Jason Carr

Okay, getting closer. Once again, thank you very much @Madcore; really appreciate your help. This new version may end up fixing it, but we'll see. There's also some additional logging which may help. https://www.dropbox.com/s/mvs7zqhvk4glb9y/LaunchBox-Android-0.36-beta-4.apk?dl=0

I'll probably have to revisit this in the code. I did play around a bit with it early on, but Android was fighting me tooth and nail at every step. I'll put that on the list.

Thanks again @Madcore. That did help. It's possible that this new version will fix the issue, but I'm not certain. I also added some additional error messages to help if it doesn't end up solving the problem. Let me know. https://www.dropbox.com/s/6bv2rg65vwf1atg/LaunchBox-Android-0.36-beta-3.apk?dl=0

@Madcore Thank you very much. That gets me closer, but I have a new version now that should help us get even closer to the solution. My apologies for the back and forth. Unfortunately this issue may take a bit more back and forth to get resolved, but if you can test this new version, I would very much appreciate it: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dooks8rg45snixm/LaunchBox-Android-0.36-beta-2.apk?dl=0 Basically, again, I just need to know what the error messages that come up are. Thanks again.

It does not look like you're using the latest version of Dig, though I'm not sure that should matter. The latest version on Google Play is 1.39.6. Also, the latest version of M64 Plus FZ Pro is 3.0.291, so that is out of date as well. I'm afraid that M64 Plus FZ Pro may have broken that functionality with the latest version. Can you upgrade everything and confirm? Beware though, because I'm not sure if you'll be able to downgrade...

@Madcore @Kuro Houou @SupaGrova @TheMadMan007 @dmaker @dia I have a new version ready for folks that haven't been able to get it running on their Shield devices. This won't likely solve the issues, but it will get us more information to help us pinpoint what's going on. If you can manually download this new APK on your device and install it, and then let me know what the full error messages are, then hopefully we can better figure out what's going on. Here's the APK: https://www.dropbox.com/s/71xneb6obbn5bjk/LaunchBox-Android-0.36-beta-1.apk?dl=0 Thanks much; I'm hoping we can resolve this issue today.

@scenariol113 We have beta 2 out with a fix for this. Can you update to beta 2 and check to see if it fixes the issue for you? You can enable beta updates in the LaunchBox options and then just restart and you should be prompted to update.

Thanks, yeah, I tried with DIG already and it did not work with the latest version. But if you have it working, do let me know, because that means I'm just missing something.

Sadly, we've already tried to get M64Plus FZ running, and it's not possible, because the developer chose to switch to the new, broken Android data model (thanks Google), which doesn't work for launching games at all. So unfortunately, as it currently stands, it's impossible for a frontend to launch any games with M64Plus FZ. Just in case I'm wrong (which does happen from time to time), let me know if anyone finds any frontends that work properly with the the latest version of FZ. From what I can tell, it isn't possible. Sorry @steliokantos.

@Madcore Okay, that is good news. I should be able to fix it then, just have to figure out exactly what's happening. I'll be diving in later today. Can you look in your device settings for the exact model number of the device and the Android version?

Good to know. @Madcore I assume yours is not a tube version? Either way, I don't think that all users with this issue are running the tube version of the devices.

Thanks for the info. If you use a file manager app, can you write to the root folder (create a folder in the root of the internal storage)? Most likely that is the issue, but I don't really know how to solve it if the Shield just isn't allowing write access to the internal storage. I don't understand why some Shield devices are allowing it, while others aren't. Any chance you can screenshot me a list of files and folders in the root of your internal storage (from a file manager app)? I use FX as my file manager on my Shield.

@scenariol113 We have seen this error once since release as well. We're currently working on a fix, which should be out very soon. Thanks for the report.

Unfortunately not yet, but we'll have a new version out very soon with that ability.

@Kuro Houou Thanks for the report. What specific model of the Shield do you have? It's working great for me on my Nvidia Shield TV Gaming Edition from 2019, but we do have reports from people saying that for whatever reason their Shields don't allow writing to the root folder in the file system, which basically screws us from being able to do anything with it. I currently don't understand why that's the case. Do you have any external USB drives attached?

Yup, both of these things will be coming soon.

Android doesn't really provide us with a good way to determine what is and isn't a game, unfortunately. You can delete any non-games though and they won't show back up. You can also just turn off parsing Android games completely if you want in the options.

FYI, @faeran has been able to replicate this on his machine, so at least we now have a system that we can test with to resolve the issue. We're hoping to figure out a fix for it tomorrow. Thanks for the reports.

It should be safe to downgrade to 11.15, yes. It would also be good to confirm that 11.15 actually does have lesser CPU usage too, since we haven't been able to replicate any changes with 11.16. You can downgrade just by manually running 11.15 installer over top of your LaunchBox folder. Just make sure you don't install it to a subfolder of the folder (the installer can make this confusing).

Huh, okay. Well in that case, maybe it's not spitting out anything useful into the logs. So then I guess we're up a creek for now.

Sadly it looks like that's the wrong log; it probably created a new empty one after it restarted after the failure. Can you maybe pull the previous one, or zip up and send me the last 5 or so?

If you want to send me your log file, I can look to see if it's anything I can fix with that Arcade import. Make sure debug logs are enabled in the settings, then run the arcade import. Then if you send me the latest log from the LaunchBox\Logs folder, we might be able to at least identify what's going on.

Yeah, doesn't look like one exists yet, so we'll probably have to build one. I'll put that on the list.

Apparently Unified Refried does use a lot more CPU usage in the background than most other themes. On my system, I only see 2% CPU usage with Unified Redux, but I see 7% with Refried. This is with 11.15, not the new release. So perhaps using a less intensive theme might be in order here?

Ah, good to know. Yes, we do check that option by default on purpose, but I wasn't aware that it was causing an issue for anyone. It sounds like maybe the emulators aren't able to access the extracted ROM files from the LaunchBox\Extracted folder. Not sure why that would be, but we can look into it. Can you help us out and answer these questions? What Android device are you using? What version of Android is it running? What platform(s) are you seeing the issue on? Where is your LaunchBox folder on the device? This is actually more of Android issue than anything else, but Retroarch may be able to get around this issue one way or another. But yeah, when I first started Android development I nearly dropped the whole idea when I realized that unless you close the emulator with the task switcher, it won't work properly to launch a new game. It's really quite irritating, but unfortunately I don't think there's anything we can do to fix it in the frontend.