Jason Carr

Bulk clearing your genre fields and then running the metadata update is a good plan; that should work great. You may need to clear the Play Mode field as well for the 2-Player and 4-Player playlists.

Sure, what you have is probably a good solution if you want the genres separated out. In Big Box it's not a big deal because you never display an entire platform category's games. The playlists will still work just fine.

That is correct. Viewing an entire platform category only shows the games that are in platforms inside of that category. This is for performance reasons, but also, there's little reason to need to display games like that. Might as well just select the Arcade/MAME platform.

A better way to go though with LaunchBox 8.6 is to use the new MAME Arcade Full Set import wizard.

Hi @goyetus, when you first select the item to create the missing playlists, this is what you see: Please read that second paragraph; you have to have updated metadata for the new playlists to work correctly. You can either restore a backup of your previous playlists, or you can run the Download Metadata and Media wizard and overwrite your metadata. Then the playlists will work properly.

Yes, by default, the Arcade playlists show up under the Arcade platform category. You can remove them from there by editing the playlist and turning off that option.

I'm confident that crashes like this are not happening under regular circumstances, so unfortunately there must be something unique or problematic going on with your system. It could be collection-related, or it could be a Windows or a hardware issue, or some sort of application conflict. It's very common for crappy anti-virus applications to cause issues like this, so that's the first thing I would check; the last time I heard of issues like this, Malwarebytes was the culprit. Do you have any anti-virus or anti-malware software installed other than Windows Defender?

It can be done with a custom theme, but unfortunately that part is just using the default Windows look and feel in the default theme, so the colors can't currently be changed. I'll probably leave it up to custom themes to change it at least for the time being.

Use the OnSelected methods to store the selected games in a private variable, which you can then refer to from the GameStarting event.

I am aware of this issue; it seems to be more prevalent on slower machines. I'll do my best to review it soon.

I'm completely lost on that; it's an issue I've never seen before. Can you zip up and PM me your data folder (if you haven't already)?

I'm not sure if maybe you didn't use the full-set importer and used the old importer instead, or if these are just files that are usually filtered out by the various criteria.

Any set will work great with the new full-set importer. This is because the new full-set importer does not even look at the files, because it doesn't need to; it knows what the full set is. Therefore, assuming you're actually using the new full-set importer, it's a genuine impossibility that it's importing any extra files.

This is an bug/incompatibility issue with the GOG plugin. This error should not come up with beta 14.

These options should not be dimmed out; do you have the Arcade platform selected? Or a playlist?

I remember this coming up before. All I can figure is that maybe you have a platform or a playlist named All? Do you have any files named All.xml in LaunchBox\Data\Platforms or LaunchBox\Data\Playlists?

Sure; let me know what hooks/functionality you need, and I can get them added for you. Most often, things are easy to add, it's just best not to add them when we're close to a release. If you find yourself having to resort to reflection, just let me know and I'll see what it would take to make it easier.

Alright, one last beta (hopefully) before the official release tomorrow. Beta 14 is out now with the following: - Fix for the rare null reference error that wallmachine posted above - Plugin errors will no longer prompt the end user, and in the vast majority of situations, plugins shouldn't be able to crash the application (though it's still a possibility, just less likely). For plugin developers, I've just wrapped all plugin calls in a try catch block. Plugin exceptions will now be written out to the debug log only.

Yes, correct. We shouldn't be uploading media with copyrighted music.

Ah, sure. Yeah, I think we'll keep things as-is at least for the 8.6 release, since I'm planning on putting it out tomorrow. FYI, for this next beta (and the official release), I've wrapped all plugin method calls in try catch statements so that the user never sees any plugin-created errors, but the errors will still show up in the debug logs if they are enabled (or if it's a beta release as they're always enabled for beta releases).

Multi-threading won't help much for downloading media, as bandwidth is typically the limiting factor. This has been discussed previously and in some situations it might be slightly quicker to multi-thread the downloads, but the performance improvements aren't likely to be substantial, so it's not a priority. Also, looking at processor utilization honestly makes zero sense when what's going on is downloads, as the CPU really has very little to do with the process.

I'm aware of the Back issue, but unfortunately I've only ever replicated it once so I haven't been able to figure out what on earth causes it. If anyone is able to narrow it down to at least a half-way reproducible situation, that would help tremendously. It at least seems to happen very rarely and there are ways around it, so I haven't made it a huge priority since it's proving so difficult to reproduce. I assume you mean when a playlist is added *to* a platform category? It is a known issue that counts don't always show up in Big Box for playlists. I do need to address it, but it has been a performance issue in the past, which is why it currently is the way it is. This is an incompatibility issue/bug with the PCSX2 Configurator plugin. I'm going to put out a beta shortly that hides plugin-related errors from the user. The errors will still be put into the debug logs for plugin developers. This also looks to be a plugin error with the GOG plugin.

I may do something to address this at some point here, yes. Admittedly it could at least do a better job making sure that lines aren't cut off. Previously in OG LaunchBox we just put a ... at the end of the title if it was cut off.

It looks like you probably have an invalid file path in your data/configuration somewhere. Probably the best thing to do would be this: Make a backup of your LaunchBox\Data folder. Delete the entire LaunchBox\Data folder while LaunchBox and Big Box are closed. Start LaunchBox and Big Box to make sure that they run. Manually copy the XML files from your backup over one by one to try and figure out which XML file is causing the problem. Once you've narrowed down which XML file is causing the problem, open up the XML file in a text editor to try and find the invalid path (or post it here and one of us can help).