Jason Carr

Hi @badbob001, welcome. The rudimentary multi-controller support was actually never intended to be used by multiple people at the same time...you're the first one to even bring that up. That's a good thought though, I'll add that to my to-do list. Keep in mind that many more modes/screen configuration options are planned for Big Box. The initial version will be simple as it is now, but we'll keep adding more options (including box art lists and such) over time.

Very cool; didn't know this existed. I like the concept. Might consider integrating it in the future.

License sent to your hotmail. Let me know if you don't receive it.

Hi LJKO, it looks like your PayPal email is incorrect; the license went out to LJkAze@domain.com. I'll go ahead and send you a license to your real email. Thanks for the purchase! :)

@Game Lounger, sorry I interpreted you negatively. No worries at all; it's just hard to read into flat text sometimes. Per the crashes, I was afraid of that. Some of the performance optimizations I made I knew were risky. They're gonna be hard to solve without any kind of error text, especially if they're random, so any and all details you can give me will be helpful. Thanks much. Oh, what version of Windows are you running? (Sorry if I've already asked.)

Just put out another new beta which makes the transitions with the videos smoother (they now play during the transitions). :)

@Game Lounger, I'm always happy to hear feedback, but there's absolutely no reason to shed anything in such a negative light. Quite honestly, I'd much rather hear "I don't care for this" and "I don't care for that" than "I hate to have to break this to you, but your whole concept is flawed". I don't really know where you're coming from, but your feedback is not at all constructive. I don't ever mind if people call things crap, so long as they present a better solution...but it seems you haven't, so I don't really know how to turn your comments into anything positive.

Hi @bookw, I do see your point. That is less of an issue with Steam these days, as you just get prompted to install a game if you try and run a game that isn't installed. But yes, I suppose we do need a way to filter out uninstalled games. You'd be surprised how little that is mentioned, though; believe it or not. If it was a regular request I would have added it by now. But I agree, it does feel like a very important feature. Hopefully it won't be too difficult to add and I can get it in soon.

Killer, DOS...thanks. :)

Hi Martin, yup, something like that is planned. G'night.

Woot. Thanks, Martin.

Thanks Martin. I just put out a new beta; I focused heavily on improving the performance. I'm very interested to hear if anyone notices any performance differences. It ran perfectly for me before, so I can't tell any differences, of course. That said, I am a tad bit worried that some crashes might show up because of some of the more aggressive performance optimizations. So it will certainly need a good beating.

Also, I did some studying up on WPF animation performance, and I'm going to put some time in to see if there's anything I can do to optimize it. There's a big long whitepaper on it all, so it's complicated stuff. We'll see what I can squeeze out of it.

Ah, thanks guys. Martin, the fanart image size thing is really good to know. I suppose it makes sense that resizing the images might take a bit of time. I suppose LaunchBox could resize the images in a cache automatically, but that'd certainly take up a lot of hard drive space, and it'd take even longer on initial load. Hadn't heard about .NET 4.6, but good to know. That probably coincides with the Windows 10 release that we'll see in 2 days (actually I already have the RTM running on my laptop, hehe). @scree, good to know. That one should be an easy fix.

Yeah, I had stumbled on the Wikipedia article myself. :)

Cool, that's a fun read.

I remember Fury 3, which ran on Windows 3.11 and Windows 95. (It was actually a complete copy of Terminal Velocity for DOS.) I remember it using something called Win32s, and the install taking years on Windows 3.11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s I'm guessing the lines were somewhat blurred at that point in a lot of cases. Also, I believe that was before the first official version of DirectX. Though I don't know if Win32s or DirectX are related or not.

Right now, officially, you can't. :/ But what you *can* do is create a batch file to do it properly. It's slightly complicated, but it can be done. You just have to use %1 variables and then you can reorder the parameters in the batch file. It's far from an ideal solution though because of the command prompt window that shows up. I do have a fix for these odd emulators somewhere on my list.

Ah, I see. I assume you mean in LaunchBox and not Big Box? Sorry, my mind has been all-too focused on Big Box lately.

It's a long ways off, of course, but I do see heading in that direction. I think the first step is to create our own game metadata and images (and hopefully even videos) database, then the social features become more possible.

Hehehehe. I haven't added Martin's latest round of metadata yet, but I believe we have all that we need. I'll confirm once I get it all into LaunchBox.

Okay guys, new beta is out. There are now options to change, and disable, all transitions: General: Screen Transition Game Images: Background Transition, Main Image Transition, Image/Video Transition Platform Images: Background Transition, Image Transition Fixed a few bugs as well. Note that of course Big Box in this beta runs off of .NET 4.5.1. I'm curious to know whether anybody needs/needed to install it, or if everyone already had it installed.

Mine is off of a standard hard disk drive. I have an SSD in my system for Windows but LaunchBox and all the images and games are on the hard disk drive. I suspect that it is because of the size of your collection. I'll do some testing to see if there's anything I can do speed it up. If you can try testing with a smaller collection to see if it's quicker, that might be helpful.

Also, on the platforms screen, the first time you load up each platform, it has to cache the box art images. That can be cause for lag when you first start it up after clearing the image cache (refresh images in LaunchBox). However, the cache is written to disk so it is persisted between launches.

The lag may be due to the size of your library, potentially. So that's worth figuring out. My 1,000 game library is pretty much lag-free. My CPU is an i7 Haswell.