Jason Carr

I took a quick look at the startup process for this latest beta while I was adding the splash screen. I did speed it up a tad bit, but probably not significantly. The difference between the startup performance in 5.5 vs. 5.8 is that we added a lot more built-in metadata (for MAME, the LocalDB, etc.). It's loading up this metadata at startup and that's what's making it take longer. I'll see if there's anything I can do to lazy load it or optimize it further soon.

In the mean time switching to use the Windows Media Player video player engine in general options should fix it I think.

Hi @dovella, sorry for that, thanks for the report. I think I've got it fixed. New beta should be out today or tomorrow. :)

The installation of VLC on your computer is separate and isn't used (you'll notice a new VLC folder inside of LaunchBox that contains the VLC DLLs and such). I suppose it is possible that it's still picking up the settings from a different installation; I haven't tested for that, so that's a good question.

CADScott said The new VLC playback seems to be working well, I actually find it a little faster to change between videos than the Windows Media Player player. The only issue I see is that there is a small black bar at the top and bottom of the video window with VLC and it is not there with WMP. WMP seems to stretch the video to fit and VLC plays at the correct aspect maybe? Good to hear, @CADSCott. With WMP, it is able to detect the exact aspect ratio of the video and cut off the black bars, but I haven't been able to figure out how to do that with VLC. Not sure if it's possible at this point. So both methods are actually using the correct aspect ratio, but the VLC engine fills the video content area, black bars or not.

No, Sanders! We're the surprise underdog. Hey, at least we're not Clinton, right?

I may also add an option to search for an archive file with the same name as the ROM file if it doesn't exist. That way users can compress their collections and their games will still work without having to edit them.

Alright, new beta is out with VLC support inside Big Box (LaunchBox will have it too in a separate beta here soon). It's not a perfect solution because there's no possible way to make the VLC videos support transitions, but we're gonna have to live with that. There's a new Big Box General setting called "Video Playback Engine" that lets you switch between VLC and Windows Media Player, so if WMP is working fine for you, you can certainly stick with it. Here are my goals for the rest of this week: - Get VLC working in LaunchBox - Add the ability to sync your collection to the cloud on the LaunchBox Games Database Thanks all! :)

Just posted this to Facebook and Twitter, we'll see if that helps. :) We're at 20.83% at this point, we beat GameEx at least. ;)

Ha, thanks guys! :)

Thanks all, I agree that this needs improved. Specific cases of naming conflicts would be helpful I think. In general, the metadata just needs to be updated to better support various platform names and the various platform features. I see this all tying into the new LaunchBox Games Database. For example, it would make sense to add an Alternate Names category to each platform that can be community-moderated.

Just this morning. Was wrapping it up earlier today.

Yes indeed, but it's going to be a while. PHP sucks, that's the problem. It's already on killer amazing hardware and performance is lacking regardless. We're going to be moving to a new forums solution eventually but it'll be quite a large undertaking.

Thank you guys! The plan is to slowly update the rest of the site to match. Gonna be a while though because we have other priorities as well. :)

It's nothing to worry about; we've had some major piracy with the last few versions so I recently obfuscated the EXE files. These DLLs are part of the mechanism to help prevent people from modifying the EXE files so that they can't be easily cracked. DRM is not involved in this process; it's just a mechanism to detect if the EXE is modified on startup (for example to remove the licensing requirements) and if so, refuse to start. It's a good way to help prevent people from cracking and releasing free versions of the app without inconveniencing everyone with DRM.

The reason for the Options dialog causing the problem is that the controllers are all re-parsed when it loads up in order to populate the controller options. It's very surprising though that it's happening with the options dialog and not with startup of LaunchBox, since the code is the same in both places.

Wow, well I do have to thank you and congratulate you, @Bedwyr for your troubleshooting skills! That's impressive. Thanks for that. I do have an Xbox One controller to test with so I'll take a look at that soon. :)

GAH!!!!!!! Alright, fixed. Damn internets.

Alright, new beta is out that fixes that issue. Sorry for that folks, update away from beta 5 promptly. Glad you caught that early, @Riffman81.

Riffman81 said Ok, after doing some more testing, it seems LaunchBox is deleting the archive from the Games folder upon closing the emulator and going back into the FE. Upon trying 3 Ninja's Kickback again just to see if it was in fact deleting the extracted game properly, I noticed that the Temp folder is in fact empty, but it's also removing the original archives. Ouch!!!! Whoops...fixing that now... :/

@Bedwyr, I haven't really been able to replicate the Options issue, but I did make some important fixes regarding stability, so if we're lucky that problem will be fixed. Let me know if not.

Alright, new beta is out after a day of bugfixes. @Riffman81, I think I finally figured out what was going on with the archives. Apparently Microsoft's Date Modified and Date Created file properties cannot be trusted, which is what was causing me the issues. This should be a lot more stable of an approach now. I also fixed a bunch of outstanding bugs and closed more than 30 bug tickets on Bitbucket, so it was a good day. See the changelog for more details. Oh, and I made LaunchBox delete all associated games when deleting platforms, which should help prevent that ever-so-common "why can't I import?" issue. Thanks to all for testing.

Awesome, Kris. Thanks again.

Ah, I see, sure. Hmm. I guess maybe TGDB would return results for all platforms if it couldn't identify the platform. I'll look into that. :)

CADScott, yes, I do think we should allow multiple options for the various images. Duplication is a hard problem to solve for that, but I think we can get around that with moderation.