Jason Carr

Alright! The 4.0 beta is here! http://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox-nightlies I hope to put out the official release in a week or so. Please test anything you can, especially those of you who've donated and are able to test the premium features. Thanks guys!

bd000 said Ooohhh, please share. Well, they're mostly untested but you can try these: /sort [sort type] /play [game title] I added these during HTSpeak development for integration with HTSpeak, but I haven't been back to it in a million years. You can take a look at that on the YouTube channel if you're curious what it is. Also, I did add the /f for fullscreen; that will be in 4.0.

I just sent out licenses to everyone who's donated in the past (there was 11 people). If you've donated any amount but have not received a license, please check your spam folder. I'll be putting out the beta of LaunchBox 4.0 (with the premium features) within the next day two, so you can test those shiny new licenses.

Thanks for this, Bigby. I reset the profile tabs per the instructions and it appears to be fixed.

Wolfereign said It just keep looking better and better! The purple looks great and the custom filters will be nice for playing through game series like Zelda or Megaman. Is there any chance of the LaunchBox.exe to support Command line switches such as -f to launch LaunchBox in full screen mode. Thanks Wolfereign. Command line switches are actually pretty easy to add in; I do have a few in there already (though they're undocumented). I'll see if I can't get -f in there soon.

Hi kandjar, it should certainly be possible. I've added it to my list of things to implement.

Kyaero, unfortunately right now it is a game-specific setting (but any way you look at it you'll have to specify specific CD/ISO files, so it wouldn't really work in batch anyways). Here's my configuration for Quake II: Application Path: DAEMON Tools Lite\DTLite.exe (should be the relative or full path to your Daemon Tools EXE) Application Command-Line Parameters: -mount dt, 0, "..\Games\Windows\Quake II\Quake2.cue" (change the path in the quotes to be the path to your CD image file) Then check "Automatically Run Before Main Application" and you should be good to go.

Hi haniobaid, good point. Not sure how I missed that one. I should have it added in the next version.

Btw guys, anyone having trouble with LaunchBox Forums emails going into their spam folder? I noticed that mine were recently and I'm not sure why they are now but weren't before. Anyways, development on the premium version is going well; I have the new saved custom filters mostly completed and I've started on the theming customizations. I'll be handing out license keys to everyone who's donated for access to the premium beta shortly.

Hi Bigby; yes, that is the current default sort order, though I understand that in some situations it's not ideal. I believe it sorts that way because I wanted something like "Game: Subtitle" to come before "Game 2: Subtitle". It's hard to make everything order well by default. I have plans to allow for much more control in the sorting algorithms in the premium version, eventually. I added it to my list.

Kyaero, you can use additional applications to automatically mount a disc with Daemon Tools before running a game. Just add an additional application to the game and check the box to run it before starting the game. I have the command line parameters and such at home, but I'm not home right now so I can't check them.

This is a great idea guys, I'll look to create this for the premium version. Thanks!

Hi Kyaero, sorry for the delay here. I was under the impression that sorting attributes by "none" was already working properly. Can you give me an example of where it isn't? Finding missing ROMs should work properly via the ROM import, if you leave the box checked to ignore existing ROMs. Alphabet sections was previously working but was conflicting with some other keyboard shortcuts, so I removed it temporarily until I can fix the issues. I am interested in your approach for auto-mounts, if you wouldn't mind. I have something set up for Daemon Tools, currently, but it would be nice to know if there was a more streamlined approach. The rest of these I've either noted or just noted them. Thanks! Jason

Hi dvds, I'll add an item to my list to optionally disable the mouse (and other various input pieces). This will likely be in the premium version, however.

Welcome target, yes I actually have this feature in development. It was shelved for more important things at the time, but hopefully I can get back to it soon.

Thanks conehead, I'll look into those.

Hi mgtroyas, I do remember. The D-Fend import hasn't been touched at all for a very long time, as I haven't gotten hardly any feedback on it. Looking at the code, it is supposed to import the images from the Captures folder. Can you send me a zip of all of your "prof" files? Then hopefully I can troubleshoot.

Hi scree, this was more because the Notes field didn't used to automatically populate via search and I didn't want anyone's manual entries to be overwritten. I can probably add an option for this. I'll add it to my list.

I have another beta uploaded: https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox-nightlies This should fix the release date issue from above. Here's the changelog thus far: - New Feature: Added a local metadata database to allow searching for metadata even if not connected to the Internet or TheGamesDB.net is down - Improvement: Improved game matching on the Steam import process - Improvement: Changed the scrollbar hover highlight to be more prominent - Improvement: The main scrollbar now resizes properly at various DPI settings - Improvement: Reduced flickering throughout the app - Fixed: When using the custom window borders, the window would get slightly bigger with every restore - Fixed: Menus were missing borders when using the default Windows theme - Fixed: Cursor was not changing properly on split containers

Bigby said Is this a mock-up? Are there plans to have LaunchBox display screenshots in this way? Videos would be nice too, if possible. I just wanted to say thank you Jason for making LaunchBox, I have been looking for a front-end for some time (tried a few different ones over the years), and LaunchBox has a lot of promise. Yeah, that's a mockup. I do have that feature on my list to implement, yes.

Bigby said Imported Sega Genesis roms, and the years are displaying correctly. Edit: After filtering for Genesis and selecting year as 1, it appears that 22 out of 968 roms has this year as 0001. For Atari Lynx this is 57 out of 85, which display year as 0001. Edit2: Having glanced at the Metadata.xml, and searching for some of the games that have 0001, it looks like they do not have an actual year present in the database. Looking on thegamesdb.net those games do not have a year either, so that explains that. Good find, Bigby. Games that don't have a release date on TGDB shouldn't have that box checked on the game; I'll look into it.

Innomen said --------------------------- LaunchBox --------------------------- An error occurred while trying to launch the game: This version of %1 is not compatible with the version of Windows you're running. Check your computer's system information to see whether you need a x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) version of the program, and then contact the software publisher --------------------------- OK --------------------------- I went to add eob2, it was found in the local database (awesome!), and I pointed the application path to it's start exe, and this is the error I got when trying to launch it. Edit: Forgot to tell it it was a dos game. (Maybe it could ask?) Checking the uhh dosbox box, now it runs Workflow: Install beta, add game, search, add from local, application path, launch, error. Hi Innomen, I'll add an item to my to do list to tell a user to check the box if it detects a DOS game.

Not as of yet, though it is on my radar.

Alright, despite the fact that I've had the flu all day (or maybe because of it), I've had a pretty productive day. There's a new beta out that includes the local metadata database: https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox-nightlies Any related testing would be much appreciated, both searching in Add/Edit and importing from Steam and ROM files. For images, it currently still attempts to pull them down from TheGamesDB for local entries. However, I'm in the middle of downloading the entire set of images from TheGamesDB; it's currently at something like 33%. Once I have all the images, I could possibly stick them up on Amazon S3 or similar, hopefully for cheap, so that even if TGDB is completely down everything would work great. Then of course up next would be branching out to our own server side database down the road, though I am worried about moderation for that, and it's on the back burner for now. nmc, that does look pretty nice, have to say. They must be using some neat trickery to make that work so well, but it's a great idea. It wouldn't work well for imports of course (too much manual selection), but I could see that being really handy for manual additions. I've added it to my list.