Jason Carr

Yup, please do @porterballs! It's appreciated!

Planning to go ahead with the official release tomorrow (Monday) guys. It looks like the music null reference bug has indeed finally been fixed (praise the Lord) as it hasn't come up since beta 15 came out yesterday. Hooray! I'm expecting that this should fix any remaining stability issues in LaunchBox and Big Box; let me know if anyone sees any additional issues.

A genius indeed! You've out-programmed me @Grila!

Again guys, back on topic please. I don't see that kind of discussion as productive. @MerlinArcade You might be on to something with the cron job thing; truthfully I hadn't thought of that. Let's discuss it in a different thread though if you want to continue the discussion.

Hi guys, I appreciate the discussion here, but let's keep new features discussion outside of the beta testing threads (at least new features that don't apply to what's being worked on currently). @MerlinArcade That is a feature I've always wanted to add, but it isn't quite that simple, as sometimes adding games with media and everything else can take a significant amount of time, and there are a number of options available as well. I just put out beta 15 now guys; the last two betas were to add more details to the errors to try and catch that blasted music null reference bug. Thankfully I finally have it down to the method that disposes the previous music player and media that was last played. I have a possible fix in there as well, so we'll see how this one fares. Also, for what it's worth, @MerlinArcade's been doing his best to figure out how to do all this legally, and came to me early on to ask how to get a hold of legitimate licenses to LaunchBox, so no issues there.

In the latest beta, guys, is the new multiple ROM versions stuff. What you *could* do is just put in two different additional apps for the game, each with a different emulator. This stuff is new in the latest beta, but that should allow you to do exactly what you're looking for, though there's no way to set it up automatically in batch.

Beta 13 is out now guys. Unfortunately we did not, in fact, fix that music null reference bug, so I've added some more logging into the music code to see if we can figure it out further. Unfortunately at this point I'm wondering if it's a bug with VLC itself, much like we've run into in the past. I'm tempted to do something extreme like throw all the music code into a separate process so that it can't affect LaunchBox or Big Box if it goes haywire, but that's not exactly a good solution either. To clarify for anyone who hasn't been following this issue, this happens both in LaunchBox and Big Box only when using music in one way or another. Sometimes it causes a random crash, sometimes it causes a NullReferenceException error with no stack trace, and sometimes both. I have been able to replicate it myself, but it happens so rarely that it's been really hard pin down. So anyways, this is the last thing to resolve before we're ready for a release, but I refuse to put it out until we finally lay this to rest. This bug is gonna die, one way or another.

Whew, good to know @cammelspit. Yes, voice recognition has always been cause for huge performance issues. One of these days we'll have to get back to it but I have a feeling it'll be a nightmare again when we do, unfortunately. @DOS76 Yes, imports will now import into the version field, which is a big win for some people, especially folks who don't want to combine their games. So if you have LaunchBox showing versions, you will indeed see that information. If you don't want it, then it should be easy enough to batch edit the games and empty it out.

Thank you very much guys, integrating those translations into a new beta now.

@cammelspit Sigh, odd. Haven't really touched Big Box at all for this release, since the remember views feature at least. The only thing I can think of would be having more additional applications and less games. Did you do any merging? @neil9000 I'll check out that thread.

Thank you @Bardock! I've pushed the official release out until Monday guys in order to make sure it's 100% stable. Also, I've committed the cardinal sin, and I'm sorry for that. I added a new dialog after sending everyone stuff to translate (the manual combine games process was too confusing so I added a dialog called RootGameForm to allow the user to select which game to use as the root game). Translation packages have been updated with this new form. If you guys can get it translated before Monday, that'd be awesome. Otherwise, we'll just run with what we got. Thanks again guys.

Great to hear guys. Beta 12 is now out. I fixed a bunch of minor bugs. Thanks to the extra reporting I added this morning, I figured out that the annoying null reference music bug was being called by the Music.Kill method, and I bullet-proofed it to high heaven so I'm hoping we can finally put that one to rest. Time will tell. I also added a dialog to the manual combine process for the user to specify which game to combine the others into, and implemented the combining and expanding on the audit screen as well. @CriticalCid's included CriticalZone theme has been updated to fix the missing marquee images for games as well, all thanks to him.

Hi Martin, I agree that we probably need some more categories for themes. I'm not sure that grouping them by creator is the best approach, but we'll revisit this at some point.

Wow, that sounds very cool @majormajor0. Yeah, let me know when you have everything ready, because it might come in handy for LaunchBox as well.

Thanks @staticfade, that will definitely be fixed before the official release.

Yeah, scraping should not at all be necessary since the entire data set is accessible and downloadable via XML. The way we do it via LaunchBox is prompt the user to optionally download a new set of data daily. What frontend are you working on @majormajor0?

Thank you guys; I just put out another new beta that adds some extra reporting to help identify the music null reference bug that is plaguing us (yes, that's still there). I've also decided not to try and rush this one out today as originally planned. It's certainly way more stable than the previous release already, but I'd rather take my time and try and get everything fixed, so the official release will probably end up coming out early next week instead. @Maddoc1007 Thanks for the report on the platform video downloads; I haven't fixed that for beta 11 but I'll get on that and get it fixed today.

Hey guys, sorry I missed @majormajor0's post above. The entire set of data from the LaunchBox Games Database is available for download here: http://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/Metadata.zip This zip file is updated daily with all the latest metadata. This is exactly how LaunchBox itself ties into the data (it's much quicker than an API because all processing can happen locally). Inside of the zip file are the same three XML files that are found in the LaunchBox\Metadata folder. Images of course are downloaded directly from the website.

Alright, beta 10 is out: Closing out this thread.

New beta is out; hopefully we're pretty close to the official release with this one. Manually combining and expanding games have been added; they're available via right-clicking on games in LaunchBox. A number of other bugs have been fixed as well, of course. Let me know how it goes everyone.

Hey guys, I'm having trouble following the steps to reproduce this. @Maddoc1007, can you give me some clear steps as to how to reproduce it?

Thanks all; I have all translations updated for the next beta to be out later today. @Bardock, I just realized that we haven't yet translated the rest of the release notes parts for the Dutch translation. Any chance you can translate the below? Welcome to LaunchBox RELEASEVERSION! Here are the biggest changes for this release: See the changelog under the Help menu for more. If you appreciate LaunchBox, please Like us on Facebook and help us spread the word! THIS IS AN UNOFFICIAL BETA RELEASE. Please do not distribute this version of LaunchBox, as it is not an official release and could be broken. See the changelog under the Help menu for further details on the changes for this release. Please report all issues that you run into using the Report Issue option under the Help menu. Thanks for using LaunchBox! To get started, you can: Install or Import MS-DOS games Import your games from Steam Import your ROM collection See what LaunchBox can do View the changelog under the Help menu for details on the latest version. Support LaunchBox!

@Pacman56 Thanks for all those details; that really helped me identify the issue. There was a conflict between the previous disc logic and the new stuff. I have it all fixed for the next beta.

I see, I think this is just because I don't have (beta) being marked as a prototype currently. I'll fix that.

Closing this thread. We can continue discussion under beta 9: