Jason Carr

This probably depends on the emulator guys; what emulator are you testing with? The issue is that some emulators have multiple EXEs and the initial EXE will close out (at least that's my hunch). LaunchBox just waits for the EXE to close down before running the exit command.

Good sleuthing guys; all sounds correct. The only thing LaunchBox does with Dolphin is load up the game via the command-line, so there's no delay-loading or anything of that nature.

That's still a question. Eventually, yes, since the Pi does support Mono. My only concern is performance.

Sure, I don't think it would work out to do a Kickstarter for Windows since users have already paid for it. Currently, we're making plenty of money for me to continue focusing heavily on LaunchBox and Big Box for Windows, and that's not going away. What becomes more difficult is if we introduce Linux (another platform). Unless we hire another developer for some significant time, of course it would significantly cut into Windows development, which I would like to avoid. I'm still thinking through things, but my current thought is to run a Kickstarter (with a relatively lofty goal) in order to hire another developer so that Windows development doesn't slow down.

Currently I'm trying to figure out the discrepancy between what I'm reading here on the forums and what we're seeing in the poll. What I may end up doing is creating a Kickstarter with a fairly lofty goal, and we'll see what happens. Money does speak louder than words.

It's displayed prominently in bold at the top of the poll... Though, good to know that some users might not be catching that.

At this point I am heavily considering hiring another developer. So there's that. According to the poll results so far, more than 40% of active LaunchBox users are hoping for a Linux version (they marked "I was hoping for this" or "I MUST HAVE IT NOW"). Beyond that, another 24% on top of the 40% are at least "slightly interested" in a Linux version. Honestly these results are very surprising to me; I would have guessed that most people would still want me to focus only on Windows. However, that doesn't seem to be the case. So 64% of active LaunchBox users who took the poll are interested. Those numbers are fairly telling, and much higher than I ever would have expected. Even more surprising are the results of the "How important is Linux development vs. Windows development for LaunchBox?" question. 39% of active LaunchBox users think that Linux and Windows development should be equally prioritized, while 46.29% think that Windows should be the priority (my personal stance on it as well). The surprising thing, though, is that only 14% think that Linux development is a waste of time and that nothing should take away from Windows development. That's quite a shocker to me. I still hate the concept of Kickstarter (I much prefer to sell people something that I've already built rather than take people's money and make risky promises for the future), but it's also surprising that 37% of active LaunchBox users claim that they would support and contribute to a Kickstarter for Linux. I'm on the fence as to whether I would actually want to go through with a Kickstarter, but that is also very surprising. Keep in mind that in all these results, I've filtered out the people who are not actively using LaunchBox, as I wanted to get accurate numbers from our actual user base. All the numbers go up even farther if we include the die-hard Linux community (of course).

I updated the post, but the poll is now live: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/WPVG975 Vote away!

It's honestly not that I'm bored...this came from the numerous requests that I get asking for LaunchBox on Linux. Every weekend I typically take a break from normal development to attempt something crazy, and sometimes those crazy things turn into something, and sometimes they don't.

Here's the video, btw, for anyone interested: I expect to do a poll coming up soon.

Hi @Domarius, sorry I've been tough to reach. Looks pretty neat; I'm sure there's a number of people who would appreciate the simplified, CRT-focused interface. I do also appreciate that you're willing to check that the end user has a license, because I know that you wouldn't have to do that. Feel free to PM me here and we can discuss any necessary logistics.

This sounds like some sort of controller conflict issue, though it's not one that I've ever seen or heard of before. Are you using LaunchBox or Big Box? What happens if you disable controllers in LaunchBox completely? We haven't changed the controller stack in LaunchBox in ages, so I'm guessing this is more likely related to updated controller drivers or something of that nature than a change in LaunchBox.

Hi there @OGControllersOrBust. The best thing you can do for non-matching titles is to arrange by the LaunchBox DB ID, which will sort the games out that are not connected to the database. Oh, ha, you said that already. Currently, there's no way to look for titles that are in the games database but missing from your local collection. That would be incredibly messy anyways since the games database is not guaranteed to be complete, and it contains extra games like hacks and such as well.

Good to know @mdreffet. I'll add that to my shortlist.

This is not currently possible, though it makes sense for us to eventually add support for multiple languages to the games database. It will probably be a while before we get there though.

Another quick update, just fixed a bug where alternate titles without regions were not showing up on the game details pages. All the data and everything was being uploaded and moderated without any issues, but they just weren't showing up. So you'll probably see a bunch more alternate titles show up on the game details pages now.

@Robin55 They look great! Yes, they should be accepted in the database. Just make sure to categorize them correctly with the correct region and category. Unfortunately I still don't have a way to upload them in batch, though.

Hey there @GoodOldGames, one way around this is to use additional apps instead for the remaining documents. I plan to add support for using the built-in PDF reader for additional apps that are PDFs.

We could certainly add that as an option, but it still won't solve the invisible text problem with changing backgrounds.

Moderation performance should be much improved now. I'm not necessarily done working on performance there, but I did make some good progress today.

Hey all, quick update. I've been working on the database website a bit the last couple of days. I put some significant time into the moderation performance; my goal is to get moderation to stop slowing down over time (instead of just archiving records every once in a while). I did make some big performance gains, so hopefully performance stays half-way decent.

Makes sense. Though if you look closely, the surrounding outlines are actually not pixel-perfect to the text (due to some unfortunate issues with Windows rendering and ClearType text), so that would require going back to the drawing board somewhat. That said, makes sense. I'll try and gauge how popular this request is based on how many times I've heard it requested. Is there a BitBucket ticket for it?

I see. Yeah, as far as I know, there's no way for us to fix this ourselves. It has to do with how the emulator is coded; they apparently never bothered to integrate the retro achievements stuff when loading a ROM via the command line, only via the emulator's interface. So yes, we would have to go back to the retroachievements.org community to get this fixed.

Yeah, I am working on the moderation performance issues as we speak. I fixed a number of errors yesterday and I'm working on performance today. I know that performance is the biggest reason why we've been having trouble getting things moderated, and the problem is that previous performance fixes we've done were only temporary. I'm not really sold on reducing moderation requirements for long-term contributors, but I will give that some thought. Per the badges, that is something I would love to do but it requires some significant work integrating the forums and the games database sites (which currently use two separate accounts), so it's a royal pain to implement. But hopefully I can get that in eventually.

Responded in the thread. Isn't that a list of pretty much every useful feature included in Rocket Launcher? I'm not saying that we'll never tackle those features, because many of them I would love to have myself, but it's important to note that Rocket Launcher is no small project and it's made even more complicated by needing separate code for all those things for each individual emulator. If you throw in the fact that it's very bug-prone due to constantly changing versions of Windows and updates, constantly changing emulators, and forcing Windows to do things it really wasn't meant to do, it becomes a pretty big mess to implement, and an even bigger mess to maintain. So as much I as I'd love if this stuff could be implemented well and just work, it's pretty unlikely to happen any time soon, which is why I'm very glad the project exists.