Jason Carr

tibic If you press Enter (or whatever key is assigned to Enter in Big Box), it should take you to the complete games list.

Hey all, just so everyone knows what's going on, I just put out 6.1 to fix a bug that was plaguing a small minority of people, only people who had not previously upgraded to 5.10. Basically, their Metadata.xml file was outdated and wasn't being immediately updated on installation, and so we were running into conflicts. The new metadata updates were designed to download from the LaunchBox Games Database, but we were mistakenly not updating the old file on startup if it was out of date from previous versions.

That's true. Good to hear. Yeah, hopefully running with WPF will continue to be a good decision for years. Either way, we'll figure out one way or another to keep on top.

Whoops! Perhaps I should change that, eh? Sorry for that @Zuckerton and thanks for the tickets. We'll definitely add those platforms soon. Adding platforms is very easy for me to do so I should be able to get that going next week. Shout out to me if I forget. :)

That is KILLER. And great to hear since WPF gets a bad rap so often lately. I still feel like I made the right decision using it for Big Box, especially since it's also going to enable us to have custom views and themes without a ton of additional effort.

Well that's cool; sounds like we might get an automatic performance upgrade when we move to .NET 4.6 then. Unfortunately we were forced into the obfuscation when pirates and crackers started running wild with 5.7 and earlier versions, so unfortunately there's not much I can do about that. That said, I've run many performance tests and performance has not been negatively affected by the obfuscation in this case; I'm confident in that. However, yes, some of the anti-virus false positives may be partially due to the obfuscation. I recently changed some of the Big Box obfuscation to help prevent this for 6.0 though.

Oh yeah, dang, I totally forgot about that. Thanks, @CliveBarker. I can get a new package out for everyone with that soon. It's actually in a separate control so you're right, there's no way to translate it for the moment. Whoops. Glad everything is working well though. :)

Hi legolas, you can indeed use the Hyperspin wheel images in Big Box relatively easily. It's as easy as downloading them and putting them in the right folder: LaunchBox\Images\[Platform]\Clear Logo.

Thank you so much @CliveBarker. I'm so stoked to release 6.0. Working on the release now. :)

Thank you all; @Nickjs my guess would be that it's because the clear logos have blank space in the images themselves. We'll be looking to tweak all those images going forward (most likely we'll pull the Hyperspin images). @wallmachine I bet I know what's going on. With every new release of Microsoft Windows, MS does a lot to improve the performance of WPF and related graphics on Windows. I've read a lot about it and there are huge differences between the performance of WPF (the graphics engine that Big Box uses) on Windows 7 vs. Windows 8 and Windows 10. So I can't promise anything, but I'm willing to bet that upgrading your OS would make a significant difference there. Otherwise, it seems like your system specs should be decent enough to run everything fairly well. Another potential culprit could be a slow hard drive, so an SSD upgrade might really help too. Alright guys, I am ready to put out the official release, so I'm going to jump on it and get it out ASAP tonight. Shout if you know of any deal breakers of course. :)

Hi guys, yes, we definitely do need to revamp how platforms like Amiga are imported into LaunchBox. Other than MAME, platforms where the ROMs do not use actual game titles in the names are currently problematic. Rest assured that this will be a focus very soon. @ThePagel, you should be just fine to use the artwork you already downloaded...and you CAN change the folders for all of LaunchBox's art. LaunchBox will pull art either based on the name of the game or based on the name of the ROM file. Either name will be picked up from the images folders. You can change all the folders under Tools > Manage Platforms in LaunchBox. There should be no issues using an existing art collection.

Just put out another new beta; this beta has updated French and Brazilian Portuguese translations thanks to @Wattoo and @AFaustini, as well as hopeful fixes for @CriticalCid's LaunchBox VLC crash on opening Big Box and the issue where switching views wasn't working properly for non-platform games list views. Cid I did some quick research on playlist support and I haven't gotten anywhere as of yet; I haven't found anyone discussing it so I'm guessing support just isn't there for that yet. I also looked into the "dropping" images in the wheels when switching pages but haven't yet found a solution for that. I wouldn't call that a deal breaker for the release, but I'll keep playing with it to see if I can fix it before 6.0. As it stands I'm planning on putting out the official release tomorrow morning to coincide with the weekly Saturday emails that go out. Please let me know if anyone finds any deal breakers in the mean time. Thank you everyone, I really appreciate all the time you guys put into testing this stuff. :)

Yes, @ALIE, there haven't been any major additions images-wise for the wheels as of yet. I noticed earlier this week that EmuMovies doesn't have any wheel art at all, so the only images that are available currently are coming from the LaunchBox Games Database. The best source for those images is clearly directly from the Hyperspin forums, though; so it's relatively easy to download a package of wheels for a particular system and then dump them in the Clear Logo folder for the platform. That said, very soon I would like to batch import these into the LaunchBox Games Database, so that is coming.

Alright guys, new beta is out with the updated French and Brazilian Portuguese translations. @dukeemu, I've also created a new Italian translation package; it's available at the beginning of this thread. Thank you very much everyone. @CliveBarker I know I'm extremely annoying and needy...how soon can you get an updated translation and release notes for us? :)

Thank you very much @AFaustini. @dukeemu, my apologies on that. I can get that to you today. :)

Thanks everybody. I appreciate that, @Riffman81. I don't really desire to make Big Box look like Hyperspin, but always have enjoyed the Hyperspin wheels. That said, I hate how Hyperspin constantly goes back and forth between the wheel and the fullscreen themes. To me it's way too "in-your-face" and jumpy. But again, that's just one opinion. @wallmachine All I can say is that's not typical performance. Sorry if I've asked before, but what are your system specs? @CriticalCid Thanks for the reminder on those issues. I can tackle those today. :) @ALIE, we already have a thread for sharing images I believe, but hit up @SentaiBrad and he can sticky a new one if we need one.

wallmachine, not as of yet.

Yup, I'm very happy with our current setup. :)

FYI all, the black bars should be removed for VLC in Big Box in the latest betas.

Yup, and I'm fine with that. I'm making a decent living at it and loving doing it, so I can't go wrong with that. I'm not out to get rich, just out to make a living doing what I love. :)

Thank you @Wattoo. :)

Lol, @wallmachine, are you for real? No, the entire program does not come from open source. If that was the case I would've been just sitting on my hands for the last two years. In reality very little of the code has come from open source; the vast majority has been written from scratch. That said, if a library is already available with a license that is okay to use (like MIT), I'm definitely going to go ahead and use it instead of reinventing the wheel and wasting everyone's time.

Great to hear, @Riffman81. I really appreciate the kind words and support. It's been a few months now that I've been on LaunchBox full time, and I'm still loving every minute of it. :)

Awesome, thank you @Riffman81. Didn't know you were part of the team. :)

wallmachine, I'm confused. There's still 433 open tickets on the Bitbucket. I fixed and closed quite a few but nowhere near anything that significant.