Jason Carr

This doesn't have to do with bulk, no, at least if I'm understanding you correctly.

Can you test to see if it has to do with music or videos? Try turning off auto-play videos and/or auto-play music. Actually, the safest thing to do would be to switch to WMP for video playback. Then if it still happens, we know it's the VLC music playback.

And here's the new thread for 7.7-beta-3: Thanks again all. And goodbye 94-page thread of despair.

Hey guys, new beta is out. In the live stream we figured out that VLC had a bug in the 2.2.3 version that we were using with MP3 playback, which very well could have been cause for some of the errors and freezes. Just put out a new beta with an updated version of VLC; we'll see how it goes. Also in this new beta, I've wrapped up the Additional Applications screen for all the new fields and some new functionality. For example, you can now select a particular emulator for each app. Next steps will be of course to modify the import process, though there's one thing I'm currently not happy with: the name Additional Applications. It doesn't really seem to fit for ROM versions and such. Anybody have any ideas there as to what to call them going forward?

Thanks @DOS76 and @Zombeaver. So this thread is getting a bit unruly. I don't mind the length of it, but I'm going insane trying to follow all the different topics at once. So I've created a new forum here: https://forums.launchbox-app.com/forum/83-beta-testing/ I will be creating a new thread for each beta release going forward. Gonna create a new one for this beta release as well. If possible, if you guys could create a new, separate thread for any outstanding issues you're having (including anything I haven't answered yet in this thread), I'd really appreciate it. I think I'm going to go ahead and close this thread for my own sanity. Going forward, you will probably want to subscribe to the entire Beta Testing forum, so that you get notified when I put out a new beta. You can do this by clicking the Follow button in the upper right of the forum page I linked above. Thanks for bearing with me on this everybody, and sorry for the sudden change of heart lol.

Gotcha; that is almost certainly the cause, I would think. It would be nice to get it fixed but I'd need the device to figure it out, and sadly I can't order 100 different Chinese knockoffs for testing.

Hey guys, new beta is out. In the live stream we figured out that VLC had a bug in the 2.2.3 version that we were using with MP3 playback, which very well could have been cause for some of the errors and freezes. Just put out a new beta with an updated version of VLC; we'll see how it goes. Also in this new beta, I've wrapped up the Additional Applications screen for all the new fields and some new functionality. For example, you can now select a particular emulator for each app. Next steps will be of course to modify the import process, though there's one thing I'm currently not happy with: the name Additional Applications. It doesn't really seem to fit for ROM versions and such. Anybody have any ideas there as to what to call them going forward? I'll go back through this thread here shortly.

Hey guys, every once in a while we find a controller that blows things up. The question is, what controllers do you have attached @dmjohn0x? We've even discovered that a seriously crappy keyboard was acting as a game controller and causing problems at one point.

Assuming @circo has made them available for download, they will actually be available automatically in LaunchBox, as an EmuMovies theme video, just like the arcade platform. And I just checked; it does indeed look like they're available!

Wooootttt!!!! Thank you @Riffman81.

Yeah, I will say that as much as I wanted us to sell cabinets ourselves, the restrictions with distributing emulators alone pretty much prevents it, unless we force the user to do all the setup work, which kind of defeats the purpose. I was pretty excited about it at first but every time I turn around there's another thing that gets in the way, so it probably won't happen for us. Honestly, I'm not sure it's worth the legal trouble at this point.

Sorry for the delay here @shro2016; I haven't gotten back to it yet. Thanks @Maddoc1007 for stepping in.

New beta is out guys; I've been focusing on bugs since yesterday so far. Here are the changes: - Improvement: The error reporting feature now does a better job of displaying more details about unexpected errors, and automatically reports the error to the LaunchBox development team - Fixed: Image region prioritization was being ignored (looked over during performance optimizations) - Fixed: Rare music error when closing LaunchBox Per the error reporting, I figured we could use a better way to manage it all, and I need more data from people in general, so it now automatically posts the error to the server via an HTTP request any time you get the unexpected error dialog. I also did some tweaks to make sure all possible error information is included, which may possibly help with some of these hard to track bugs, like the plain NullReferenceException one that I haven't been able to find. Let me know if any of the same errors you've been getting are more detailed. They should also be automatically reported to me now as well. @Zombeaver, I did also revert some of the focus changes to hopefully alleviate the hiccups. Let me know if this version fares any better.

I have heard this a few times now, but of course I haven't been able to replicate it. So any details to help would be great.

Well, now I know exactly what's causing the hitching. It's the particular checks we're using to see if the application has focus (which I had changed to a more simple method, but then reverted thinking it had to do with the Demul issues). So is this a significant improvement over what was happening before, with stuff going on in the background while games are playing?

No problem @RetroAsylum. I appreciate it.

Thanks @Zombeaver. This is the feature that was the most voted for in the poll: "Many people like to include more than one version of a game in their collection, such as from various regions. This option would automatically group these games on import into a single game in your collection, and allow you to choose which one to play."

Alright guys, new beta is out. Per the live stream this morning, Big Box now optionally remembers the last view used for each platform. We also started working on multiple ROMs per game, but I moved on from that temporarily to address bugs. Sans for bugs, multiple ROMs per game will be my focus for this week. You may notice that the additional apps dialog has been restructured a bit (also per the live stream). There are new fields on that screen that currently don't do anything, and the screen isn't complete yet, but the plan is to restructure additional apps with additional fields and such to support multiple ROMs per game. With this beta, I'm hoping that the various focus issues surrounding Demul, etc. are fixed. I've reverted a few things that I'm guessing were causing the issue; I had changed some focus stuff to help make things more performant. Gonna look into the other bugs reported here next; let me know if this beta fixes anything you guys have been seeing.

We're replacing the custom filters here shortly with the new playlists solution. It's not really freezing, just taking a long time to populate the drop down (sort of a Windows issue). It should work if you wait long enough, but of course we're going to be fixing that up soon.

@chronichemp I'd be interested to know if you have the same issues with previous versions. I can hook you up with an older install if you'd be willing to test. Honestly none of this sounds related to anything that I'm hearing from anyone else, so I'm guessing it's somehow isolated. That said, I'd really like to figure it out. I'll send you a link to a previous version via PM.

Hi @Sithel, yes it should already do this in attract mode.

For people running into these issues, we need to figure out the common ground, as I can't replicate it any of it unfortunately. What version of Windows are you running @chronichemp?

@mgtroyas It may be that you just need to increase the RAM cache size under Tools > Options > System > RAM Cache. Typically 512 MB+ is optimal, and you can check the box to clear the ram cache before launching games if needed.

@mgtroyas, this is due to the background caching system. It can always be improved though, of course. It shouldn't be doing too much of this stuff while not in focus; it should only be performing the significant background caching operations while in focus. What are you seeing when LaunchBox isn't in focus? I have had one report that the "stop while not focused" functionality wasn't working for somebody, so that's why I ask.

Got it fixed. We switched the forums over to use HTTPS but hadn't told Tapatalk to use HTTPS. It's working for me now, so we should be good to go.