Jason Carr

Another new beta out. I finally added a "Hide" field to games, so that you can hide games from your collection in LaunchBox and Big Box. I'm finding it really convenient to only show games with images and metadata completed in Big Box. Also supports bulk editing.

Hi Patrick, version 4.9 was the last available version to (sort of) run on XP. I say sort of because most of the wizards don't work, and it's probably prone to crashes if any of the problematic features are used. I don't freely distribute old versions of LaunchBox online, but I can send you a copy of 4.9. I'll send you a Dropbox link to your email.

Hmm. Well, I've installed the latest version of Kodi myself, and I can't seem to replicate the issue on my end. However, that issue seems related to sound, considering that it's the XAudio2 DirectX library that's throwing the error. I suppose it's possible that something weird is going on like Kodi is stealing the DirectX audio engine exclusively. However, I don't see that issue happening on my machine. Try disabling the sounds in the Big Box options and see if that fixes the issue.

Hi @garbanzo, I honestly didn't even know that problem existed until just recently with the platform, but I found it randomly and fixed it on the spot. Find as you type is on my list. Per the missing covers/metadata, this isn't a perfect solution, but you should be able to filter by TheGamesDB.net ID: None, which should at least tell you which games didn't automatically populate with metadata/images from TGDB.

Hi @CoX, that is almost exactly what I had in mind, actually. I wasn't aware that it already existed anywhere, though; that's great to know. I'll take a look at it to see if I can streamline the idea. But yes, that is the goal. Pretty much anyone can contribute anything, but only the best data will be used by default. At least that's what we'll shoot for.

Hi @clarky05, that's an odd one. Normally that error only happens if DirectX isn't installed or updated. Any chance you're running Kodi as a different user or something? Maybe as administrator? Otherwise, I don't really understand what would cause the problem. I've tried to replicate it with batch files or anything I can think of, but haven't had any luck.

CoX said Thank you Jason, its nice to see things are evolving sp quickly atm. btw. noticed another small thing. If you don't add all your MAME roms in the specific folder in MAME you have to edit a .ini (which i can't find at the moment for some weird reason), which kinda defeats the purpose of the genius way launchbox can import the roms to the games folder inside its archive for portability... any thoughts? Sure, I see what you mean. It works well for most platforms, but there are a few that it doesn't, of course. I should probably disable that option for MAME and the others, or change it. I actually have some significant revamping that needs to be done for those platforms to better support searching TGDB, etc.

Yeah, it'd be optional, of course.

Alright, folks, just put out a new beta. Fixed some bugs, made Page Up and Page Down holdable, improved the performance on initial load while the box images are caching, and fixed sort titles. Unfortunately, though, one of the bugs that I've fixed is a glitch with the Big Box updater for official releases. Both versions 5.0 and 5.1 will crash if an official update is available, so you'll need to do your next update in LaunchBox instead of Big Box.

I see, sure. Though I feel like we should prompt the user before starting up a game, but that sort of feels clunky. What if we just remembered the user's last selected game and selected it on startup?

Hi Stimpy, are you thinking for Big Box or LaunchBox or both? I can see that being pretty cool, though I still have a lot of work to do on the LaunchBox games list in order to support animation. The LaunchBox games list uses GDI+ which doesn't support much of that very well. I need to switch it out to use WPF or DirectX, or something.

Hi @CoX, welcome. :) I'm working on adding more filters options to Big Box for the next release. I do think we still need some way to filter out games that we're working on from Big Box, though, so that is on my list. :)

Good idea indeed. Not sure what the interface would look like, though. Any ideas?

Thanks @Ruthalas, to be honest I didn't even know visual novels were a thing. ;) I'll add that to my list. :)

Ah, thanks @Arcamenel. I hate those white title bars too. Come on Microsoft, you were *so close*. ;) I haven't fix this yet in 5.1.

No worries, @Mike-W, welcome. LaunchBox doesn't create zip files or put them in your platform folders, so I'm totally lost here.

Oh yeah, unless is was because of the platform issues. That's right. ;)

@Syriacn, wow, didn't even know they existed. It doesn't look like they have an API though, so there's probably not a good way to integrate with them. @oreozzy, glad TheGamesDB is working again. The funny thing is though, nothing related to that was changed in 5.1. Probably just more TGDB stability issues.

Great idea @s0m. I'll add that to my to-do list. :)

DeathProxy said A few more suggestions 1.)This one should be fairly simple, just add the ability to HOLD the page up and page down buttons to continue scrolling instead of having to constantly click the button. 2.)I imagine this one isn't possible or is a pain, but being able to open the manuals in some kind of full screen view from big box(like you can screenshots), would be really cool. If not does anyone have any idea how to do this a little more elegant? Such as open it in an already fullscreen view and some way to close it kind of like an emulator when starting a game? 3.) Option to show game banners instead of the text or maybe show if available? I don't think I'd even prefer this method over the current text there is but emumovies which I used to grab my video files has game title banners and maybe some people would like to scroll through that somehow? 4.)Maps. There are very few of these from emumovies but I still think it's be cool as an option to open up one(in the same way manual functions now). Just have a maps folder in launchbox the same way the other ones work. 5.)This might be more of a question than a suggestions. Is there such thing as transparent system(console) images with launchbox? I like the grey color background and want when im selecting my system for it to show it in the background, I found some on the forums but they do the white background and I don't like that:(. If this isn't possible that'd be cool. Hi @DeathProxy, #1 and #2 are planned, though of course #2 is a pain so that probably won't be soon. Per #3, yeah, I've been thinking about trying to do that like Hyperspin, sort of, somehow. Especially since EmuMovies has so many good ones. Per #4, I'd suggest using an additional application. Since there's so few, and they don't apply to most games, that's probably the best bet. You can open anything with additional apps, even documents. Per #5, you mean images of the actual console in the background? LaunchBox doesn't come with the console images, but you can add them in Manage Platforms, and then Big Box should show them when browsing the platforms, if configured that way.

SagaXIV said Hello Jason, So far, I really like LaunchBox and BigBox. A couple features I could see being useful : In Big Box Mode, adding auto-scrolling to the names in the game titles that are too long to be completely shown; and, 2) a separate batch-function to add video/picture/music to already scrapped games. I have tons of games to add, but my video games don't match exactly the rom name, and adding them one by one is a real pain... Thanks! Edit: Te 2nd suggestion is not specifically for BigBox, just for launchbox in general. Good ideas, @SagaXIV, thanks. Per #2, have you tried just putting the files in the right folder? LaunchBox does make some educated guesses, so it's possible that most of them would just work.

Good point guys, and nice to see the progress there. I'll add an item to my list to see if it's possible to close applications.

Ah, I see. Yeah, unfortunately that's a pretty different scenario. With Retroarch, all of the emulators lie within the same Retroarch EXE, so it becomes the same application, so Retroarch can do pretty much whatever it wants to improve on the cores. Unfortunately, LaunchBox can't really do that. Retroarch requires that the cores be custom built for Retroarch, so we'd have to work with the code of pretty much every emulator to make that happen.

Sort of confused by what you mean @shinra358. What do you mean by hotplugging support in games? Simply the ability to plug in and unplug controllers and have games recognize them?

Oh, ha, nope. Guess I completely misunderstood you. Thought you were talking about Big Box by itself.