Jason Carr

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.

Great news guys, thanks. Sounds like I'll be putting out the release tonight. You've both convinced me that I should put the banner and/or the clear logo on the game details; I'll look to do that for the next release. bd, screen saver is a great idea. Added to the list of fun things. I agree about lightbox, but probably won't bother with that in all honesty. Thanks to you both for keepin' on testing.

Cool, good to know. I'll look to see if they have an API and what their stance is on third parties.

Oh, one more thing. With the new pictures viewers, do you think we still need pictures on the games details (or on a separate sidebar, or whatever else)? Or does the pictures viewer cover it?

Alright guys, here's version 3.1 beta 1. And the changelog: - New Feature: The full size picture viewer now allows you to arrow key through all of a game's pictures, and includes a full screen mode - New Feature: New option to "Always go fullscreen when viewing images" in the Options menu Images tab - New Feature: Favorite icon/button (heart) added to the game details - New Feature: Additional applications can now be automatically run before or after the main application (to configure controllers, mount drives, etc.). Simply check the boxes in the Additional Application dialog (from Add/Edit). Wait for Exit will wait for the application to exit before launching the main application (30-second timeout). - Improvement: The mouse cursor is now properly hidden when using a controller - Fixed: The ROM and Steam imports were not downloading the game description (overview) from TheGamesDB - Fixed: The wait cursor would sometimes stay after editing a game - Fixed: Cancelling the auto-update sometimes caused a crash Test whatever you can. I'm also interested in hearing feedback on the pictures viewer (both fullscreen and windowed modes) and the autorun for additional applications (I use it to configure Xpadder for some games). This will hopefully be the only beta for this release (unless someone finds an issue). I want to get the next release out quick, as it fixes an annoying wait cursor bug (the wait cursor doesn't go away after using the game details Edit icon and then pressing OK on the edit window). As always, thanks for all your help.

Good idea, bd. Thanks for trying to replicate that. I'll have the new version up shortly, after I finish my deving tonight.

Not a bad idea, I wonder if they have an API... Is their selection significantly better?

Believe it or not, I should have a new beta up for testing sometime today. I put in some significant time yesterday on a number of things. In the mean time, I noticed a situation where the box art wasn't updating after changing it in the edit dialog. Is anyone else able to replicate this? I'm curious if this is something anyone else is seeing. Thanks, Jason

Hello everyone; I am often asked to add MobyGames.com support to LaunchBox, and to be honest, I'd love to be able to add it (for my own use as well). However, I really can't, and I wanted to detail why. D-Fend Reloaded has had support for MobyGames.com for a long time. However, recently it's been often broken. Looking through the D-Fend Reloaded thread at Vogons, you'll notice that Alexander, the developer for D-Fend Reloaded, has been playing somewhat of a cat and mouse game with MobyGames.com in order to keep their import working. It goes like this: D-Fend Reloaded makes their import work with the site, MobyGames.com changes their site which breaks the D-Fend Reloaded import, Alexander fixes the import, MobyGames.com changes their site, and back and forth. It's questionable whether MobyGames.com is purposefully changing their site to break the import processes for D-Fend Reloaded and other applications, but generally the impression that I get from MobyGames.com is that they do not want to support third party applications using their data. MobyGames.com is a for-profit site that is anything but "open". In addition, they have no desire to create an API or any kind of a stable way for third party applications to retrieve the data. D-Fend Reloaded simply resorts to downloading entire web pages and searching the HTML code for the required content. But that way, if the site changes, the import breaks. Therefore, there are a number of key issues here. For one, if MobyGames.com doesn't want me using their data, I'd rather not use it. I would much rather encourage people to use TheGamesDB.net, as they make it easy for everyone to contribute, have an easily accessible API, and have done as much as they can to make the site fully accessible to everyone. They recognize that this is the community's data, not theirs (as all the data is provided by the community); they are simply providing a service to host it. Furthermore, I have no desire to play a cat and mouse game with MobyGames.com. Doing so would take up precious development time that could be used to implement useful features. LaunchBox does plenty already, but there's always so much more good functionality to add. If I were to have to sacrifice time to keep an import from MobyGames.com working, I wouldn't be able to put out nearly as many new features. Not to mention I would likely end up with 10,000 "the search is broken" emails. I like feedback, because I want to fix the problem if something is broken. But if something constantly breaks faster than I can fix it, communication will fall through the cracks and development will become frustrating. So, like I said, it disappoints me not to be able to add support for MobyGames.com, but under the circumstances, I can't see it happening. If MobyGames.com changes their position on the matter, and/or provides an API, I will certainly look into it again. Also, if anyone has any useful information on the matter, please chime in. Or, if I've misspoken on anything, please do let me know. I looked into it a while ago, but haven't done any recent extensive research. Thanks everyone for using LaunchBox; do keep giving me feedback. Jason