Jason Carr

Hey all, first off, my apologies for the delays in maintaining the games database website. There have been a few issues for a while and I should have gotten to them a lot sooner than I did. That said, I just did a bunch: - Moderation statistics should now be correct again, including the archived data - Moderation is slightly more user-friendly (more loading notifiers in places that were previously awkward) - Fixed a couple of items that were stuck in moderation - The My Collection issues have been fixed - Everything should be much faster The next thing I'd like to do is clean up the platforms list; especially now that we have playlists implemented in LaunchBox, we no longer need the fake Arcade divisions. Officially, going forward they should all be under Arcade as one platform.

The new server is up and live with the LaunchBox Games Database; DNS may or may not have propagated for everyone yet, but image downloads are now lightning fast assuming your DNS has updated. We have a lot more room now for traffic. Later this week I am also going to spend some significant time on the current issues with the database site, most notably the issues with My Collection, so that is on my immediate radar.

Big Box already has the option to always launch on a specific monitor.

Hi all, the EmuMovies download speeds have nothing to do with whether you have a premium or free LaunchBox version, as EmuMovies is separate from LaunchBox. However, I expect that speeds are likely faster with a premium EmuMovies subscription, but @circo would need to confirm that. For what it's worth, we are throwing immense amounts of traffic both to our servers and EmuMovies servers as of the last few days, so it's possible that things are slower because of the extra traffic. I also have plans to multi-thread the EmuMovies downloads, which should help speeds there as well eventually. Finally, I'm adding a new server tonight to help with downloads from the LaunchBox Games Database, but that won't affect the EmuMovies downloads.

Thank you @corvusfan23.

Woot?

It was fixed actually to the best of my knowledge, and is working fine in my testing. Are you using Windows Media Player or VLC? What happens when you hit the fullscreen option?

Not fully following, but yes, we've changed/improved the way MAME imports work several times over the past months.

Application downloads are coming from Amazon S3 for the time being, which should absolutely fly. If the download is slow for you currently, it's almost guaranteed to be on your end at this point.

Alright, sorry for that. We're working on moving away from S3 into our own solution, so give us a day or so. It is puzzling though, because we're getting thousands of successful downloads. Where are you located?

LaunchBox itself should automatically remember which screen it was opened on last, unless I'm missing something. So yes, this was only implemented for Big Box.

Thanks guys; glad it's figured out.

@ALIE, yup. I'm actually in the process of spinning up yet another server to help with the massive traffic.

Beta 13 is now out guys:

Alright guys, beta 13 is here with the following: - At this point I refuse to say that the sidebar sorting bug is fixed (sigh), but I've gotten farther with it now at least. Let me know how this is fairing for people. - Platforms can now be managed directly in the sidebar via right-click just like playlists - Arcade playlists are no longer automatically created if a platform with the same name already exists - Default-sorted playlists were not sorted properly in Big Box, which was also causing issues with alpha-numeric navigation; this should be fixed - In order to better support some MAME games that don't have an associated zip file, LaunchBox will no longer complain that the ROM file does not exist if the emulator's "use file name only without file extension or path" box is checked I think that's it. We're getting there.

We have so many safeguards in place to make sure nothing like that happens; I'm pretty confident that it's not possible that LaunchBox went and deleted your data files. That's literally historically never once happened, so there must be something else going on here. The worst situation we've seen in the past is corrupted XML files, but they can be restored from the Backups folder. Remember that all of LaunchBox's data is stored in the LaunchBox\Data folder via XML, so you can check on that folder. Regardless, yes, I don't say this to be a jerk, but it is absolutely imperative that everyone who is using the betas maintains regular backups of their collections. Really, everyone should, period, including those on official releases, but especially folks using the betas. It's super easy to back up your collection because it's just a matter of copying the LaunchBox folder (as long as you leave default paths and such). Anyways, it looks like that error occurred with the setup program, oddly; are you using any kind of file syncing program or anything that could have changed the folder while the setup was running? Also, what anti-virus and/or security software are you running? Have you checked the file system for errors with chkdsk?

Yes, the games database server is currently being pegged due to all the extra traffic since the weekend, which is another reason why we're firing up another server here. I'm hoping to get it up and running late tonight.

The downloads have been hosted on Amazon S3 for the past few days, which should in theory eliminate any download issues, though Amazon apparently did have some DNS issues (sigh). I assume it's working for you now @bauerdave? Amazon S3 is temporary though because it's costing us $100 a day (ouch!) to keep them up there. We're in the process if getting *another* server going as a more permanent solution.

@keithhov This has probably come up before but I got so much going on, I can't recall. Can explain exactly what is happening?

@sdotmartin Replied to you via email, so you should be all set.

Okay, well that confirms that somehow the additional applications were removed from the XML then. So the question then becomes how. It does sound like it was probably caused by Lightspeed if that was the only thing you had done in the mean time, especially since no one else has ever reported it as an issue. @Antropus, I certainly don't mean to call you out here by an means, but is there any chance that Lightspeed could have removed additional applications from the XML?

FYI guys, I've added something to my short list to stop demanding that files exist if that emulator option is checked, which should make this easier. It's not in there yet but should be soon. Thanks for the reminder guys.

That does sound pretty cool @Mohammed Ali Hosho. It would be a pretty extensive thing to implement, but it is a great idea. Can you put a ticket in using Issues/Requests in the header?

Makes sense @oilertitanfan. I will contact the Rocket Launcher guys and see what we can work out.

Cool, thanks @MajKSA. Unfortunately it may be a bit yet because I have to create the translation package and such, but it's on my shortlist. Much appreciated! Oh, what country are you from? Need to be able to assign it the most accurate version of Arabic: ar-DZ Arabic - Algeria 0x1401 ARG ar-BH Arabic - Bahrain 0x3C01 ARH ar-EG Arabic - Egypt 0x0C01 ARE ar-IQ Arabic - Iraq 0x0801 ARI ar-JO Arabic - Jordan 0x2C01 ARJ ar-KW Arabic - Kuwait 0x3401 ARK ar-LB Arabic - Lebanon 0x3001 ARB ar-LY Arabic - Libya 0x1001 ARL ar-MA Arabic - Morocco 0x1801 ARM ar-OM Arabic - Oman 0x2001 ARO ar-QA Arabic - Qatar 0x4001 ARQ ar-SA Arabic - Saudi Arabia 0x0401 ARA ar-SY Arabic - Syria 0x2801 ARS ar-TN Arabic - Tunisia 0x1C01 ART ar-AE Arabic - United Arab Emirates 0x3801 ARU ar-YE Arabic - Yemen 0x2401 ARY