Jason Carr

All alternate names should be used when searching, and used when matching games for retro achievements. I'm gonna dive into the code here to confirm all that and make sure there's not any bugs, but that's how it's implemented.

Unfortunately that would be an issue with the retroachievements.org API. I guess we need to contact those guys again. All makes sense; thanks for those thoughts guys.

Gotcha. We should be able to leave the parameters column in the grid in order to add extra parameters easily enough. That's why we're testing.

So the next feature we're looking to tackle from the poll for this release is further Retro Achievements integration. Looking for some brainstorming here:

Hello all, we're looking to tackle the Retro Achievements additions item from the poll, but we need to do some brainstorming to decide what should and should not be added directly into LaunchBox and/or Big Box. Here are some general thoughts that I have: It's relatively pointless for us to build a popup window of sorts in LaunchBox, when we can just link to the retroachievements.org website. This should be considered throughout all brainstorming. It's super easy for us to provide a link in a menu somewhere in the app to link to a particular page on the site (such as showing the leaderboard for a particular game from the right-click menu in LaunchBox). It makes slightly more sense to put more time into leaderboards and such in Big Box, since the web cannot be as easily browsed using Big Box controls. That said, we could use the integrated Chromium engine like we do for PDFs, which should allow for controller navigation pulling up the retroachievements.org website from within Big Box, which is an option that should be considered because we could integrate a lot more of it in a lot less time. The main thing I think that would make sense to implement directly into LaunchBox would be anything that we want to display *all* the time, when available, such as profile stuff, gamer score, etc. We could display this stuff in the game details sidebar, but I'm looking for brainstorming as to what we should consider showing directly in the LaunchBox window and where. Let me know your thoughts, guys, as well as the specific features your looking for related to Retro Achievements integration.

The cores do need to be configured properly in the Retroarch emulator. It doesn't automatically find all cores from your folder. They have to be added in the emulator dialog. The emulator dialog does allow you to add more than one core for a particular platform.

Thanks for all the feedback guys; all noted. Beta 2 is out now with two new features: - New Feature: The Launch With functions will now allow you to choose a core when launching Retroarch - New Feature: Managing the Retroarch emulator is now much easier with drop downs for the cores and notifications for missing cores The Launch With stuff is not yet in Big Box or LaunchBox.Next (only LaunchBox), but will be coming soon to those as well. I'm particularly interested in feedback on the new Retroarch core management stuff, as it's kind of tricky and I'm curious to know if anyone runs into any hitches or restrictions. Testing from a new install, adding cores, etc. would be great. Let me know how it goes. LaunchBox.Next development is in progress of course, but there's nothing new there for this beta.

Good to know; added to my list. I've added this to my list as well, though we have plenty of more important things to do before I'll likely be able to come back to it. Same here; I like this idea but it will likely be a while. Yup. This looks to be a bug with the Ao.Bigbox plugin, as it seems to be assuming incorrectly that a particular platform exists.

Some of the EmuMovies issues you speak of are due to the API, which unfortunately sometimes still has issues even with the right names. LaunchBox *does* use alternate titles correctly. However, in some cases the EmuMovies API doesn't.

Were you running version 8.1 before upgrading, when it was last working?

Sorry to hear about this guys. Do try restarting your machine, per @Vhero, but I assume you've tried that already. Were you both running version 8.1 before upgrading?

That has come up before, and I agree that it would be best add it in (the drop downs for the filter values). It's on my list already, but I'll see if I can move it up a bit. Agreed; genres are much simpler than say, developers or publishers because there's a lot less of them. I agree that we should enable that, so I'll that to my list as well.

Yes, though I recognize if you want every genre or every developer, for instance, that's not really going to work. The issue with using other views for genres, for example, is that we just don't have pictures for each genre, or each developer, etc. Otherwise we could easily implement the other views for the other filter types, but without pictures for them, the other views are fairly impractical.

@danpow That's what dynamic playlists are for. You can create a playlist to do exactly that and include it in the platforms list.

Yes, you can adjust it currently and it even remembers it too!

Great feedback, thanks Zom. We can certainly add all those settings, yes, though they'll have to wait until after everything else is done. Here's a couple screenshots of what the game details sidebar used to look like in a previous iteration, spanning all the way to the right and bottom: Personally, I've decided I like it better the new way. Thoughts? Keep in mind that either way, we will soon have support for custom themes, so it'll be fully tweakable soon enough.

Thanks for the feedback guys. All is coming of course. Any feedback on the visuals of the new game details sidebar?

Hello all, as stated in the latest beta thread: I've added the game details sidebar and image groups to LaunchBox.Next. Check out the thread for details.

Hello all, the first 8.3 beta is finally here. We're still working on the two Retroarch-related items from the poll (those should be in for the next beta). However, what we do have in this beta is LaunchBox.Next implementations for the game details side bar and image groups: There are still a million little things to do with LaunchBox.Next before it's complete, as well as getting Arrange By working properly. That said, the end is in sight. My current plan is to hopefully get everything mostly completed in LaunchBox.Next before releasing 8.3. Then once 8.4 is out we'll most likely do away with the old version of LaunchBox entirely. It will probably be a couple months yet, but I'm looking forward to LaunchBox.Next being the main release due to its ease of development and much improved performance.

This is planned for the MAME-related item from the poll, though no timeline at current.

Very nice work guys. Currently there are no horizontal text list theme options, unfortunately, at least without adding a custom plugin for it. You could always use a wheel with clear logos instead, though.

Yes, but only Big Box plugins can be added to a theme. There would be no way to add that program to Big Box or a theme.

I have no idea how that tool works, but from the looks of it, it may not work at all. I'm not sure what you mean by adding it to the theme.

Big Box uses WPF, which in turn uses DirectX. I would assume it would use DX11, but I really don't know what version it is.

Hmm, it seems like there's a corrupted image file in there somewhere that's wreaking havoc; either that or something in the .NET framework has gotten corrupted. The error is happening when trying to load a PNG image, from what I can tell. Though that doesn't explain data errors like missing emulators. Generally, if there's more than one thing going wrong it's a strong sign that there's some kind of issue with the operating system or the hardware, though I can't say for sure. I would run chkdsk to make sure you don't have any file system errors. Do you have any backups?