Jason Carr

scree, I'm going to look into that error, thanks. It's an odd one but I'll see what I can do.

Yeah, decompressing large disc-based ROMs isn't recommended for performance reasons. It takes a pretty killer CPU to be able to do that quickly. We're relying on 7-zip to do the decompression of course, so there's nothing we can do to improve the performance (I'm sure 7-zip already does a pretty killer job doing things as quick as possible). In the future it makes sense to add in a caching system so that frequently or last-played games aren't decompressed every time, but that's a ways down the road. @CADScott, I'm wondering if maybe your email provider (noticed you have a fairly unique sent.com email address) might have all the sudden just decided emails from us are spam. Actually, ha, I just checked my email logs: So apparently somehow one of our messages got reported as spam from your email, and our email system says "okay, no more email for you!" when that happens. Lololol. Not sure how to reset that. I'll look into it.

Adding the platform back actually won't help anything. The games have all had their platform removed. So the games will need to be deleted; they should still show up under All.

Sure, we can add the asterisk concept. That makes sense. Good idea, Brad. :)

Thanks guys for all the great feedback. I've created a separate ticketing system here for the LaunchBox Games Database: https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/issues/new Going forward, we'll use this for all bug reports, feature requests, suggestions, etc. I'll need to link to it on the site. Per ESRB vs. PEGI, I plan to add a new field for PEGI at some point soon. Then when you add or change a game, you'll be able to specify one or both. K+A did indeed get renamed to Everyone so we should use Everyone for that rating, as you guys have already concluded. Note that ESRB has a "Not Rated" option, so if you know for a fact that a game was never rated for ESRB (or PEGI once we add it), you can specify that. Otherwise, blank means that the data is missing. @CriticalCid, I just gave you moderator permissions. One more thing I wanted to mention, we will indeed be adding profile pages with badges, etc. I'm already tracking users' changes and moderations so once that stuff is in place you'll definitely get credited for your work and obviously you'll all have an advantage since you're getting started early. Obviously this isn't the biggest priority right now, but the LaunchBox Games Database is going to be much, much bigger than just a games database. I'm going to stop at nothing; we're going to add social feeds, friends, and much more. Long term I'm hoping it can become an incredible social portal for gamers.

I think when it comes to platform organization, it's important to note that there's no way to make everyone happy with the default platform settings. I prefer to separate out the various consoles, because it's much easier to combine platforms via batch edit than to separate them yourself. What we *do* need to get right, is to make sure that if you do choose to combine them, searches for metadata and images still work correctly. For example, if you combine Famicom into NES, it should still work properly to search for Famicom games from the site. I haven't done a lot of testing on this, but I expect we'll need to do some tweaking there.

Great to hear. Whew. ;) Don't get scared but I just put out another new beta (don't worry, I tested this one to hell and back). This just fixes the link in the Add/Edit dialog to actually take you to the site.

Woot! So I trust this means we finally fixed the issue with 32-bit? :)

If you're having trouble updating to the latest beta because of the previous errors, download it from here and just install over the top of your previous installation: http://api.launchbox-app.com/DownloadBeta.ashx?s=cbf04341-4e0d-4859-a154-55a213120e0e

Sigh, somehow I botched the upload. Freshly uploaded. Wifi is the bane of my existence.

New beta is up with the hopeful fix. :)

Thanks for the kind words, @MesonW. :) @Drybonz, that has come up lots of times before and I agree that it would make things easier on you guys. The challenge is that the more time I spend updating changelogs, the less time I have to actually develop. So thus far I've chosen not to go into that much detail. I am uploading another beta. It's sort of a crapshoot but we'll see if it fixes it. The cross-communication between native VLC DLLs and .NET code is what is causing the problems I think. I still haven't been able to test this stuff in 32-bit environment; waiting for a test VHD to download from Microsoft. But if we're lucky, this'll just work. I'll let you know when the upload is finished.

The VLC setting is added upon saving the LaunchBox.xml file. It makes sense if it's crashing that it never gets saved and thus the VLC setting never gets added. I'll have to put a 32-bit virtual machine together so I can test this I guess.

To me what makes sense is that ROM hacks should be part of the official games. That way we could add a "Hacks" section for each game that lists the available hacks. Far from priority, but that makes sense to me ultimately. Homebrew, etc. games we might as well add to the list, I'd say. We could add a field to specify whether it's an official release.

New beta is up. The issue was ultimately that I was mistakenly loading 64-bit VLC native DLLs for both 64-bit and 32-bit environments. Let's hope this fixes things. :)

99% sure I've found and fixed the issue. New beta is uploading.

Ding ding ding! I bet it's the 32-bit thing. I'll do some testing. :)

Are either of you guys running 32-bit versions of Windows?

Thanks guys. Unfortunately I've tried both and they're both working fine for me, sigh. Anything you can give me at this point would be helpful; screenshots, videos, etc. Or even just a very detailed description of exactly what is happening and what you see. Also, if you go into your Windows Event Viewer and go to the Application log, it should give you some info on the crash at the top of the log. That might be useful as well. Beyond that I'm baffled. Oh, what version of Windows are you guys running? @DonkeyKongsVet @scree

Images are coming soon but aren't there yet.

Hehehehehehe. It's actually a Strongbad reference. ;)

Alright, I've opened up moderation for the following people: @donarumo, @SentaiBrad, @CADScott, @FistyDollars, @DOS76, @CliveBarker, @Freestate, @DonkeyKongsVet, @DudeManL57, @Hexxxer @CriticalCid, @XxvondutchxX, @wkLeon, I tried to open it up for you guys but I couldn't find your accounts. Go ahead and register and give me your gamer tags and I'll get you access. To moderate, sign in and then click the "My Account" link at the top of the site. Then you should see a "Moderation" link if you have access.

I've just released the initial changes/moderation system for the site. As-is right now, anyone can submit changes to game metadata. To make changes, just go to a game's details and click the little pencil icon that shows up as you hover over the fields. Changes are currently available for all game metadata, but not for images, developers, publishers, etc. It's also not yet possible to add new games or delete games. It's all coming soon. :) Moderation is currently restricted to only a subset of people. For these beta testing stages, we'll open it up in order of request on this thread. I'll post another update here soon with the initial set of people that I've opened up for moderation. The way moderation works is that every single change requires 3 different moderators to approve it before it gets accepted. I'm confident that this will help to ensure the quality of the database. This also means that we will need lots of quality help moderating. ;) We do still need to write detailed rules/guidelines for the data. Let me know if anyone wants to tackle that. Thanks!

The official default going forward for arcade "front box art" will be arcade posters/fliers like this: https://www.google.com/search?espv=2&biw=1920&bih=1075&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=arcade+posters&oq=arcade+posters&gs_l=img.3...0.0.0.18495.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0....0...1c..64.img..0.0.0.xIkdntsfbu0 Reason being that they resemble box art and typically do a great job of both showing off the game and the cabinet. However, I agree that ultimately we want to provide an option for that in LaunchBox, so you can use whatever you want.

Thanks, won't matter either way.