Jason Carr

Hi @Bedwyr, the situation you describe is basically what happens when LaunchBox is busy working in the user interface thread. I put some work into making sure that long processes happen in background threads instead of the main user interface thread (to help prevent that stuff), but I haven't gotten all of them. I assume LaunchBox does come back after a while? Or does it stay that way permanently? Also, by the way, per DPI scaling, LaunchBox should show up fine without any blurring at most DPIs (100%, 125%, 150%, and 200% are the DPIs that I test with). The only exception to this is when Windows uses different DPIs for two different monitors, and Windows will unavoidably fall back to the blurring approach. Just curious that you're seeing blurring there.

Just wanted to drop a line to say thanks to @Antropus and that I'm excited about this project. I expect to integrate this stuff into LaunchBox eventually but it's nice to be able to focus on other things for the moment, and it's great to see you've already got it covered, @Antropus. :)

Great idea, @CliveBarker. I agree that a "could be improved" signifier would be useful. I'd prefer not to resort to fan-made box art (outside of creating a category specifically for it); I'd rather just use the best quality available. That said, there is a lot you can do with bad scans to fix them up in Photoshop.

Thank you @spacegoathlz. Glad to hear that it's proving useful. :)

Hi Derek, most likely the problem is that the platforms aren't matching up. I expect that if you select Arcade as the platform during the import process, you'll get data for those as well. You can then filter on status to get the imported games and change the platform after the import. That kind of thing should improve going forward as we clean up all the data in the LaunchBox Games Database.

Great. I'll chalk that up to a Retroarch issue, I guess. Let me know if anyone runs into any additional issues with the 7-zip stuff. Sounds like it's time to move on to other things. :)

Great to hear guys. Still no explanation for @Bedwyr's lockups, though. Has anyone done any further testing on the 7-zip stuff? Thanks!

I'm with you, @im4potato. We do have to keep in mind that we're starting with all of the data from TheGamesDB, so right out of the gate we'll unfortunately have the same quality issues. That said, going forward, we can strive to improve the quality significantly. Would you like to put together a set of submission guidelines to post on the site? Then we can work through them as a community, but it'd be good to get a good starting point going.

Also in this beta is a new option in Big Box for frame rate, which should help with performance on low-end systems. It also may allow you to enable animations on these systems.

Just put out a new beta to address some of the issues with the game loading popup. I finally saw it happen once where the interface didn't refresh after returning from a game. Let me know what issues remain. :)

Thanks all. @im4potato, I'm planning to implement a community moderation strategy. Here's what I'm thinking: - In order to add games or submit any changes, you'll need to create an account (of course). Users who create an account will immediately be able to submit changes for moderation. - Once you submit your changes, all changes are put into a moderation queue. No changes are made to the site until they've been approved by at least three moderators. - You'll be able to become a moderator only after you've successfully submitted and have been approved for changes or additions to a certain number of games. Once you prove that you're submitting useful data, you'll be approved as a community moderator. I think this should work well. It'll take some development magic, and obviously will require a good group of moderators to keep things going, but I think our community here is large enough and committed enough to handle the load. I am still open to suggestions though. :)

@fromm, yeah, please put in a feature request for that. I can see that being a good thing to add but it probably won't make it into 5.9. @Mute64, the popup should go away 5 seconds after starting the game. Did you wait out the 5 seconds; is it really locked up? I might able to change this to close out the popup when the window loses focus instead. @Bedwyr, I'm confused. Is the beta still locking up for you when you go to Options? Or is it just reverting that fixed the issues? If the beta is locking up then I'll need to get it fixed. @Soundtrackgeek, I think the answer probably depends on the emulator. Some emulators will support m3u playlists, while others will require you to close and re-launch the emulator with a different disc. Some of them are still pretty messy and don't have good solutions. For emulators that support m3u playlists, it makes sense to put all of the discs in a single archive with the playlist, and then LaunchBox will find the m3u playlist. For emulators that don't support this, I think for now the discs would have to be in separate zips. I do plan to add a dialog to choose which disc or ROM to run from the zip eventually, but I'm not sure if that will make it into 5.9 yet. Thanks guys! Please help me out with more information on the outstanding issues so I can get them fixed. Is anyone having further issues launching the ROMs now that I've hopefully fixed those previous issues?

Alright, well I'm hoping this new beta fixes it. It's odd because I can't seem to reproduce the issues on my end, but I have a hunch that this will fix it. Let me know. :)

Thanks for the extensive testing @scree. The trick is that I am purposefully not clearing out that entire folder because so many emulators like to save states into the same folder as the ROMs, so I need to not delete them. I think what's going on is it's not properly identifying the files that were extracted from the archive. Reviewing.

fromm said Would it be possible to have it prioritize .m3u files. This is the common way of launching multigame discs with Retroarch for PS1. This would allow people to compress all discs plus the m3u into one archive... Absolutely, will be in the next beta.

Thanks all! All are welcome; we'll open it up in the order of the requests in this post. :)

Just put out a new beta that hopefully fixes the above issues with the bin/cue and mdf/mds archives. Thanks again guys, let me know if you run into any additional issues with this new beta.

Thanks guys, I think I see what's going on. I'm not expecting there to be more than one file in the zip files so it's launching just the first one that it finds. In the case of bin/cue, it's probably finding the bin first, which I expect is the problem. I'll add some logic for bin/cue and mdf/mds. Any other formats I should look out for?

Version 1.0:

Cadet Stimpy said Mute64 said Abit of a backstory/history on LaunchBox would be cool to, like how it all began, why jason chose to make this great frontend and maybe were he would like to see it go. Good idea, Mute64. Maybe some early developmental screenshots (if available), too. Going all the way back through the News posts would probably be the best way to experience the history of LaunchBox. Believe it or not, I had the first version out in a weekend (literally 2 days). But all it did was launch games in DOSBox, and it was horribly inefficient. :) But believe it or not the box art view has been mostly unchanged since the beginning.

AtypicalWinter said I'd like the. Idea if having platform specific emulator reviews/updates ect. I know there is quite a few different emulators for each platform but that's what would keep it busy. Quite a. Few of them getting updated from time to time. Some others not at all. But you get my drift Yeah, I like that idea too. Eventually I'd like to create an automatic emulator updater of sorts that pulls down, updates, and installs the emulators automatically. That's probably a ways off though.

CriticalCid said So since Jason started to work full-time on LaunchBox this week I thought it would be nice to have a weekly or bi-weekly update in Retro Style Spotlight on what features or improvements Jason works right at the moment. My wish list of new features for LaunchBox is very long and this week we hit the 500 created tickets mark in BitBucket this week, so it would be nice to have regularly updates on what we can expect next. I'm gonna try to do this in the weekly emails going forward. Now that I'm in to full time development, I expect things to go quicker.

Ah, sure. Odd. I'm guessing 7-zip is just somehow incompatible with that feature of WinRAR. :/

Sigh, I have to admit that my experience with Spreadshirt has been very poor at best. That heavily influenced my decision to remove the store from the top menu. The store is still available, but my experience with Spreadshirt has been so terrible that I can't even recommend it to people. Back when I first put the store up I had mugs up there. I ordered all the products to test them so I could be certain the quality was up to snuff. The mugs I received were so terribly done that I had to completely remove them as products. The logos were crooked on both mugs. There were printing artifacts. It was like a bad joke. I'm tempted to just completely disable it. Sorry for that, Stimpy. I hope it washes out.

Ah, okay. How did you convert the 7zip file?