Jason Carr

Ha, nice. Indeed. Anyone found any of the easter eggs yet?

Exactly. I remember using a really old version of Access way back as well, but it had stupid limitations. I'm guessing I never used the later versions though. It would be neat to figure out the VGA graphics stuff. That said, I'll probably never get that good at DOS development lol.

Also, thanks much for the error reports guys. I'll have a new beta out end of day Monday with as much fixed as possible.

Let me chime in on VLC since it seems to be coming up a lot here. The issues we've had with it have literally nothing to do with VLC itself; they have to do specifically with the difficulty of integrating *any* video player into the app with support for animations, transitions, etc. To be frank, integrating MPC or any other video player at this point would be a horrible idea, simply because we'd be back at square one, and it would do nothing to fix any bugs; we would instead end up with more bugs to fix. Integrating any particular video player requires immense amounts of code; there's no such thing as a way to easily swap them out, because there's no standard way that video players are implemented. The only reason why we've had less issues with the Windows Media Player implementation is because Microsoft already went through all the work for us. That said, even they've had problems getting everything working across all systems, and WMP refuses to work correctly on some systems as a result (not to mention WMP is likely to get dropped in upcoming versions of Windows). It's not easy to integrate a video player into WPF with support for transitions, animating the videos, playing several videos at once, etc. Switching to a new video player would only cause us more work and we'd have to start over from scratch, so it's just not at all a good idea.

I was just kidding, @lordmonkus; I really don't know. Combined that's a lot to implement and I don't want to make any promises that long-term. Also, let's keep this thread lighthearted and focused on the MS-DOS app.

Two weeks.

Hello everyone! Here's to screwing around with the new LaunchBox for MS-DOS Special Edition 1.0! Check out the details in this video here: And download it here: http://bit.ly/LBXDOS11 Let us know if you've figured out any of the Easter Eggs.

If those would typically be the only file in the archive, then we should already be covered. Do they need to be prioritized over other files?

Awesome @Kevin_Flynn, very much appreciated. The new audit tool will come in very handy for most users, but may not be a perfect solution for hardcore enthusiasts, so I would say this is definitely worthwhile. Thanks a ton for your work here.

Lol! I was 8 characters! Come on!!!!

Woot! Great to hear @jadekitten.

Also, going forward I'll be focusing on the bugs here for a while, starting tomorrow. I'd like to put out official releases more often from here forward, so we're going to put 7.5 out once everything is stable with the auditing and such.

Alright, as some of you guys have noticed, I put out a new beta. The Audit feature should be pretty close to where it will be for the next official release. Please give it a shot guys and let me know what you think. I've added all the media items to it, added proper support for MAME, and a bunch of other stuff, like duplicates and deleting games via right-click. The one caveat here is that for simplicity's sake (both development-wise and usability-wise), we've decided *not* to compare to full sets for this release. This means that you won't be able to identify games that you're missing, but to be honest, most people should just have a full set to begin with anyways so I don't see that as a very important feature, and it would cause some massive confusion for most people. Still, it's super easy to identify and remove prototypes, duplicate games, etc. Eventually we will be working some of it into the import processes as well, but probably not for the next official release. Also, apparently VLC was using the system's VLC settings in some cases, despite us using the "--ignore-config" command line option, which doesn't make much sense, but apparently it was. I've added two more command line options for the VLC playback: --config=VLC.cfg - Should hopefully prevent the default system settings from being used? --postproc-q=0 - Forces post processing to be off, which was identified by @cammelspit to increase performance @cammelspit also noticed that DXVA increased performance, but per our research unfortunately we can't set that everywhere because it doesn't work on some systems. Let me know guys if this addresses the issues with installed versions of VLC, and if it helps performance in Big Box at all. Thanks all!

Aha! You may have just figured out that weird theme video platform video path issue that I couldn't identify. Woot woot. That should help to get it fixed.

Cool, will look into it @oilertitanfan.

Cool, thanks @stephy. I'll take a look at this as well. Is this in LaunchBox or Big Box? I'll need more details on the image issues; check to make sure that your image folders are correct under Tools > Manage Platforms.

Thanks @CriticalCid and @jadekitten; I'll take a look at this (the Steam games image priorities issue). Or @orkoapprentice. Lol. My eyes somehow thought that was written by you @jadekitten. I'm going blind.

Please try the latest beta. I've told VLC specifically to never use the local settings, but it seems to be ignoring it in some cases. Let me know if the latest beta fixes it though.

By "stop functioning" do you mean they keep playing? And you're saying the issue is specific to Demul?

Can you explain what exactly the bugs are here? I'm having trouble following.

Good point @imdavid555. It is supposed to show the logos for the Scrape As value, assuming one doesn't exist for the actual platform name. That is a good point though that I hadn't thought about. I'll look into it.

@shro2016 Good find; it looks like perhaps I broke this in a recent version. I'll get it fixed shortly. Sorry for the trouble there.

Hi @Dan, unfortunately weird stuff like that is extremely hard to troubleshoot without having the device on hand. Really, all game controllers should be showing up in LaunchBox and Big Box, so I'm not sure why it wouldn't be. Have you tried "Use All Controllers" to see if it works that way?

Hi @MerlinArcade, I just responded to your PM. There is a new Big Box theme available on the forums for vertical monitors, though it is new so you'd be treading some new ground there. Also, LaunchBox is what's called "portable" so literally everything is kept inside the LaunchBox folder to make it easily move around (unless of course you use emulators and ROMs outside of the LaunchBox folder.

Awesome, I'll look forward to it. Thanks @shro2016.