Jason Carr

Important life lessons from the LaunchBox community: don't play Knight Rider on the NES (apparently).

Star ratings are only sent up to the cloud when changed or added with the new version of LaunchBox. So they're not automatically sent up in batch from users' existing collections (hopefully that'll make them a bit more accurate). Just checked Super Metroid; we can all breathe a sigh of relief. It's rated 4.29.

Lol, you beat me to it, brains.

This should be fixed guys if you re-run the Download Metadata and Media wizard. We found a bug where 0-star ratings were being reported and used in the calculation when a game was rated and then un-rated. Thankfully I just needed to fix it on the server. However, keep in mind that the LaunchBox app will only download updated metadata once a day, so if you've previously downloaded updated metadata today then you may have to wait until tomorrow for the fix.

Nope. Community ratings will be updated even if you don't overwrite metadata. I do have plans to add a separate process for it eventually.

Yup, it will be specific to Retroarch.

Yup, netplay and the PDF reader.

Certainly a possibility. I haven't looked into the APIs for those, but of course that would determine the feasibility of it.

I think you can get past this by setting the "Scrape As" dropdown value for the platform under Tools > Manage Platforms.

Wow, you're right, good find. What happened is that I didn't realize that when people un-rated games, the 0 value was still being reported back up and then it was being used in the calculation. The good news is that I can just fix this on the server and it should fix it in people's collections once they download updated metadata. It's not an overly common issue because it only happened when people un-rated games, but it's enough to matter lol. It's fixed on the server, but since LaunchBox will only download updated metadata once a day, you may have to wait until tomorrow to run the Download Metadata and Media wizard (unless you haven't downloaded any metadata yet today).

Let's go ahead and close this thread now, since we've certainly received enough feedback on the matter. For those that were offended, irritated, or thrown back, I am sorry for the unnecessary drama. As always, thanks everyone for all the support, whether it be feedback, community contributions, or simply just using the software.

Alright guys, let's stop fighting back and forth. I can certainly understand where people are coming from in saying that I should not have sent the email. In fact, I'd by lying if I said I didn't have any regrets. I thought long and hard about it, but at this point at least I'm coming to the conclusion that perhaps I should not have sent it out to everyone. My apologies for that, as the last thing I want to do is make people feel uncomfortable or divide the user base. The fact of the matter is I don't make all the right decisions all the time. I'm a good developer (at least I hope) but this is certainly a learning experience for me. I don't think anything will be detrimental, but I do need to share that I haven't been overly confident in the decision I just made to send the email out to everyone. Thanks everybody for your feedback.

Reporting his PayPal for illegal practices (which is exactly what he's doing) is not attacking him personally.

Understood @H-Ten. I hear you.

I certainly would if I could. Because we're DRM-free, I can disable his licenses for future versions, but not for existing versions.

Hey everybody, just sent this email out to our email list. I'm copying it here so that it's available online as well. We Are Being Attacked and Threatened First off, thank you so much to the entire community for the amazing success that LaunchBox has seen over the past few years. Everything is going extremely well and we look forward to continuing to improve LaunchBox and Big Box going forward. Over the years, we have come across some major bumps in the road, and we've surpassed every single one of them with relative ease. We expect to surpass this issue in the same way. That said, we need your help. We are being attacked and threatened by a hard drive seller named Christopher Shaw, who goes by wizshaw. We do not believe that he is capable of serious damage, but there's no doubt that he could become a thorn in our side. He became angry with the LaunchBox community because of a thread on our forums, and claims that LaunchBox forum users are continuously reporting and getting his YouTube channel shut down. I have no way of determining if that is the case or not, but regardless, his channel has been repeatedly reported due to his own illegal practices. This morning I woke up to a message from Mr. Shaw: Mr. Shaw ultimately sells hard drives full of ROMs, emulators, and frontends. We do not support people like this, but we have never taken legal action against him or any other hard drive seller. Ultimately we believe that it is wrong to make money off of other people's work, which is exactly what he is doing and continues to do. However, we are not concerned about his "business", as it is minimal and has never been an issue for us. We are primarily concerned with his threats to massively distribute illegal versions of LaunchBox Premium and Big Box online. This is not the first time that someone has massively distributed pirate versions of LaunchBox Premium, and it won't be the last, but it is a potential further issue for us. We have chosen to take a DRM-free approach to our licensing system, which means that we are at risk here. We have chosen not to annoy our customers with crippled software in order to prevent piracy, and we have dealt with a fair amount of piracy over the years. However, we do believe that the best way to prevent piracy is simply to put out quality content with regular new features, and this approach has worked very well for us so far, thanks to our wonderful community. We have no intentions to ever change this, even if our sales do start to suffer due to piracy. That said, it is our hope that we can prevent this from happening. Going back to Mr. Shaw's conversation with me this morning, my response to him was to the point and very clear: I hate making threats like this. This is the first time in my entire career that I have ever felt the need to say something like this, and it disappoints me and troubles me greatly. As a Christian I value forgiveness and love above all else, and it's painful to share with the world that I would write something like this. However, LaunchBox is a business that needs protected, and I do need to be entirely open and honest with you all. Regardless, this was Mr. Shaw's response: Clearly, he is accusing us of destroying his business, despite the fact that none of us have had anything to do with his YouTube channel getting shut down. We have more important things to do (like LaunchBox development!) than to go around and attempt to shut folks like him down. It's worth noting that I did replace all names in the above text with (REDACTED) in order to protect everyone involved, and I did censor some inappropriate language as well, as I will continue to do going forward. My response to him was this: And his response: And once again mine: At this point he is dead-set on destroying us, simply because he's convinced, without proof, that someone in our community has been getting his illegal YouTube channels shut down. He feels entirely in the right in this. Here's his response: Clearly at this point, there was nothing I could do. I can't message the whole entire community and ask them "if you're the guy who banned his YouTube channel, can you unban it?" I'm not even sure if that's possible, but I also don't know if anyone in our community even did it, nor should it matter, as it was full of illegal practices to begin with. So once more, Mr. Shaw is threatening to do everything he can to ruin our business (which, for what it's worth, is not much). And the conversation continues with my response: So here we are. I am so very disappointed to have to send this email out, and I poured over this email for hours before even considering actually sending it. Mr. Shaw's response was more of the same: If that's not incriminating enough, I don't know what is. He has some of the most disgusting intentions that I have ever seen in all of humanity, and he's not in the least bit ashamed to admit it. My response to him was this: As of right now, I have not received a response from him. I thought about waiting until he actually did retaliate, but considering that I probably won't even know about it when he does, that wasn't really an option. I wanted to make the entire community aware of this; my apologies for the extremely long and involved email, and for involving you all in this. What Can You Do? First and foremost, no one in our community is obligated to do anything, so please don't feel that way. Even if nothing is done to stop Mr. Shaw from his attempts to hurt us, we will still survive, as I do not believe that he is capable of doing any major damage. The most important thing that you can do is to simply not purchase any of his products and to discourage others from doing the same. The public needs to be aware of his horrible business practices and corrupt nature. Also, if he does come forward with illegal versions of LaunchBox Premium and Big Box, we would ask that you not download or use them (of course). Even though we have not reported any of his social media sites in the past, I believe that now is the time to do so. Probably the most effective way of preventing his business from continuing is to report his YouTube, Facebook, website, etc. as being illegal. Here are links to his known sites: https://www.hyperarcadesystems.com/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/205573939885510/ Most importantly of all, I must insist that we do not resort to attacking him. I'm not so naive as to think that no one will do so, but I do have enough hope in humanity that most of us know better than to personally attack someone over a business issue. Please DO NOT take any further action other than reporting his websites and discouraging people from purchasing or using his products. We do not want to become the enemy here, nor do any of us want to face any legal issues. This is extremely important. Thank you all very, very much for your continued support, and please rest assured that LaunchBox and Big Box development will continue for many, many years to come. We're only just getting started here. Love, LaunchBox (Jason Carr)

I am aware of this issue guys, just have no idea how to fix it. I've taken a look at it several times and the Tapatalk integration just seems broken. No idea how to fix it, sadly. I'll take another look at it soon.

Okay, then it's probably an issue with the emulator configuration or ROM files. Check to make sure the ROM files exist in the right spot and that MAME is configured properly in LaunchBox. It's difficult for me to troubleshoot the issue from here, unfortunately.

I'm guessing something else is wrong with the files on your disk (ROMs/emulators). It's impossible for me to be able to troubleshoot it from here, but that would be my first guess. I would be careful about continuing to use that hard drive as it's possibly dying. I would first run a chkdsk on the drive to see what's going on.

@Typhon Try switching themes. It's possible that you have a specific theme set for that platform that might be messing it up. When you switch themes under the general Big Box settings, it should reset them. Let me know if that works.

Possible, but it's not really a good solution and would be likely to break upon new releases of Retroarch. So, as usual, if we're going to do it I'd want to do it properly.

That's gorgeous @SNAK3ATER. Yeah, the wall view backend is still pretty rudimentary, so I still need to flesh it out. Hopefully I can get video support in there soon. Are the videos the only thing that you're missing?

The Default theme files will show up after you run Big Box. They won't be there until you open it for the first time.

I would love to see this too, guys. Unfortunately though, no, it's not really possible. The API has no way to provide a "notification" when an achievement is gained. The emulators work because the code for attaining the achievement is all running within the same process, so it's relatively simple to do. For us to do it, we would have to somehow tap into the process of the emulator, which would be tricky in itself. On top of that, it would be completely different code for each and every emulator. So sadly, as things currently stand, it's not even a possibility. The only thing I can think to do at this point is to constantly ping the API every few seconds to detect for changes. But that's a terrible idea as it's extremely wasteful and it's likely to bring the retroachievements.org servers down. The best approach to possibly get this implemented in the future is to ask the retroachievements.org team to add some sort of notification features to the API.

Just hasn't really been requested and therefore I never added it. So let's call this the first request.