Jason Carr

Thanks all. I'm finding that the best art to use for the wheels is the wheel art that is available from the Hyperspin community, naturally. http://www.hyperspin-fe.com/files/category/2-hyperspin-media/ The site isn't the easiest to navigate but you can navigate using the menu on the left to find a particular system and then download the wheel images for that system. You can easily just extract the zip file to LaunchBox\Images\PLATFORM\Clear Logo and you should have some excellent wheel art in Big Box. Remember to refresh the image cache if necessary in Big Box. :)

Yes, the data for the LaunchBox Games Database will all be freely available for any application to use. In fact, anyone is able to download the entire set of data (yes, literally ALL of the data) in XML format here: http://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/Metadata.zip. This archive of data is automatically updated on a daily basis. We chose to go with a single XML format download instead of an API for performance reasons in LaunchBox. This is also much more flexible of an approach for implementing in various other applications.

Ha, welcome. :)

kmoney2315, what is the aspect ratio of your monitor? Is it a 4:3 CRT? Wondering if that's why images are being cut off.

If you're looking to do it all locally without a syncing service like Dropbox, there should be several decent options available. I will say, however, that trying to run LaunchBox and your ROMs directly off of a server is mostly a bad idea for performance reasons. LaunchBox does need direct access to a disk in order to have any kind of decent performance. The LaunchBox folder is used for disk caching and if reading and writing to the folder is slow you'll probably end up with really bad performance. That said, some ideas: There are plenty of software syncing tools that you could use to sync two folders on a network between computers. I'm not overly familiar with any of them so I don't have any recommendations, but in theory you can put LaunchBox on both machines and use a software package that syncs folders in order to keep them in sync. This has the benefit of being 100% local for each machine, so performance will not be an issue. My only other idea is that if you map a drive in Windows, you can configure caching options on the mapped drive. I believe you can even make it so the entire drive is available offline, but syncs up to the server. I haven't really tested to see how stable Microsoft's solution for that is, but it might be something good to try.

ALIE said game wheels view looks so nice. will this be implemented into the other views ? kinda bump it wasn't in my favorite Hi ALIE, can you explain what you mean there? Not fully following.

Thanks all, new beta is out with the new CoverFlow with game details view that we worked on this morning in the development live stream. Been tweaking it all afternoon/evening. I'm pretty happy with it. We've pretty much wrapped up everything I want to get in for the official 6.0 release, other than minor bug fixes, tweaking, and cleanup. My goal for tomorrow and Friday is to fix any remaining bugs and add any tweaks that we can fit in. I'll take a look at the issues above tomorrow. Thanks all! :)

Hi Martin, this is definitely possible and it's exactly how we designed the product. All you need to do is subscribe to Dropbox (or Google Drive or Microsoft's OneDrive) and put your LaunchBox folder inside of the synced folder. Dropbox is the best solution, but probably isn't the least expensive. There is also a free version of Dropbox, but it's not big enough to be able to sync ROMs and videos.

Bedwyr, can you email me the video? Whether or not the video is corrupted, it would be great if I could replicate it so I can try to fix it. :) @CriticalCid, that's interesting. I'll have to look at the VLC libraries to see if that support exists at all. It's funny that both the Meta.Vlc and Vlc.DotNet libraries aren't working with them.

I talked to Brad about this; he didn't mean to offend and certainly didn't mean to imply that Lightspeed wasn't useful. Sometimes Brad comes off as insensitive (as you already know). His intentions are never poor, though. He really wants to respond and explain himself here but I am trying to end this here and now to stop any further drama. Brad's words never come from ill intentions, but he isn't the best at explaining things in a sensitive manner. My apologies for the trouble here. But Antropus, if you would be so kind as to help promote peace in this community instead of drama, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks @Justified and @kmoney2315, great to hear. @Bedwyr, what game's video is causing the issue? I can just download it from EmuMovies and test it myself. After thinking about it, even if the video is corrupt, I should probably figure out how to make it so that corrupted videos don't crash things. So it'll be a good test/way to fix that scenario.

Ugh, sounds like a nasty bug to fix. Or actually more sounds like a bug with VLC itself. I always blame my code first, but you're right, if it's only that video that's causing the issue, then it probably isn't the relative path issue. All I can figure is it must be a bug with VLC. I assume you're still getting the error with beta 14?

Thanks @wallmachine, I see, sorry for misreading you. It's hard to keep track of everything. Per LaunchBox coming back up after the Options screen, does it get stuck unpainted like those screenshots? Or is it just displaying like that permanently? The black bars should no longer be there in Big Box when using VLC. They shouldn't be there in Big Box for Windows Media Player either. In LaunchBox, the black bars will still show up for the VLC engine, but shouldn't be there for Windows Media Player. I see what you mean about the folders; can you add a ticket for that to Bitbucket to create those folders immediately after a platform is created? It does sound like performance issues are the cause for that stuff in Big Box. It's smooth on all my machines, so not sure what the trouble might be. Does it help any if you reduce the CoverFlow Quality setting?

wallmachine said anyone else find the site slow to load? I have a fix for this in progress. It's hard to justify spending too much time away from LaunchBox/Big Box development, but I am working to fix this. It's really only the forums that are a problem, but the forums are of course probably the most important part of the site.

Soundtrackgeek said I'm getting a strange thing whenever I delete a game and right after that tries to edit another game. I get this message: I have to click OK and then go CTRL+E again on the file I wanted to edit. Any way to remove that? It would make sense if the game I was going to edit wasnt actually in there anymore, but it is. Ah, that's interesting. I'm guessing what's happening is that somehow the "deleted" game is still selected in the GUI, but obviously hidden and you can't get at it. I'll take a look at that. :)

wallmachine said is it just me or the coverflow design screws with the eyes? Also added 36 systems and its laggy as. Also when deleting a platform it doesn't delete the videos/images etc @wallmachine, honestly that kind of feedback doesn't really help me at all. Please try and be specific with feedback, and try to stay positive. I don't like getting discouraged because of negative comments, especially ones that I can't do anything about because I don't have any details. What specifically about CoverFlow is screwing with your eyes? What in particular is laggy? LaunchBox or Big Box? Where are you seeing the lag? Videos and images aren't deleted on purpose right now (don't want users losing stuff that they don't want to lose). We could probably prompt for that though when deleting games/platforms.

Bedwyr said Just got a new error in the latest beta (13). System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Not found: Videos\Super Nintendo (SNES)\Ultima VI - The False Prophet (USA).mp4 The video in question does exist and I grabbed it from EmuMovies. And it does play in BB, but has occasionally not consistently played. Perhaps there's some encoding shenanigans going on in the file that VLC choked on? For reference the file I'm using is located on the server at /Official/Video Snap Packs (480p)(HQ)/Nintendo SNES (Video Snaps)(HQ-480p)(EM 20160209). Toss this in the bugtracker? Hmm, I wonder if it's because we're not using an absolute path. I should look into that. Added that to my list. :)

Justified I'm hoping the issue you were seeing was just due to a crappy 64-bit version of LibVlc we were using. I've updated it to hopefully resolve that error. Let me know if it's working for you now.

wallmachine I missed your middle paragraph there. The folders should be automatically created whenever media is added to them by LaunchBox. Is that not working for you? Or are you just trying to add media manually immediately after adding a new platform?

wallmachine said @Jason and @Sentaibrad This is what I mean't so when selecting a new option in the Options menu in LaunchBox it would minimize the entire LaunchBox then re-open it, this is the same case for BigBox when first opening it or when pressing the Windows key. The following images below is what happens... I'd like to provide a video but can't. On a side note when I go to Tools -> Manage Emulators -> Then select the emulator and pressing Edit is the only way to create the necessary folders inside the "Images", "Videos" and "Platforms" folder unless I create them manually. (I didn't tick any of the boxes to download from emumovies, because I already have the files so I'm assuming it would of automatically created them if I downloaded the files through the parse.) Also when clicking on a game in LaunchBox it takes a while to load the video, maybe 7 seconds? then after that they all load so I'm assuming its caching? The window needs to be refreshed after changing the options for various reasons. Having the window minimize, restore, and refresh/repaint is by design. However, if it's getting stuck without finishing painting itself then we might have an issue. That isn't typical behavior, though, so I'm more inclined to believe it's a glitch with video drivers or something of that nature. It also could be that it only happens on Windows 7; the Windows graphics engines have come a long way since Windows 7 so it could be that we're hitting a glitch that got fixed in a later OS. Does it eventually finish painting itself? Or do you have to close and reopen? Per the delay when loading a video in LaunchBox, it's the same deal as in Big Box. The VLC engine has to be loaded before any videos can be displayed. I assume you are using the VLC engine. The Windows Media Player engine will likely load much quicker, if that is an option for you. I can "trick" the user into thinking that the VLC engine is loading quicker by preloading it on startup or doing it in the background, but beyond that there's nothing I can do to make the VLC engine load up any quicker.

With the new VLC implementation, it does indeed take a few seconds the first time you load up a video for the VLC engine to load up. It also sort of freezes the interface while it loads, so I do have some work to do to somehow make that more performant. That is on my list to tackle before the official. Per LaunchBox (not Big Box) resizing to only a small portion of the screen, this is an unfortunate side effect of screen resolution changes. When a game or an emulator changes the screen resolution, Windows unfortunately does a poor job of resizing windows properly to match. I have struggled with this in the past, but I haven't given up on a solution yet. Not sure if there's a Bitbucket ticket in there for that yet, but we should add one if not.

Alright, I'll go through all the comments above in a few guys. New beta is up. I'm hoping it fixes the remaining issues with the new Big Box VLC implementation. So far it seems that the videos playing in the background issue is fixed, and I'm hoping that the libgcc crash that some users were seeing is fixed as well. Please let me know if anyone runs into any further issues with the new VLC implementation. Also new in this beta is the games list wheel that we started working on in the development live stream yesterday. I wouldn't say it's perfect (yet) but seems to be working well enough for a beta. ;) I also made games without any images to use for the background default to using the platform's backgrounds if they exist. Thanks guys, let me know what issues you run into. Other than bug fixes, tomorrow it's onto the next view with CoverFlow and details.

Just emailed you @gizmo.

Hi @gizmo, it sounds like your email provider must have stripped the attachment. I'll see if I can send it to you another way. Thanks for the purchase. :)

Hi @Expello, this should be coming soon.