Jason Carr

Thanks @keops, welcome. Requests noted. :) Per #1, @ps4isthefuture has the solution above.

Ah, I see what you mean on the border. For some reason I was thinking you were talking about the enter white selection border. Sure, I'll add those options to my list. :)

Thanks @TroyTheZombie. I'll see if I can't bump this up higher on the list. For what it's worth, though, it's also been suggested to add platform additional apps, so that games for a particular platform would all start an app before or after launch. Would that be a better option?

Yes, I use process monitoring to tell when a game exits. Windows allows me to tell when a process (EXE) that LaunchBox starts exits. For emulators, there's unfortunately nothing I can do that I can think of to resolve the issue with opening a new ROM.

Hey guys, I'm back! Finally. ;) It's actually not overly difficult to time when an app starts and ends, for the most part, so it can be done, even with emulators. The trick is that often times, games will contain more than one EXE. For example, a launcher EXE, and an EXE for the actual game. So what can happen is that the launcher EXE is used to start the game, then fires off a new EXE for the game, and then LaunchBox will think that the game isn't running anymore, when it is. There are similar related issues as well. That said, even Steam struggles with some of these issues, but they do it anyways. So I'll put it on my list to implement it as best I can, knowing that it can't ever be 100% accurate. I think the problem games would most likely be the exceptions, but that's really just a guess as I haven't done much experimentation. I think emulated games would work, so long as you can assume that the emulator will be closed after the game is done, and a different game won't be loaded up inside the emulator. Even still, I personally find it a bit lacking, because if I pause a game, even for long periods of time, the play time is still increasing. But Steam does the same thing, I think.

You can also try adding the images as clear logos, that might work as it doesn't zoom the images for clear logos (it puts them over top of the default background). Let us know if that works.

Very cool ps4. I'll take a look at that soon. :)

Thank you guys. Even getting on the Internet over here is a chore, so I'm doing my best to take a break from it for the most part. I only have a few small withdrawal symptoms. ;)

Just want to let everyone know that I'm taking my family to family camp this week. I'm hoping to be online at least once a day but I'll be more spotty than usual for the next 6 days or so. I'm also hoping to get some peaceful development time in, but I'm not sure how things will go. I know everything is in good hands here at the forums. Just wanted to keep you guys in the loop. :)

That is odd, some of this doesn't make any sense to me. Deleting a platform should never remove or hide any games. So let's start there. If we're truly seeing games removed or hidden after deleting a platform, then there's a serious glitch I need to attend to. Has that been proved? What I'm guessing is going on instead, is that the games are still there, but they are hard to find. When you delete a platform, the games are not supposed to be deleted. The games are still there, but they no longer have a platform assigned to them. So, looking at the sidebar, those games are only going to show up in the "All" platform view, or in the "None" platform view. Could that be what is happening here? Per the imports, yes, LaunchBox is not going to re-import the game if it finds it already there, even if the existing game does not have a platform assigned. So I'm guessing that this is what is going on. Can anyone confirm this?

@bd00's solution is probably your only option, and is worth a shot; it's likely that it'll fix the problem. Keep in mind though that all VPN providers are not considered equal, a lot of them suck, and your performance will suffer even worse if they do. There are a lot of good ones, but there are also a lot of bad ones. I've had good luck with these guys in the past: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/

Yeah, what @bd00 said. Unfortunately there's nothing I can do to prevent over-zealous anti-virus programs from restricting the downloads. Sounds like Kaspersky is to blame here if adding LaunchBox as trusted is not permitting them. All downloads occur from within LaunchBox.exe, so there's nothing special going on.

Hi @Rhedox, welcome. You're actually the very first person to ask for both of those options. :) I'll add them to my list. Per the selection one, without the border you wouldn't be able to tell if any game was selected. Is that what you're looking for?

Hi JKeift, welcome. Glad to hear you're enjoying LaunchBox. :) Currently, there isn't really a play time feature. It's a hard feature to implement because you have to be able to tell when a game is running or not, and without a tighter integration with your games like Steam has, it's almost impossible. Even Steam has trouble with that feature (for example, my GTA IV hours are way, way, way up there for no apparent reason), so without a tight integration, it would have to be mostly guesswork. I would like to have that feature as well, but I haven't tried to implement it because it would likely end up being so inaccurate.

Good point @Kriven, that would be useful. I'll add it to my list. :)

Thank you @MonarKay, what a great contribution. :)

Holy crap dude. Glad you're alive. That is amazingly awful. It's hard to believe that good people even exist in a world filled with people like that. Unbelievable. I'll pray for your recovery. Thanks for sharing that all with us. And yeah...maybe I should buy a bicycle helmet. :/

:) And pinned.

Alright, new beta is out. There's a bunch of random crap in this one that I can't remember. ;) Really, though, primarily I'm hoping that this release fixes all outstanding errors/crashes. Please let me know if anyone is seeing any remaining errors or crashes. I improved the input engine with wrap-around and fixed some performance issues with the Platforms favorites and recent games. Also, changed the logic for recently played to show the last 10 played or updated games (though Last Played still isn't working properly in Big Box Mode, gotta fix that yet).

Very cool, Martin. :)

Yeah, haven't added custom fields to custom filters yet. We'll get that in eventually. ;)

bd000 said OK, I tried beta 6. I like the new options menu, it is convenient and it feels like it is in the right place. Great work. A few things: All Capcom CPS clear logos are missing. I think somebody mentioned this already, but could the "Backspace" perform the same actions as "Esc". I keep hitting backspace by mistake, I guess that feels more natural with home theatre apps. Does the recently added list show games that were added in a period of time, like the past month? If so, could it be changed to show the last 5 games that were added, period. I only ask because most of my platforms were added ages ago and they don't show anything for recently added. It leaves a big space that doesn't look right. Most of them will never have anything else added either, because they are complete. Or replace it with something else if the platform has no "recently added games". Something like top-rated games, or favourites, or something other than a blank space. Also, if a game does not have cover art, the recently played/added lists show blank spaces, which doesn't look right. Lastly, I encountered an error. I left the room and when I returned BB had crashed, I got the "program has stopped working" windows message. It wasn't doing anything, it was just sat idle on the platforms list. It has not happened again since, but I thought I should probably mention it. I think Capcom CPS is because of differing names; I haven't yet added an alternatives list for any of the Capcom platforms. I have the default names like this: Capcom CPS1. I think that should work, though we need platform name alternatives lists for all of the platforms. We currently only have them for the platforms that are on TGDB. Good idea on Backspace, that should be an easy but important add. I like your idea for recently added. Yes, right now it's the past month or something. I do eventually plan on showing what makes sense there, so there's always something showing, with favorites, recently added, recently played, recently changed, whatever. Yeah, I'm still seeing the occasional random error myself. Trying to identify what might be causing the problem.

Fluffo said The options are working great! Could you add an option to change which screen it will show on or allow alt+enter so that I can move it myself? Where are the platform-images located? I can't seem to find them anywhere. Edit: I have also noticed that BigBox mode does not update "last played" or playcount. Thanks @Fluffo. I'll look into a screen option. The platform images are all located under LaunchBox\Images\Platforms. This may change before the official release though; I'm not quite sure. They may end up going in the platform folder (which is not yet fully realized). Good find on the play counts/last played.

Hi @DickNervous (lol), welcome. 1. Probably the best way to do this would be to use custom filters. 2. That's a good point, I guess there's no way to specify "not exists" in the filters. Whoops. I'll add this to my to-do list. 3. The LaunchBox.xml file contains all the data in XML format. So it's easy to open it up in a text editor for search, replace, etc. You might have some luck opening it up in Excel, but I'm not sure. 4. That is definitely coming. :) Thanks!

Great idea, Carlos. I've had a "kid mode" in mind for ages but it really should be expanded beyond that. That makes perfect sense. To a certain extent, this could already be done by restricting access to LaunchBox.exe and only allowing access to BigBox.exe, since Big Box Mode is read only.