Jason Carr

Alright guys, another new beta is out. Couldn't help but add some more new stuff. The platform videos are working, but there's currently no way to automatically populate them; we'll be adding an automatic EmuMovies download of them hopefully before the official release. To manually populate them, put the videos here: LaunchBox\Videos\Platforms\PLATFORMNAME.mp4 Or use any other video file extension; it shouldn't matter. I also added a series of new platform views to Big Box, including several views that use the new platform videos, as well as a view that uses the platform videos as the background, which turned out pretty neat. :) I'll be playing catch-up on bugs and such next week. Thanks all.

sagaopc Do you have a backup of your LaunchBox folder from before you upgraded to the beta? Unfortunately in order to figure out what happened here we'll need to see the way it was before vs. the way it is now. I have a feeling you had some kind of strange configuration going on that messed with things. You're the first to report any issues with the migration, so we need to figure out what was different about your collection.

@imdavid555 Believe it or not there is some negativity surrounding this being done by other frontends as well (directly supporting Hyperspin themes). So going forward I don't expect to add that support. It would be a rather lengthy and involved process anyways, but mainly I just don't want the drama.

Hi all, unfortunately the leaders of the Hyperspin community have requested that we stop distributing these recorded Hyperspin themes. They have no problem with us creating them but they'd rather that they be distributed via the Hyperspin forums. We're allowed to upload them there one by one, but downloading the complete package would require a premium subscription to Hyperspin. It's up to @CriticalCid if he wants to upload them there or not. Unfortunately, we can no longer distribute the recorded themes ourselves.

Hi guys, just make both fields blank and it should fix it.

Hi @rmilyard, I have this exact controller board and for most part I love it. MAME works out of the box, as the keys are configured specifically for MAME. You will need to reconfigure keys and such for Retroarch and other emulators, but it's relatively easy to do. Every single input/output from the board maps to a key on the keyboard, which works well enough. You can change the keys coming out of the controller with special programming, but I wouldn't bother. I'd leave them the same and just tweak emulators to match. Per using the controller, the quality and build is excellent. It has stood up to my kids beating on it very well. My one beef with it is there's a hard plexiglass edge all around the sides of it, so it can get annoying after a while when using it if you put your arm on the edge of the plexiglass.

keltoigael said Anyone know a trick or solution to have one back ground image for all game back grounds? Reason I ask I am trying to go for a universal look and I would also like to cut down on image space for a more light build. For example in my Nintendo wheel I would like a static image of mario while looking through games, Sega would be a static sonic background, etc. Custom backgrounds can be implemented by adding images in Manage Platforms. Set the images to fanart when editing platforms and they should show up for all games in that platform that don't have backgrounds. This should work fine in the latest betas; let me know if not.

SentaiBrad said The Metadata and Images function in the Tools menu is broken. Jason knows about it and is trying to fix it. Lol...I'm confused. This isn't broken as far as I know.

New beta is out guys with the fabled "Scrape As" functionality. I also fixed the empty background image priorities bugs and added @Opaklopper's new German translation. :)

We're working on making that discount available. :) Thanks @CriticalCid for staying one step ahead of the game on all that stuff. You really are very much appreciated in this community, myself included. I appreciate you not getting discouraged from all the red tape. It may take me a while to get everything set up, but yes, I can certainly host theme videos for us if that's the best solution. Hopefully we can get this all worked out with Hyperspin though, first off.

Oh @Opaklopper, if you do test and find some things to fix, be sure to download the new German package from the link in the first post of this thread before making any changes. I had to rename the files so you'll need to grab the new package first. :)

Many thanks to @Opaklopper for the incredibly fast work! I'm putting out a new beta now with the new German translation. Also, @CliveBarker, I fixed the issue with the EmuMovies login controls not being translated. There are new items in the Strings file for those texts. :)

Sigh. I'll talk to Circo about what we can do here.

sagaopc, are you on the latest beta? Please keep in mind that the betas are just that, beta releases. Things will happen from time to time and they should not be relied on without backups. I'll need more details in order to get things fixed. What AutoHotkey script are you using for Demul? Can you elaborate on what is happening with the images? We do move some folders around in the latest betas but no one else has reported issues where the wrong images are being moved.

Yeah, I'll be working on the games database site this coming week to clean up some of the final pieces, so I'll make sure I add some controls for reporting images and such. I'm very much in talks with both Circo from EmuMovies and the Hyperspin community, so hopefully that will continue to go smoothly. Circo is great to work with, but of course it's much harder to work with an entire community. We shall see how it goes. I know the Hyperspin guys would like us to implement their new API (which requires a paid donation/subscription), but I don't think that's a good solution since all the images are already freely available to download on the Hyperspin forums, and I don't think very many people would pay for access to the API when you can just go download and extract the zips. I have offered to make donations, though, so I'm hoping something like that ends up working out. We shall see. :)

Dropbox runs in the background and automatically syncs everything to the cloud. So all you'd have to do is install Dropbox on the computer and everything would sync back to your new drive.

Hi @Drybonz, Snap is now "Screenshot - Gameplay" and Title is now "Screenshot - Game Title". Yes, I removed the tiny little delete and add buttons on the add/edit images because I had to make room for the longer names for the image types. So now of course you just have to get to them via right-click. I made the tool tips more prominent in add/edit to make this more obvious.

Wow, very nice Matticus. That looks amazing. I'm gonna tweet this video out. :)

Hi @mazjohn, if you can back up the entire LaunchBox folder, that's the best solution. Assuming you haven't customized your folders to move images and other media items elsewhere, that's the best approach. The LaunchBox configuration consists of the LaunchBox.xml file in the root of the LaunchBox folder as well as all the images and media, basically. A better approach, though, typically is to sync your entire folder with Dropbox (or a similar tool like OneDrive or Google Drive). This way it's always backed up and syncs between all your machines. :)

This brings up an important discussion point. One thing I'm sort of worried about currently is contributions from within LaunchBox, which is likely to happen very soon. At that point it will be very easy for users to download images from any source (including the Hyperspin forums) and batch upload the missing ones to the LaunchBox Games Database. This is meant to be extremely easy on purpose, as obviously it's the best approach to filling in the database. And I truly believe with this approach that we can quickly become the most populated database out there. But of course, that said, I'm worried about the implications of stealing other people's images. To be completely honest, I agree with Derek that these images are really *only* owned by the original artists that created them for the games themselves. That said, I do recognize the significant work that goes into creating the images (especially clear logo images), so I understand why some people might get upset. So from that front, we are sort of between a rock and a hard place. Once we open up easy community contributions from within LaunchBox, there won't be any good way to determine where an image comes from, so there's no way to identify if an image has been stolen or where it came from. Not to mention that the majority of the images originally came from TheGamesDB.net, which in itself has images stolen from all over the place (including Hyperspin, EmuMovies, and many other places). So this is a pretty hairy issue that we need to somehow come up with a solution for, and/or take a stance on. Any thoughts?

Wow, gotta say, that entire video is gorgeous. You've managed really tweak things well, I'm impressed. That video's probably better for a public demo than even the official demo videos lol! :P Somehow those polaroid images help to really add some great character. One of the (many) things I have on my shortlist is image packs, so people can easily download and use them. Obviously this would be an awesome image pack. Thanks again, @Frakatchoo.

Good to know about the mouse issue, @shinra358, thanks. @Drybonz I'm still planning on adding that "scrape as" option, thanks for the reminder. I'll see if I can sneak that in this coming week.

That view looks really awesome @Lmagnus87. It will probably be a while before we start adding more visual features to LaunchBox itself again, but that'll be a great path to take when we get there. If someone can add that as a ticket to Bitbucket that'd be great. Per that error on updating, it's unfortunately not an easy one to solve. We run the setup EXE from the LaunchBox/Big Box EXEs and then immediately shut them down, but of course sometimes it just takes too long to shut down, and that error message happens. Ideally we would have a way to shut down the app, then run the upgrade setup, but unfortunately with a portable application I don't know of a way to do that. I'm sure there's a solution for this out there somewhere, but it's not an easy problem to solve.

Hey all, new beta is out that allows for on-the-fly image switching (with hotkeys) in Big Box now as well as in LaunchBox. I also fixed a number of bugs. I have not fixed the background bug yet mentioned by @prolecat, but that is on the top of my list.

I'm gonna home-page that image, @Zombeaver.