Jason Carr

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.

Wow, yeah, I see. In the states building computers isn't really profitable anymore either; neither is computer repair. It's incredibly difficult to make a profit competing with all of the big guys, even though the big guys do suck at what they do.

Figures. I would contact them but I have so much to do development-wise that unfortunately I really don't have to time to play a cat and mouse game with anti-virus companies. Unfortunately I doubt I'd have any luck getting to someone useful anyways.

Thank you @scree! Thank you a million times over! I have the data and I'll be integrating it soon. :)

Hi @Cabirus, welcome. :) These features are indeed all planned. I'll try and increase the priority of them.

Otherwise, maybe you can post it here?

Odd, didn't receive it, not sure why. Hmm. Maybe try again? Try sending it to admin@launchbox-app.com?

Ha, that's pretty great.

Ah, I see. That makes sense. Yeah, a centralized location to pull a user's game data would be pretty useful. It's interesting that they're able to do that too...I wonder how difficult it would be for LaunchBox to do the same thing...

Wow! Very cool Stimpy. I'm jealous of that experience. I've done pretty well in the software world but of course nothing even close to that cool hardware-wise. It'd be really neat to learn those ropes. I'm a big fan of Corsair, so I trust that case would serve you well. I really love my Thermaltake Soprano, but it serves a slightly different purpose (it's really quiet running fans, but doesn't have a side window to show anything off). Every few years I think about going liquid cooled and then chicken out. ;)

Ah, I see. Okay...honestly didn't know you could do that. ;) I'll add it to my list.

Yeah, I like that power to dollar ratio as well, absolutely. I was an AMD guy for a long time too. What unfortunately broke me away from AMD had little to do with AMD. At one point back I bought three AMD motherboards in a row, three different models from different companies, Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte. Every single motherboard I bought had chipset issues. Drivers didn't work, network connections would randomly disappear in Windows, etc. Eventually I did some research and found serious issues with pretty much every decent chipset for that generation of AMD CPUs, and jumped the boat. I miss the power to dollar ratio, but thankfully the stability has been great since my jump to Intel.

Jealous.

Yeah, indeed. Game developers are definitely getting lazier. This has been going on for ages. But as a programmer, I can reflect on a few things: - Often times, faster load times = larger file sizes. Not always, but it's often a trade off. - Being able to be lazy takes the focus off of having to constantly fix annoying bugs and worry about a million different things, which allows programmers/designers/etc. to focus on other things, like new features, better design, and just making a better game. It's no secret that everyone has a budget, and everything is run by money. So unfortunately, there's often a trade off between increasing frame rates and making a better playing game, otherwise. - Regardless, there's absolutely no excuse for a heavily bugged release. If a game comes out bugged from the beginning on a vast number of systems, it either wasn't properly tested, or they knew about the issues and released it anyways. I would imagine the latter is a lot more common. The developers say "it's not ready" but the business executives release it anyways is probably most likely.

Indeed, I've learned to love Retroarch.