Jason Carr

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.

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. :)