Jason Carr

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.

bd000 said Have you considered offering a collaboration type scheme with them, that allows LB users to update from inside LB and you get to mirror the database. They already have the web frontend and moderation protocols in place. Could be mutually beneficial... Unfortunately, I have asked to collaborate at that level with them several times, and never received a response. I even sent a donation with one of the requests, but still, no response at all. So I've pretty much given up on that idea.

The entire database compresses down to 6 megabytes; that's crazy. So it certainly seems more than feasible to distribute the entire database with LaunchBox.

...and finished. All 24,191 records downloaded. Now to start downloading images; I imagine that will take long while. But per the metadata, the entire database fits in less than 60 megabytes. That's pretty incredible to me. A 60 megabyte download doesn't seem out of the question (though it would have to be optional).

Well this is really quite interesting... I looked up the license that TheGamesDB.net puts on their content. They use this license here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ The absolute only requirement with this license is that you acknowledge that the data came from TheGamesDB, and point to that license. So this got me thinking...how easily could I batch download their entire database? A few hours later and here I am batch downloading all ~24,000 records into a shiny new SQL Server database. I'm currently at record ~5,000 of 24,000, and it's only been maybe 15 minutes. So before the night is out I will have a fully complete copy of all of the data from TheGamesDB.net, completely legal to use. Not even kidding. After this I still have to download images, but that's not a challenge at all. So this opens up many, many possibilities. It's possible that I could include a subset of this data with LaunchBox itself so that no searching the web would even be required, and if TheGamesDB.net was down, I could simply use the local copy. I'm sure there would be minor setbacks with that idea (one of which being the total size of the data), but that actually appears to be feasible. Another option is to put in the work and do what I've wanted all along. We could use TheGamesDB.net's data as the base for a new service, where users could upload their content directly from LaunchBox. Obviously that would be a lot of work (and I'm concerned about the time that would be required in order to moderate submissions), but I wouldn't rule that out at this point. So these were some game-changing discoveries; I'd feel bad about grabbing all this data from TheGamesDB if the site was consistently up, but under the circumstances I'm just glad to be able to grab the data. Thoughts, anyone?

So I've been thinking folks. I'm sick and fricken tired of TheGamesDB.net being down, and as bd stated, Wikipedia leaves a lot to be desired. At the same time, I *still* don't want to rely on a crappy HTML parsing solution to pull stuff from MobyGames or similar. So solution. I think I can probably build my own API relatively easily. Could still leave TheGamesDB and MobyGames in there, but LaunchBox could then allow you to upload your values to it's own API. Would probably eventually solve all of these issues. We have a big enough user base now that it could be community driven most likely. I don't envision any kind of a website frontend at first. LaunchBox would be the only frontend. Thoughts?

Most likely it's TheGamesDB, not your firewall. As of late it seems to be down more often than up, unfortunately. I have no idea what's going on, and I don't see any updates from them in their social feeds. I do know they've been blaming it on "attacks", but I don't know any details. Who in their right mind would want to bring down a site like that, I have no idea. :/

Hi, bd, great to see you back in this thread. I believe the caching system is what is causing that CPU usage. I'm not sure if we've confirmed yet, but try disabling the cache and let me know if you still have CPU usage when idle. Per Wikipedia, a number of things are quite a challenge with it. Wikipedia is mostly platform agnostic, meaning games don't have a page for every platform. They simply have one page that lists the associated platforms. So proper platform support with Wikipedia is pretty close to impossible. There's also typically only one image per game, for all of the platforms, so the box art just isn't going to match the platform in a large number of cases. I know Wikipedia isn't ideal in many regards, but I needed to rush out *some* way to search, since TheGamesDB.net has been having so many issues for so long. Not sure what the problem is over there, but it's starting to seem like a fix is not coming quickly. Per the HTML tags in the fields, that's something I can fix. Beyond that, I don't have many options when it comes to Wikipedia. I chose Wikipedia because it has a proper API so I'm able to implement the search relatively quickly (still took me 20+ hours), but obviously something better is still in order.

And we have another new beta. I've added controller support for the sidebar and fixed a bunch of other little things. https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox-nightlies Here's the latest changelog: - New Feature: The sidebar now has controller support - Improvement: The included ScummVM version has been upgraded to 1.7.0 - Improvement: LaunchBox now shows a friendly error message when it is run from a folder without the necessary file permissions - Improvement: LaunchBox now shows a friendly error message when the LaunchBox.xml file is corrupted - Improvement: LaunchBox no longer forces you to close the application when an unexpected error occurs; closing and restarting is still recommmended, however - Fixed: Sidebar filters were using a "contains" search instead of an "equals" search, which was causing confusing results (such as PlayStation 2 games showing up for PlayStation, etc.) - Fixed: Depending on configuration, a crash could occur on startup due to the caching system - Fixed: Options dialog max RAM usage was not updating the number - Fixed: The context menu wasn't showing in the right spot when using a controller - Fixed: Controllers allowed you to scroll past the end of the games list - Fixed: Keyboard/controller navigation was not working properly in the new Options dialog - Fixed: The Alt key now properly opens the menu in full screen mode

Sure; the latest betas have this fixed.

Alright; I've posted a new beta: https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox-nightlies Here's the change log thus far: - Improvement: The included ScummVM version has been upgraded to 1.7.0 - Improvement: LaunchBox now shows a friendly error message when it is run from a folder without the necessary file permissions - Improvement: LaunchBox now shows a friendly error message when the LaunchBox.xml file is corrupted - Improvement: LaunchBox no longer forces you to close the application when an unexpected error occurs; closing and restarting is still recommmended, however - Fixed: Sidebar filters were using a "contains" search instead of an "equals" search, which was causing confusing results (such as PlayStation 2 games showing up for PlayStation, etc.) - Fixed: Depending on configuration, a crash could occur on startup due to the caching system - Fixed: Options dialog max RAM usage was not updating the number

I just fixed this. The fix will be included in the beta I put out later this evening.

LaunchBox uses HTTP port 80 to connect to thegamesdb.net. That's it, so it should be pretty easy to whitelist.

Hi tomokok, this is because of the way the filters currently work. Since "NES" is part of "geNESis", they both show up. I'll be fixing this for the next release.

No worries; I'll stop when I run away. I used to include 4 demos with LaunchBox but I removed them because it bloated the install and some people just didn't like having them there by default. But now we have the ability to import and export game packages, so someone could easily build a nice collection and then make it available online. Unfortunately I'm more than occupied with development so my time wouldn't really allow me to create a package like that. But I'd download it and use it if someone else did...

Thanks, corinthian. I do have an item on my list to batch download info, but unfortunately that's not built quite yet.

Sure, you can use File > Exit as well. But also, in 3.6 the close and minimize buttons are there in full screen if you move your mouse to the top of the screen.

True, it would be really awesome if it could auto-download games like that. Sadly though we're a very long ways off from that. Glad to have you here; we're always looking for more people to provide feedback and help test. Check out the beta testing thread here if you want to help beta test: https://www.launchbox-app.com/forum/features/launchbox-beta-testing/page-14 There's not much there for the moment since we just released 3.6, but I'll have more betas for 3.7 up there soon. If you subscribe to the post you'll get notified when I put up a new beta.

Hi treskatae, It looks to me like higan might have some issues with command line parameters. I don't see any official documentation on it at all, but I found this thread: http://www.gameex.info/forums/topic/14203-resolved-higan-bsnes-command-line-anyone/ Perhaps RetroArch might be a better option? Thanks, Jason