Jason Carr

Yeah, the XML performance thing is mostly a misnomer. Dividing up the XML would not increase performance, it would only slow it down, at least in this case. We store it all in memory anyways so that navigation, searches, etc. are as quick as possible (and it takes up a minimal amount of memory). When stored in memory it is not parsing through XML, so the size of it doesn't matter much. If it was divided up, saving could be faster because there would be less to save, but it currently does not take long to save the file anyways, so that's almost a non-issue (not to mention we do it in a separate thread so it doesn't slow down the UI). Initial load times could also be improved if we divided it up, but truthfully you can't really predict what the user wants to see first, so ultimately you're going to need the entire collection soon enough anyways. I've put a lot of effort into optimizations and at this point I'm pretty certain that the only way to significantly improve performance in useful ways would be to use a proper database instead of XML. But of course that has its own annoyances.

Bah, thanks guys. Re-uploading. Give me 15 minutes.

Unfortunately there's no way to disable that one extra click. Feel free to add a ticket for it and we'll get that in eventually.

Sigh, let me know if you end up being able to replicate it @Mute64, thanks.

FastFeet Do you have a lifetime membership? Or a paid membership at all?

Yeah, thankfully it will run in the background and you can throttle it, but yes, of course it does require a decent upload speed especially for the initial backup. I remember my initial backup took months and months. It keeps up fairly well to changes though once you've done the initial uploads.

I just put out a new beta with the sidebar videos support. Keep in mind that there are many, many known issues with the videos in this release. Resizing the sidebar doesn't resize the videos until you click on a different game, the videos in the hover popups don't work, etc. The primary reason I'm putting this beta out early is that I have one machine that I can't for the life of me get the sidebar videos to work on, and it seems to be just that one machine. I haven't been able to figure it out, so I'm curious if the videos are working for everyone. If they are, I'll just ignore the problem and stop wasting my time on it. Either way I should figure out what it is because someone is bound to run into the same issue eventually, but if it's working for everyone then I'll consider that a low priority. Thanks and let me know if the videos in the sidebar are working for you.

Good ideas @Lmagnus87, jump lists are on my to-do list somewhere; feel free to add them to Bitbucket if they're not already there. Live tiles are also a good point; I thought of that a while back but nothing ever came of it, so go ahead and add that to Bitbucket as well. No big deal (really no big deal at all), but it would be better to keep this beta testing thread free of feature suggestions and put them either in Bitbucket directly or in a separate thread.

Yes, we are among royalty. ;)

Hi @djcarnage, the important thing about integrating with any site is whether or not they have an API. Sites without an API (or at least that are unwilling to build one or let us help them build one) are unfortunately completely out of the question. Our policy is: 1. There must be an API. We won't do "scrapers" because they're error-prone and if anything with the site structure changes, then it all has to be re-built, which just ends up to be a huge waste of development time. 2. We must have direct permissions from the owner(s) of the site. So if we can research those things and it works out, then we can add it to the to-do list. :)

Well, for what it's worth, I'm very glad Rocket Launcher exists, because it solves many problems that people would otherwise be on top of me for, of course. I do plan on integrating everything eventually, but for people who are overly particular about the various features that Rocket Launcher gives you, it really helps to have it available, because this way I can focus more on the frontend for now and less on the nitty gritty elements of launching the games. Also, if anyone has what they consider to be a "perfect" Rocket Launcher setup, I'd love to see it all working as ideally as it gets. Sadly I don't have time to get Rocket Launcher all configured myself (would take too much time away from development), but I'd love to have a good setup to play with to see just how much is possible with Rocket Launcher.

Hehehehehe, yes, we do plan on selling merch at some point here. I do have them in vector format, @DOS76. Here you go. :) You should hopefully just be able to remove the blue overlay to get to the standard LaunchBox logo.

Keep in mind that it *should* match absolutely everything, assuming the file names of the ROMs haven't changed. LaunchBox will look both at the title of the game and the ROM file name to determine a match.

Ha, nice @mute64. Awesome video, looks like a lot of work went into that, so thanks. What's your job title? ;) Per the LaunchBox logo, it was a little tiny icon created by someone a long time ago that gave me permissions to use it. Since then @bd000 graciously made and gave me a bigger copy of it. It's still just the logo though, so not sure how well it would work in a pattern. Do you want the Big Box or the LaunchBox one?

fromlostdays, very much looking forward to seeing your tutorial, thanks. :)

DOS76 said It sounds like if you are coming over from Hyperspin and you already set it all up then yeah why wouldn't you use it, but for someone who has never used it and already has all of their ROMs decompressed with little interest in bezels why bother. Sort of how I feel about RetroArch which sounds cool and full of features but do I really need them compared to what I already have spent time setting up Yeah, this is the point. I don't recommend people work at setting everything up with Rocket Launcher for new collections. However, the reason why it's so important is that there are lots of people with existing setups that already work flawlessly through Rocket Launcher. We have many people who are coming from Hyperspin who have labored over their setups to make them perfect, and keeping Rocket Launcher makes the transition much, much easier.

podologo24, make sure you're using the default Dolphin LaunchBox emulator settings. If in doubt, just delete the emulator in LaunchBox and re-add Dolphin without changing the settings. Either you've got a different version of Dolphin than I've seen/used, or the settings are incorrect for the Dolphin emulator. If you're still running into issues after that, let us know how your Dolphin emulator is configured in LaunchBox.

Yeah, unfortunately somehow we need to identify what game is causing the issues. Unfortunately it's probably going to be a royal PITA to figure that out. If you can manage to somehow narrow it down to a particular game that causes the problem, though, that would be amazing. Then I could fix the problem fairly easily.

pasteko @alexis254 I've mentioned it before and I know it's not an automated solution for imports, but remember that you can use additional applications to achieve this for now. For example, create one game for it, and then add additional applications that point to the various versions of the ROMs. "Play US Version", "Play Japan Version", etc. Only problem is you have to set it up manually, the imports won't do it automatically.

Thank you @Hexxxer, I appreciate the mockup. Helps to see it visualized. :)

Thank you @klownk! :)

By the way, if you guys have a little bit of money to spare, and have lots of data, you need to know about Crashplan. It's amazing because there's no limit to how much you can back up. So if you have 10 TB on a computer, you can literally back up 10 TB to the cloud for relatively cheap. I've used the service for over 5 years and I feel like I'm completely ripping them off. I'm not kidding when I say I have 30 TB backed up in the cloud. I pay for the family plan which gives me 10 computers. Can't remember what I paid (I keep getting it on sale) but it was something like 2 or 3 hundred for 5 years when I last renewed. As per how well it works, not only have I backed up that much, I've also successfully restored terabytes and terabytes after hard drive crashes, so confirmed, you can trust it.

Drybonz, solution to stop waiting for EmuMovies is simply to remove your login creds per what @SentaiBrad said. I agree though that it would ideally save your preferences per what to download. That's slightly tricky because different platforms and games have different available downloads, but agreed that it's good to put on the list. :)

I agree that the error handling should be improved, and this is indeed on my list.

Yes, I will be looking to improve the MAME metadata soon, which should help to resolve some of the issues.