Jason Carr

Is this LaunchBox for Windows, or for Android?

What version of Android are you running on the Shield? From what I'm reading, it seems that Nvidia's latest versions of Android for the Shield are rather broken when it comes to network storage.

Theming support is definitely planned.

We just completed the migration of the main www web server, which hosts the main LaunchBox website as well as all application and theme video downloads. So hopefully we'll see the same download speed improvements across the board as we saw with the games database server. Now on to the forums server...

Yes, of course. Migrating to a different forums provider would be quite an undertaking at this point.

We've been on similar hardware for a long time. The games database is fairly hardware-intensive, especially with the massive audience for the free version of LaunchBox.

Also, we have two more servers to migrate: the forums web server, and the main www/application downloads web server. We'll be migrating both to new servers within a week or so.

Hey all, we've decided to do our best to upgrade our servers and provide the fastest media and application downloads as possible. Thankfully, availability in the market for high-bandwidth dedicated server hosting has much improved in the last couple of years. Previously, all of our servers were hosted in The Netherlands, because of our high bandwidth requirements, as North American options were prohibitively expensive due to y'all downloading so much media. Going forward, we are in the process of moving to servers in the US. We're hoping that this will generally improve download speeds for everyone, especially those in various areas of the world where speeds were not ideal. We're figuring that the US is most likely just better connected in general. We have three dedicated servers total (not virtual machines, actual bare-metal servers). We've already moved the games database website and all image downloads over to a new server, so hopefully you're already seeing improved download speeds while downloading images in LaunchBox, and improved website performance on the games database website. This new server has 2 Intel Xeon CPUs, 20 CPU cores, 40 threads, and excellent specs all around. Let us know how it's performing for you.

I spoke with Tahlreth, the AetherSX2 developer tonight. I was as careful and polite as I could have possibly been, but unfortunately he has no interest in supporting frontends or allowing frontends to launch games in AetherSX2. He ended the conversation with "I might just make the activities private next update", suggesting that he is going to completely disable any chance of frontends launching games at all. So unfortunately that is bad news, but it is his choice if he does not want frontends to be able to launch games in AetherSX2. From what I can tell, his reasoning is that he wants users to use his user interface only, and does not want it to be hidden or bypassed by a frontend. So, for now, we have to give up on supporting AetherSX2.

Huh, that's interesting. I would expect that to be on the emulator developer to fix. Or at least we'd need their input if we do need to change how we launch it.

LaunchBox for Android 1.0-beta-4 is out now with the following: Fix for crashes on startup with Nvidia Shield devices (introduced in a recent beta) Fix for launching games with Snes9x EX+ on Android 11+ Added some additional warnings for emulators that are not always working to launch games on Android 11+ For anyone who had issues with the previous beta and needs to manually update, you can download the APK for beta 4 directly here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/bhutfrdol75gp4l/LaunchBox-Android-1.0-beta-4.apk?dl=0 There are now four emulators that have been updated to work properly with Android 11+: Dolphin Snes9x EX+ Mupen64Plus FZ Mupen64Plus FZ Pro Thankfully, the above emulators do prove that things can work just fine on Android 11+, but it requires that both LaunchBox and the emulator itself are updated properly. The problems come into play when an emulator developer chooses to update to the latest Android API, but does not implement all the necessary features in order to support launching games properly. For example, often times an emulator developer will update the internal code to use the new Android Storage Access Framework, but unless they add additional code to properly launch games from shared content URLs, then launching games will be broken by default. Google is the biggest cause of this problem, because they've made horrible design decisions as to these changes, and the documentation is incredibly confusing. So we can't really blame any emulator developers, but the emulators will need to be updated in order to fix the issue. Here's a list of emulators that we are aware of having known issues launching games on Android 11+: AetherSX2 Citra Citra MMJ Pizza Boy GBA Pro Pizza Boy GBC Pro PPSSPP Redream There's probably more that we haven't run into yet as well. There are known hacks that work to force some of these emulators to launch games on Android 11+, but they are not good solutions, as they provide a bad user experience (such as forcing the user to have to re-select a folder with the Android Storage Access Framework). For example, Arc Browser has a hacky solution right now that uses an external app to handle translation, but it's confusing to set up, and I would much prefer to avoid that kind of a solution. Ideally, we can reach out to the development teams of all of these emulators and work with them to get the issue fixed properly. Soon I'll be doing my best to reach out to them all to start up a conversation. If anyone has any direct contacts, please let me know. In the mean time, do remember that RetroArch works great with most platforms and there are zero issues launching games with it, because they have refrained from targeting the latest Android API (which honestly is just about the wisest thing you can do right now). Thanks for bearing with us on all of this; we'll be working on finishing up the video support and hopefully working with emulator devs to improve compatibility with the above emulators before the official 1.0 release.

Quick update guys, the latest beta does fix the issues launching games with Dolphin and Mupen64Plus FZ. However, AetherSX2, Citra, PPSSPP, and Redream all have issues launching games on Android 11+, and they need updates/fixes from the emulator developers to make them work. More details are here in this post: Also, I have a new beta coming out here shortly to fix some additional issues, so you might want to wait to update until beta 4 comes out in an hour or two.

Just to update this thread for anyone who hasn't been in the loop in the beta testing thread here: We've successfully solved the issues with launching games on Android 11+ with Dolphin and Mupen64Plus FZ, because they've apparently been built correctly for the latest versions of Android. Unfortunately, though, several others have issues with their implementations, including AetherSX2, Citra, PPSSPP, and Redream. These emulators apparently don't yet support the proper content URIs for Android 11+. We're hoping to reach out to all of the development teams here soon. If anyone has a direct contact, please let me know. To clarify, it may be possible to launch games with some of those emulators by popping up file browser dialogs that should really not be necessary, but we're trying to avoid that if possible for the best user experience. Arc Browser uses a hack to make them work that we would like to avoid, though we may end up doing something similar if absolutely necessary. Regardless, we're working hard to get these issues resolved, despite the unfortunate climate that Google has dumped on the emulation community with Android 11+.

Lemuroid is on the list of emulators to add, so hopefully I can get it in soon (assuming that it does actually allow us to launch games).

It's possible that Dolphin is expecting a different way to launch the games if they are compressed. I'm not sure. I'll be putting out a new Android beta later today. Can you test 1.0-beta-4 (after it comes out) to see if it happens to solve the issue?

I've spent some significant time on this stuff, and unfortunately, both PPSSPP and Redream will need updated/fixed in order for us to properly launch games on Android 11+. They don't appear to support the new proper URIs that are required in order for us to send the games over. I'll be doing my best to reach out to the development teams here soon to see if we can coordinate a fix. If anyone has a direct contact, please let me know. That said, you might have some luck by installing older versions of the emulators and then upgrading to the latest versions. This is because of Android's poor design decisions; permissions are different if you upgrade from an older version than if you install the latest version fresh.

Are you referring to the export from the desktop app for the videos? If so, you will need to update to the beta of the desktop app to fix that.

@Buckshot60 @Ally68 Thanks, I have that issue solved for the next beta. Will review those emulators. Yup, should be relatively easy to get it all back with the same process. No idea why your phone would have removed it on an update though; that shouldn't be happening as far as I'm aware.

Yeah, you may want to use a different device, if at all possible. It will automatically place them in internal storage.

I believe folks that don't have the All Games banner showing up are having the issue because they're using a translation. This is an issue that I need to solve, and plan to for the next release. In the mean time, here's the image to download and use manually:

@Neil Aubin @Kuro Houou We've seen this odd issue with some lower-end devices that are just not quite configured correctly. Unfortunately we don't have a solution currently, outside of some strategic file placement. On these older devices, you should be able to place the ROM files on the SD card and import them from there, but the media and XML files unfortunately don't work on the SD card and have to be on internal storage.

Sorry for the way late response here @senkwich. This is a known issue with those really old clamshell Shield devices. I might be able to solve the issue if I had one on hand, but I don't, so solving it has proven difficult. Whatever the issue is seems to be unique to that device.

@rubenjavier Sorry for the way late response. I've noted the request. The code is supposed to pull only the relevant images for the region of the game, but it will use the foreign images if the ROM is marked as from that region. I may need to revisit some of that code though, because I believe I've heard this issue elsewhere recently as well.

@flexzi Unfortunately we haven't tackled DOSBox or ScummVM on Android yet, because there's a lot of complicated stuff involved in the process. We do hopefully plan to tackle them soon, though. As of yet, I'm not sure what all would be required or if it's possible on the current versions of LaunchBox for Android.

What device are you running?