunately @marceli that means that we're starting over at square one.

Hahaha thanks DOS. I forgot about those antics.

I could be wrong, but I don't think we've received anything from @wirtual82, though I do believe it was in progress. Hopefully he can send you what he has.

I believe @CriticalCid is planning to release an update very soon. I believe the existing Unified theme should work fine with 9.1, just like it did with 9.0. The only issue is that it won't work for nested playlists. It will probably also have trouble at the moment if you re-generate your arcade playlists with 9.0+. Other than that, though, you should get the same results as you did previously. It creates categories underneath the platform for genres, play modes, etc., and then puts playlists under those.

Okay. I'm still trying to figure out what on earth Steam is doing to cause this. It doesn't seem to be an issue with Big Box, but of course we still need to figure it out. I haven't been able to replicate it myself, so I'm still a bit lost on it. All I can figure is that Steam is somehow converting inputs from one type to another, and Big Box is picking up both of them. Do you have Use All Controllers checked in the Big Box options? What happens if you uncheck that?

There's an option for that. Tools > Change ROMs folder path for Selected Games.

Hey all, both LaunchBox 9.1 and Unified Redux 1.5 are out, which in combination should fix the issue with the arcade playlists.

Did you use the same data as you had before? Edit: I'm just curious was resolved the issue.

Hello again on this guys. As you guys probably know, we've been to hell and back trying to get this resolved for everyone, and as far as I can tell we've resolved it for the vast majority of people, but apparently not for everyone. @DR9 @xman By chance, are you guys running Steam? Do you still get the same issues if you completely close out of Steam? I ask because we recently became aware of Steam causing duplicate inputs for some people in other threads. Whatever is causing this is isolated and somehow unique to certain systems or certain configurations.

Hi @rsjz, I'll be looking at it soon. An alternative I think would be to just delete all the language folders inside of the LaunchBox\Metadata folder. They will show back up on updates though. Also, make a backup because I haven't tried that in a long time lol.

Yup, that's correct.

@Wattoo recently had to step down from translating to move on in the real world, so we're actually in need of a new French translator. So thanks for stopping by. If you can, please read the first couple of posts of this topic. That should give you all the details you need to get started, and you can download the French translation pack and fix what needs fixing. Let me know how it goes. Thanks much @thedope.

Look for the following in the Wheel3GamesView.xaml file: <!-- DISC ROTATE --> <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="DiscImage" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.RenderTransform).(TransformGroup.Children)[1].(RotateTransform.Angle)" From="0" To="0" BeginTime="00:00:0" Duration="00:00:00.001" /> <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="DiscImage" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.RenderTransform).(TransformGroup.Children)[1].(RotateTransform.Angle)" From="0" To="28800" BeginTime="00:00:2" Duration="00:00:8.000" RepeatBehavior="Forever"> <DoubleAnimation.EasingFunction> <CubicEase EasingMode="EaseInOut" /> </DoubleAnimation.EasingFunction> </DoubleAnimation> You can change the second To="28800" property to a smaller value, or increase the second Duration parameter. If you play with those numbers you should be able to get what you're looking for. You can also take a look at the values in Cid's original Unified theme.

Clear logos will show up for developers, publishers, genres, and play modes with the new auto-generated playlists/nested wheels. However, they don't currently show up at all outside of the nested platform categories views in Big Box. For example, if you go to the system menu in Big Box, and select View Genres, it won't clearly show clear logos there and only the text lists are supported. That is something we do need to tackle eventually, but currently you can't edit a "Genre" or a "Developer" (for instance) to add a clear logo to it, only playlists, categories, platforms, and games. That's correct. I turned off log writing for beta builds by default at that point. You can turn it back on by manually editing Settings.xml in a text editor and changing the DebugLog property to true. I can't seem to replicate this; my guess would be that maybe it's because of a different DPI setting or something like that. Any chance you could screenshot me? What are your Windows DPI settings set to?

Good to hear.