Jason Carr

So, back to performance. There are things I can do in the code to speed it up, for sure. So I'll attempt to tackle that first to see how much I can speed up the populating after filtering/sorting. There are a bunch of other things to look into performance-wise, plenty to do there, for sure. For instance, I'm using XML for all the data. I chose to do it this way for flexibility (easy to write your own import, etc.), but it's obviously not the fastest way to do things; a database would be faster. It's all about spending the time to address the slow points in the code and thinking about how to speed them up. I'll devote some time to this soon. Imports for DOS and ScummVM games might be tough. I'm open to hearing ideas on how to implement these. Let's start a new thread for that though (would be better to discuss individual things on individual threads I think). Emulators, yeah, I can see the benefits of all that. I still have a main goal of keeping it all as simple as possible, but there should be a way to apply an emulator to a group of games, etc. Noted. That said, if you update the command line settings for a particular emulator, it will apply to every game assigned to that emulator. Even though you access the emulators from within the games (which I will be changing, btw), they are still separate in and of themselves, and not specific to each and every game.

Woah, big conversation here! I do appreciate all the feedback, Brad and bd. Regarding filters, yes, you'll need to do multiple imports to cover multiple extensions for the moment. With the pictures, the issue is somehow with the caching. I have a cache in place in order to make the games view performant, and it sounds like in large libraries the timing causes problems somehow. It's good to know that it happens mainly with larger libraries. This is the biggest glitch I know about right now, so I'll focus on it for this next release. As per 64-bit, the app is written for the .NET framework, and targets both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms, individually. This is hard to explain, but depending on which version of the .NET framework you're running (32-bit or 64-bit), the app should run under that model. It's not really that simple, and I don't really understand all the aspects of it, but the .NET framework does do a good job of handling it all behind the scenes. So, unfortunately, I think we're already seeing the benefits of 64-bit (or any that we could see in using the .NET framework). Gonna go through the rest of the feedback as well, but I'll divide it up into more posts. I'll say this first though: I'm glad to have you on board here, Brad. Honestly the best thing you can do for LaunchBox right now is to advertise for it however you can; I'm still working on getting it out to as many people as possible. Also, we should get you in on the beta testing thread.

Hey everyone; I need some *serious* testing on this. I've spent 4-5 days developing a wizard that makes it as easy as possible to install DOS games from a CD, folder, CD image, etc. I've even implemented a way to rip CDs to .bin/.cue files to make them run without the CD. Obviously this is a tough undertaking. I've wracked my brain to make it as easy as possible, but I'm sure there are things I haven't thought of, and I'm sure there will be issues with certain games. The new wizard is available under Tools | Install DOS Game. Here's what I really need help with: - Please run through the wizard, pay attention to/read everything, and let me know if anything is confusing (if you have any questions about how to answer any of the steps). I want to make the wizard as easy to use as possible. - Please pull out any DOS games you have (especially if you have the original game media or CD images of the original game media) and run them through the process to test it. I'd like to test the wizard with as many games as possible. The more games we test, the more stable we can make it. - Please try and test every aspect (every page, select every option, etc.) of the wizard as best you can. Try and make it crash. Put it through hell. It's tough to maintain state with such a complicated wizard so I want to make sure I didn't miss any problems that might come from going back and changing options, etc. As always, thank you all for all your help. The new 3.2-beta-1 version is attached. Also attached is a zip file that contains CDRDAO; this is an open source application that I've integrated that provides the CD ripping functionality. I'll include it in the new setup, but for this beta test you'll need to manually extract it to your LaunchBox folder. The folder structure should be LaunchBox\CDRDAO\cdrdao.exe. Happy testing! Whatever details you can give me as to what you tested, what works, and what doesn't is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Jason

bd, yeah, that is certainly a current priority. I'm thinking just a simple one-field at a time thing. Select the games to update, select the field, select the value. Simple and effective (and probably relatively easy to implement). Vinicius, welcome to the forums. I'm currently looking for more help beta testing, so you're in. You can now download the beta releases from this thread.

Also a good idea. Added to the list.

Good idea, shinra, added to my list.

Hey Brad, thanks for those details. Yes, I expect performance when editing games mostly has to do with having such a large library. There's always performance improvements I can make; I'll add a to do to see if I can speed that stuff up. I've seen the picture issue before as well, but I've had trouble replicating it. It seems to pop up randomly out of the blue. If you can see any kind of pattern behind it, let me know. I'll add a to do item to add an option to remove games with missing application files as well. Thanks, Jason

Hi Celeste, welcome. Good idea; I'll add it to my to do list.

Hi Ed, welcome to the forums. Older Windows games are unfortunately the hardest and least-reliable types of games to get working on modern systems. Sadly, you could be in for quite a battle in getting the game to run. LaunchBox has nothing to help you there, unfortunately. Bd00 is right though, the first thing to try is to see if you can get the game working in compatibility mode inside Windows. Maybe do some searches on that game in particular to see if anyone has done it. It might work, it might not. If it doesn't, then maybe Windows 95 in DOSBox might work. Personally, though, I don't have any experience with that. Good luck! Do let us know if you get it working and what worked best.

Hi Brad, thanks for joining us here. I agree that we need some more import mechanisms, and it's on my list to look into adding them, especially since TheGamesDB's search engine isn't exactly stable and I can't seem to get them to fix it. I get a lot of data from Wikipedia myself. I'll add that to my list of sites to consider. Unfortunate the API for TheGamesDB does not allow me to import games, currently. That'd certainly be nice (we could do a batch import), but I can imagine the data quality problems that it might introduce, so I can see why they haven't done it. As for the batch changes, that is currently a glaring omission; I intend to add a feature to batch update games very soon. Currently, your best option is to just open up the LaunchBox.xml file in a text editor (make a backup first to be safe), and do a search and replace to fix the values. Thanks, Jason

Can't have too many requests, always appreciated. Unfortunately, for the moment, I'm using plain-old Windows GDI+ to render the games list. It works perfectly fine for what it currently does, but wouldn't support animation (even fading) very well at all. So, before I can implement something like that, I need to replace the engine behind the games view with either DirectX, or a web technology like the Chrome engine, or something similar. Currently I'm leaning towards using the Chrome engine as it would allow for more cross-platform options in the future. So I have this kind of stuff planned, but it'll be a big undertaking and isn't likely to happen soon. But we will get there eventually.

Okay, I should be able to add an option to hide the "Genre: " part. I'll probably add that to the Options dialog though; the View menu is starting to get a bit cluttered. I'll experiment a bit with hiding the bar completely or just showing the text.

Hi bd, I agree, a refresh button would be good. Probably best not to add it on the game details though, as that implies just refreshing that game, I guess. I'm thinking I'll probably just add a refresh option to the right-click menu (and the Games menu).

Hi again, Sure; I'll add this to the list. I'm afraid it might be confusing to hide the dividers completely, but I can at least hide the black bars. I'm also not sure we really need three check boxes for it; would it be enough to just add an option to hide the divider boxes (just show the text only)? Thanks, Jason

Hi shinra, yeah, that really should be easy to do. I should be able to get it into the next release. Thanks, Jason

Thanks nmc. Great to know. I'll have to check out Retroarch. But just as a quick note, there's nothing wrong with encouraging other products (even competing projects) on these forums. I'd rather everyone find the best solution for them, and keep working on LaunchBox to adapt to people's needs.

Hi Krazed, Thanks for the feedback; good idea. I'll add an item to my list to add configurable keyboard shortcuts. In all honestly, it might be a bit, but we will get to it. Thanks, Jason

I think RZenith is probably referring to the fact that the games view doesn't refresh itself when setting a favorite. For example, if you're sorted by Favorite in your games view, the game won't automatically move in the list. This was by design though; I thought that would too confusing. So, as it currently is, you just have to change your filters to refresh it if you want. Thoughts?

Hey guys. I'll start with bd. Currently, no, there's no way to set an additional application for an entire platform. That's a good point about the emulators though. Obviously it would be ideal if you could set it up for a whole platform. Good job on the batch files though. I'll add an item to my list to come up with some sort of a solution for this.

Great.

Ah, sure. I noticed that a long time ago and then forgot about it. Thanks; I'll get it fixed for the next release.

Thanks, MultipleX. Welcome to the forums.

That is a great idea, gotcha. I'll add it to my list.

Cool; I'll look into IGN too.

Hi downingjosh, thanks for the feedback. I'll look to add that sooner rather than later. As per donations, I just added a donate page to the site; I tend to shy away from asking for donations, but at the same time they are always appreciated. Thanks much for giving me that push.