Jason Carr

Hi @reely989, welcome, and thanks for the purchase. I actually just added that recently to the game details menu. ;)

Okay, just put out a new beta that should hopefully fix all the lockup issues. Martin, I'm willing to bet that those issues probably all had to do with the lockup issues in the previous version. Let me know if you are still seeing any of those issues. Also included in this beta is a bunch more options in the game details to play/stop the video, play it fullscreen, etc. Finally, I've made manuals and music use the same auto-populating mechanism as the videos (just put it in the right folder with the right file name and it will automatically show up in LaunchBox). See Manage Platforms for all the new folder settings. Furthermore, images placed in the new image folders should show up now as well, though I am not moving any existing images for the moment. This piece is a harder problem to solve so I have more work to do on it to complete it. One challenge is what to do if there are two games with the same name, on the same platform (Tomb Raider 2013 vs. 199x comes to mind).

Sorry, forgot to update last night. I think I've found the lockup bug as well. I'll have a new version out tonight. Sorry for the trouble. @troelsdk I'm actually trying to contact the right people at EmuMovies to make this happen. I hit them up on the forums a couple days ago. Let me know if you have any better way of getting a hold of them.

...weird. How long does it usually take to BB for you? Mine usually loads in a second or two. There are still some stability issues that I'm trying to resolve, so I guess that explains the lockup. Per the music playing simultaneously, is that happening for anyone else (it's another thing I can't reproduce...working fine on my end)? Yes, the controller settings were reset with a previous beta because we switched from using the LaunchBox controller settings to using special Big Box controller settings (new settings in addition to the LB settings). Yes, the image viewer is part of Big Box itself. Images are easy to display, but PDFs and other types of documents generally aren't as easy. But yes, agreed, that would be good to have, I've wanted that myself. I'll add it to the list and see it would take. :)

Yeah, I can certainly just automatically move them, but I'm torn on whether I should do that. Also whether I should make it automatic or provide a manual process, etc. I'm also curious to know whether people really think the new format will solve the issue...I know some people probably want the images in the game folders, etc.

Hi @MetaKnight, welcome. Thanks for all the feedback; I'll add it to my list. I can see how importing a collection of games for all regions without duplicates could be a real issue. Per the name in the title, I don't typically compromise on that, but if you are planning to use it for recording, I can change it to your YouTube name or whatever. Let me know.

I hear you there. I've been bit by SSD issues several times from power outages. It seems that some SSDs just don't handle pulling the plug very well at all. In the worst case, I had to reinstall my entire OS. Thankfully backups are never an issue for me though, between Dropbox and Crashplan.

Awesome @Kriven. I just put out another new beta; I added that image and a few others I made for Portable, Favorite, and Game Completed. Per Not Rated, I did add that image, but it only shows up for "Not Rated", "NR", or "NR - Not Rated" values. I didn't want to make it show up for blank values, because then you can't tell whether something is "Not Rated" on purpose (really hasn't been rated), or just hasn't been specified in LaunchBox. Still, you can easily batch edit to change them all to Not Rated to show the icon. Per the videos, I've changed it to be much more lenient in the title matching, so that punctuation is pretty much ignored, and it doesn't matter if it's different. I think I've solved the issue with editing the video path as well; let me know if you see any more issues with that. Solve some other issues with the videos as well, like stopping the videos on playing a game, not overlapping music and video, etc. There's plenty more options to add yet for that stuff but for the moment I just focused on making the defaults work properly.

Hi Marcelo, in fact, the Premium version of LaunchBox has a feature that uses AutoHotkey to allow you to exit nearly any emulator with the controller. It's under Tools > Options. Look on the Controller AutoHotkey page.

Yup, vid card and SSD. :) These days the SSDs have really come down in price and can make a huge difference for overall performance. Though, sounds like your video card (and maybe your CPU) are the likely bottlenecks.

Interesting, I gave it a shot but gave up quickly. My eyes these days can't handle that for as long as they used to, it seems.

Hi Dillon, as are so many things, it is planned but of course not there yet. I'll see if I can boost the priority on it.

I am planning on revamping this for 5.0. The structure is currently planned to look like this: LaunchBox\Images\Nintendo 64\Front\Donkey Kong 64.jpg LaunchBox\Images\Nintendo 64\Back\Donkey Kong 64.jpg Etc. I haven't 100% decided on that format, but that's the format I'm currently looking at in order to achieve compatibility with EmuMovies data. In the future we may support more options, or if a better idea comes along, a different format. I like the "Platform\Game Name\Front.jpg" format too, but that would be much more of a pain to integrate with EmuMovies data. Since there's really no standard to speak of, I just ran with that. It's up for discussion (I haven't implemented it yet). Another challenge will be moving users' existing images around; not sure how best to deal with that yet either.

Controllers should definitely work. I use my 360 controller for pretty much all testing, so that's pretty close to a given. Let me know if you have any trouble with it.

No, no, keep it coming. Those are great ideas, and they're easy to implement too. :)

Never snows. The biggest benefit ever. I can vouch for that, having grown up in Illinois (I now live in sunny California).

That's crazy. I remember screwing with those Magic Eye things...I guess this is it in video form?

Hey Clive! The screenshot idea has come up before; I think it's on my list somewhere, but it's good to have a reminder. :)

@Maddoc1007, I still have that on my list. Sorry I haven't gotten to it yet (an option to not extract those folders). @Kriven, we can definitely include all that stuff when exporting packages. In fact, we can include it all, I just of course have to implement it. The plan is definitely to do that for music and manuals as well. I've already fixed the simultaneous playback issue, hoping to have another new beta out tonight. The other options are great ideas; I'll add them to the list. :)

:) Me too, @Maddoc1007. We won't abandon the desktop mode, but agreed, I find Big Box much more fun and easy to use.

And the new beta is out! :D

Also, just to get you excited, here is a screenshot of what I've got going. Note that the picture on the bottom is actually a playing video that was easily downloaded and scanned from EmuMovies. I've also implemented icons for ESRB:

Alright guys, could use some feedback on this. I changed gears quickly to provide some flexibility towards using people's existing image libraries, partially because I wanted to be able to use the EmuMovies collection data (videos and images), but also because it's been a common request as of late. I am not (yet) trying to tackle how to import people's existing metadata, as that's a lot more complicated of an issue I think due to no common data format. I'm currently only trying to tackle images and videos. The current concept is to allow you to specify folders for videos, and all image types, for each platform. That way that folder could be scanned for artwork or videos when needed. Off the bat, I'll make it scan by both ROM file name (as per EmuMovies) and game title. I *think* this will basically solve the problem of importing existing metadata for the vast majority of users. If you happen to store your images or videos in folders not based on platform, it won't work right, but this is a start (this is also the way that EmuMovies does it). In that case you could also use a file renaming/moving utility to solve that problem if necessary. Previously, you didn't really even have an option to do that. I have this working already for videos, but I'm still working on getting it implemented for images. The below screenshot shows the Edit Platform dialog with the new option for video image folders. I'd like some feedback from everyone (if they care about this feature) whether this would work for their collections.

Just added game videos support to Big Box. Should have another release out tonight.

Hey guys, it's been a bit, I know, but I did put out a new release last night. Still focusing on implementing more settings. The goal for the official 5.0 release (at least Big Box-wise) is to fill out the settings, get better platform metadata in there, show icons instead of metadata where appropriate, and then I think we'll shoot for the 5.0 release. Before that, though, there are a few things I want to tackle in LaunchBox itself as well.