Jason Carr

Are you guys seeing this with EmuMovies or the LaunchBox Games Database?

That is probably because images are no longer being cached in the background. Assuming you have the RAM cache enabled, LaunchBox was previously caching all those images after it loaded up. It still does that but only once you scroll to the actual images.

Awesome. Thanks @Deej.

I'm guessing the setup just got cut off half way through, @ALIE. It should be safe to install the latest setup on top and it should keep your configuration. It is always dangerous when that happens though because data loss is always a possibility. If it was just in the setup though, hopefully it shouldn't be any configuration files that would be messed up.

Hi @flores9, sorry to hear about this issue. It does sound like corrupted XML somehow. Are you able to restore a backup XML from the backups folder? Are you on a 6.10 beta now or the 6.9 official?

I have yet to confirm, but I've been in talks with Plays.TV and they have added LaunchBox.exe and BigBox.exe to their blacklist. Supposedly restarting Plays.TV (or waiting overnight) should update their blacklist in the app and it should no longer cause the problem. If anyone is able to test, let me know. I can't say I'm a big fan of their blacklist method of fixing this issue (largely because so many applications are going to be affected and this really screws over the little guy who doesn't have an amazing user base to identify the issue to begin with), but I do appreciate how quickly they got back to me on this.

Maybe "Show Broken Games"? I see that that's unchecked.

Hi @Deej, thanks for the purchase! Some email clients might change the file name of the file. It should work to just rename the file to "License.xml" and place it in your LaunchBox folder. Or, you can use the Help > License Registration option in LaunchBox. Email me at jason@unbrokensoftware.com if it's still not working for you and I can get you all fixed up. Thanks!

A fix for this is coming guys.

I got in touch with Plays.TV and they are adding LaunchBox and Big Box to their blacklist which supposedly should solve the problem (though obviously that's still going to cause problems for many other applications, so I don't think that's really a great solution). I'm waiting to hear back from them on whether or not the fix will take effect immediately or if we'll have to wait for a new version of Plays.TV.

Just put out a new beta; I focused primarily on performance in LaunchBox when switching between platforms. I improved the rendering, caching, and data population routines all to be more performant. It was actually the rendering/painting operations that were causing the biggest amounts of lag when switching between filters and repopulating the boxes. The single biggest performance gain came from caching the rendered text that is displayed below the games. The caching routines have been significantly cleaned up and also simplified. Previously LaunchBox would cache images in the background, but this was causing quite a bit of confusion ("Why is LaunchBox using so much CPU usage!?") as well as hurting the performance elsewhere a tad. In this beta, images will only be cached once they've been scrolled to. However, we now do a much better job of refreshing the images that are actually displayed on the screen first, so I don't think this will be much of an issue. That said, leaving LaunchBox overnight will no longer automatically cache all of the images. We may add that back in based on the feedback from these betas.

Looks like I need to test deleting platforms with the new XML model; will do. Per RocketLauncher, we are aware that this will "break" the existing implementation. Things should still work but changes to your collection will no longer be updated in RocketLauncher until the new version of RocketLauncher is released (simply because RocketLauncher will continue to use the LaunchBox.xml file which is no longer updated). I notified bleasby from the RocketLauncher team of the changes yesterday and he will be integrating the new file formats soon.

I know, I keep putting this off. My apologies. Part of the reason for it is the upcoming Retropalooza; I've been wanting to do quite a few things before the conference. I should be able to get back to the database this week.

Unfortunately nothing has been done to prevent this for *new* games. When importing games via the ROM importer, you get to choose the platform anyways. For Steam, however, it just defaults to Windows currently. I think the Steam and MS-DOS importers are probably the only things affected by this, but perhaps we should add an option to select the platform name for those importers.

Hello everyone, we've come to learn that Plays.TV is causing detrimental crashes for many Windows applications, including Big Box and possibly LaunchBox. If you are experiencing stability problems with Big Box and/or LaunchBox, please make sure that you do not have Plays.TV installed. Uninstalling Plays.TV should fix the issue. Plays.TV is apparently getting installed with ATI video drivers, so it is especially worth checking if you have an ATI video card, although the issue affects all users who have Plays.TV installed, not just users with ATI video cards. We've spent ample time looking into the issue and it is clear that Plays.TV is causing serious crashes for many different applications. We've submitted a ticket with Plays.TV to get the issue fixed, but we have not yet heard back and do not know how long they will take to fix the issue. The issue is very serious though as many different applications are affected. A different user previously created this ticket here: http://support.plays.tv/support/discussions/topics/12000005500 The ticket even includes sample code that will quickly recreate the issue, which not only proves the problem with Plays.TV, but also should allow them to fix the issue relatively quickly. In the mean time, it is strongly recommended to uninstall Plays.TV from your system in order to ensure the stability of not only LaunchBox and Big Box but also the rest of your system. Thanks! Jason

So I found this: http://support.plays.tv/support/discussions/topics/12000005500 I was working to troubleshoot and get the issue fixed; I installed PlaysTV and I'm indeed able to replicate the issue. Apparently this is an issue with *all* WPF applications and their software so there's literally nothing I can do to solve it, which is pretty upsetting considering how many gamers will likely have that software installed. I'm contacting them as well.

Hi Falcon, unfortunately neither of those features currently exist. I'm not sure if they've been requested either, so feel free to add tickets for them using Issues/Requests in the header.

Thank you Walter; I'll take a look at this.

@martinconroy Thanks for all those details. There may be a big clue in the note about things possibly not working if they don't match the system's language settings. That's certainly interesting. I think what I'm going to end up doing is installing a virtual machine that uses UK English for everything to test with. That way I can debug my way through everything and figure out what on earth is going on.

Thanks all; all issues noted and added to my list. I just put out a new beta that separates the XML files out in order to make it easier for Rocket Launcher and LEDBlinky. It's funny; I hadn't read this thread but I guess great minds think alike. We've plans to separate it out for a while and I figured it's best to do shortly after a release so there's plenty of time for testing. Keep in mind that this latest beta will break imports and exports to LaunchBox zip packages. I have that on my plate to address. Let me know if anyone is seeing any other issues since separating out the XML. The LaunchBox.xml file will still remain in your LaunchBox folder but will no longer be used after things are saved for the first time with the new beta. A new Data folder is created that will contain separate XML files for everything. You might see some minor performance improvements in some cases during save and load operations, but as expected I do not think there will be anything significant (which is why I fought doing this for so long lol). We will be back to performance again soon.

Hi @voyagerxp, any chance you're using ATI video drivers with PlaysTV enabled? Apparently PlaysTV is causing problems for some people.

Hi guys, this functionality changed so that you can't back out while there are things moving in the interface. There may still be a glitch or two with it though because it should never take more than a second or two to catch up. If the Back button isn't working at all that seems like a separate issue (and a serious one actually that merits a bug fix release). I'll see what I can figure out.

Hi guys, do make sure you have "Don't use quotes" and "Use file name only" checked for MAME.

Thanks @nicolasg. No matter what we do, the new implementation will support custom themes with full flexibility as to what goes where.

Wow, sounds like I need to test with an ATI machine. It figures that every single computer I own runs nVidia. What the heck though, really. That is seriously insane.