Jason Carr

I've reverted to the beta 6 version with the most optimizations for beta 12, which is uploading now. I think we'll keep this unless there's a unanimous conclusion that it's worse.

The playlists won't show up if there are no games found for them.

Do you still have the playlist files in your LaunchBox\Data\Playlists folder?

Okay cool; it's not an anti-virus issue then. What are your computer specs and collection size?

No problem Claudio; I have it integrated for the next beta. Should be out later today. Planning to put out the official release on Monday.

I see. At this point, honestly, it's just a matter of priorities. I've moved on from .Next development for the most part back into building actual features. The black bar thing can easily be changed with a custom theme, and I know that there are custom themes being built, so I probably won't be back to that any time soon. Per Tahoma vs. Segoe UI, I might tackle that later if it proves to be a more common request, but as it stands I could be wrong but I think you're the only person who's requested it, so unfortunately that's not on the radar currently. That said, that could be solved with a custom theme as well. Sorry to not bring better news.

Alright, all of @uv777bk's videos have been uploaded as well. @harryoke Let me know if you have any additional platform, category, or playlist videos in your back library that we could upload.

I have all of the new @RetroHumanoid vids uploaded to the server, as well as the new Ball & Paddle Games video from @harryoke. The next beta will have the option to prioritize @harryoke and @uv777bk's videos as well. @uv777bk I'm in the process of uploading your pinball category video as well as the rest of the videos you've made to the server; they look and sound great, btw. I assume it's okay for us to put them in the automatic video downloader?

Woah! Very cool. We do have videos for everything at this point from RetroHumanoid, but we could certainly use some more options. It would definitely be appreciated and we'll get them up on the automatic downloader.

@maxcb97 Can you give me an example of the overlay not stretching properly? I'm not sure what you're referring to. Also, Segoe UI is the new Windows font used for pretty much everything, so that is by design.

That video looks awesome @uv777bk. The Pinball Arcade playlist is for MAME-based pinball arcade games, rather than Future Pinball, Visual Pinball, or Pinball FX though.

Awesome; thank you Retro! I'll get these uploaded to the server.

It does make sense for beta 6 to have been the smoothest beta, because I had put in the most performance improvements. However, I ended up reverting the improvements that I had put in for beta 6 due to claims that they made it worse lol. So perhaps I'll go back to the improvements I had put in...

Wow, I love it @harryoke! Very cool; I'll definitely be using it for my own collection. We should probably start a harryoke set of videos for the downloader in LaunchBox as well.

Hi alec, yes, previously the System menu stuff just hadn't been implemented, but it is implemented in the latest betas. The official release should hopefully be out early next week. Let me know if you run into any additional issues.

Just a shameless plug for the Unified Redux theme for Big Box: I've updated it to work very well for the new MAME/Arcade playlists.

I just released version 1.1 of the Unified Redux theme for Big Box with lots of image updates primarily from @RetroHumanoid: The updated theme should work really well now for all the new playlists.

Just letting you all know that I just released version 1.1 of the theme: Background images revamped (and in some cases removed) for common platforms in order to increase readability of the wheels and remove JPEG artifacts (many of the Classics playlists had backgrounds with horrible artifacts from Hyperspin). Thanks to RetroHumanoid for many of the new backgrounds. Removed the default Big Box logo for platforms or playlists with no logos. Even we're not that in love with the Big Box logo. Added background fanart images for some playlists that will show up if there are no videos for that playlist; previously the theme was showing a black screen in this case. Reduced the size of the theme by over 350 MB by converting the background images from PNGs to maximum-quality JPGs. There is no perceived quality loss and now the theme is less than half the size. Modified/removed some of the video borders with characters in order to better support the new arcade playlists (some of them were irrelevant to arcade games) and make room for arcade flyer images, which used to half-overlap the characters. Highly recommended: Modify your "Images" > "3D Box Priorities" settings in LaunchBox to include "Box - Front" and "Advertisement Flyer - Front" images in order to display regular box or arcade flyer images if no 3D box image exists.

This is something I definitely want to do, but it is complicated and we're pushing for the 8.6 release at this point, so unfortunately it won't make it in for the next release. Hopefully I can take a look at it soon though.

Holy crap @Grila; that looks amazing. Well now I'm excited... We'll probably do a video on it once it's released since it's likely to be the first major overhaul theme.

Thank you very much @dukeemu. I have the Italian translation integrated for the next beta.

Hi Tony, sorry for the bad news there. Hopefully I can get back to it at some point to improve it, but until then I just don't want such a flawed feature to be included in LaunchBox.

Alright, beta 11 is out with the following: - Updated Brazilian Portuguese translation thanks to @Cauptain - Hopeful fix (again) for folders being created in emulator folders - I noticed that performance in Big Box while going from platform categories into platforms was made a lot slower by all the new auto-populate playlists, so I did some work to speed that up, and it seems to be much faster now. Unless any new issues come up, I'll probably let this beta simmer over the weekend and we'll put out the official release on Monday or Tuesday.

Hi Dan, I tested with your data. I'm not seeing long CPU spikes on my end, but it could be because I don't have your media, or it could be because of something like an anti-virus app interfering. Do you have any kind of anti-virus or anti-malware programs installed? For some reason I didn't think of that before.

Unfortunately it's very different, since they're two completely different interfaces, so moving a theme from Big Box to LaunchBox isn't likely to be a good idea. The point of LaunchBox is to have a desktop-style interface, whereas the point of Big Box is to have a home theater or arcade cabinet-style interface. That's not to say that you couldn't do it, but it wouldn't be as easy as just copying the theme over and tweaking some things. That said, I'd love for you to play with it @SNAK3ATER and see what you can come up with. The recommended approach is to copy the Default theme and tweak it to be whatever you want it to be.