Jason Carr

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.

The problem with doing that is that data loss is still possible, so the user needs to at least know that there was a corruption issue. But yes, we could probably still streamline that. It is a pretty rare issue though (or it should be), so it's hard to prioritize.

I see; it looks like we just need to allow using mGBA for Game Boy and Game Boy Color. We missed the fact that that core works with more than just Game Boy Advance. I can add that support here shortly. We do have plans to allow you to use a custom core name, but that feature isn't available just yet. Unfortunately not just yet, but that functionality is also coming. We're planning on adding the ability to choose a different emulator for each game here soon.

The Duckstation Retroarch core is now available in the new 0.35 release. Are you referring to a standalone version of Duckstation? I will add Classicboy Gold to our list of emulators to add support for.

I just tested this out on my system, and I'm not noticing any significant difference between 11.15 and 11.16 in background CPU usage. It's a max of 2% on my system, in my testing, in both 11.15 and 11.16. However, it is possible that Big Box might be temporarily doing something in the background that increases this (such as caching images), so maybe if you give it a while, the CPU usage might go back down. Let us know if that's the case. Other than that, there's probably not a lot you can do. We can revisit this though in development if you can consistently prove that CPU usage is higher for you, though I haven't been able to replicate myself thus far. Are you running any plugins?

Hmm, I feel your pain on this. Unfortunately I don't have any real ideas or recommendations. Just chiming in to say I gave this a read and wracked my brain for a bit. It is possible that we could program our own resolution changer, but that's about the only idea I could come up with, and I don't know if it would interfere with the Shield.

Just to clarify, if you want the best performance, you should definitely put your LaunchBox install and your LaunchBox media on an SSD. It really does make a world of difference. That said, yeah, there's really no reason to put your entire ROM collection on an SSD. The ROMs themselves can be safely kept on a traditional spinning hard drive without any perceived performance loss.

I see; yeah, we do have it working opening up the emulator in testing, but of course it doesn't load up the game. We could put it in in that broken state, but then we're likely to get a million reports that it doesn't work. I'll keep my ears open on that to see if we get any further feedback on it.

Just released LaunchBox for Android version 0.35 with the following: Added support for 8 new platforms: Apple II, Apple IIGS, Commodore PET, Fairchild Channel F, Neo Geo CD, PC Engine SuperGrafx, Sharp X1, and Watara Supervision Added support for 25 new RetroArch cores in order to support the new platforms and better support some existing platforms as well Updated the RetroArch recommended/default cores list with more up to date options Upon restarting the app on Android, you should be prompted to update to the new 0.35 release. If you're not getting prompted, make sure your Internet connection is stable and working properly. Let me know if anyone runs into any issues updating.

Okay, not sure if there's gonna be much we can do there, but if you have access to another frontend, by chance, you could test to see if loading that particular core works with any other frontends. If not, then the issue is likely somehow either a bug with Retroarch (on that device), or just a problem with the device in general. Looking into that device, though; is it really this $40 device? https://www.tivo.com/products/stream-4k If that's really the device that you're using, to be honest, it's a miracle that anything is working lol, since the hardware is so lowend.

To be honest, I'm really doubtful that's a LaunchBox issue; I don't think that's even possible. Maybe try rebooting? Okay, good to know. I assume you have an external drive attached to the Shield? Can you try these steps that I posted a while back in this thread to see if they help? Keep in mind that you will need to back up your external drive contents, if there's anything on it that you don't want to lose. Here's the post:

@adam1972 Also, I do have a new version coming out with some core updates here shortly. Per Famicom, Android currently just calls Famicom Nintendo Entertainment System and doesn't differentiate. NES is working fine for me though with all the core options. I have added the SNK Neo Geo Pocket and Pocket Color core though.

Okay, I've confirmed that Sega Genesis with the genesis_plus_gx_libretro_android.so core works fine on my setups. Just tested it. So not exactly sure what's going on there. I am using the 64-bit version of Retroarch sideloaded though.

Okay, well that's definitely the problem. That really should not be the case. I haven't figured out why some Shield devices are doing this, but until we figure it out, there's no way to make them work. You should be able to at least write to the root folder (make a directory) on the internal storage. Am I understanding correctly that you can't do that?

Good to know; I'll look to add that Retroarch core.

Can you verify if you can write to your storage with a file manager app? That's what we're trying to figure out with the Shield at the moment.

Hmm, maybe try downloading again? Perhaps it was a corrupt download. That's the only thing left that it could really be, if you're running Windows 10 64-bit. Is it the setup EXE file that gives you that error?

Where is the rogue XML file and what it is called?

I'm not certain, but there may be an issue with older models of the Shield, yes. We haven't figured out what the issue is (I don't believe anyone has gotten back to me on it, though I might have missed it). Are you able to use a file manager app to access files on the device? Are you able to write to files on the device with it?