Jason Carr

Beta 6 is out now with the following: Added Retroarch Plus from the Play Store Added a .nomedia file to the root LaunchBox folder so that the game images don't show up in the Android image galleries

We are planning on recommending the full-fat sideloaded version of Retroarch, and not any version from Google Play, because of the Google Play restrictions. We're also considering adding a feature that automatically downloads and installs the sideloaded version of Retroarch, but that won't make it into the 0.34 release. Regardless, yes, we can add support for that from Google Play.

Yup, absolutely. Please email us at support@unbrokensoftware.com with your Google Play email address and we'll send you a forever license. We wanted to do that automatically, but Google Play won't give us a complete list of email addresses for privacy reasons.

Good to hear. I would highly recommend getting some sort of a game controller device for your phone. It's more annoying to carry around but it really does make the difference between playable and worthless, at least to me. I can't use the on-screen controls to do anything really. Check out ETA Prime's channel on YouTube if you need some reviews.

Hey all, it's that time again. We're hoping to release both LaunchBox 11.16 on the desktop and LaunchBox 0.34 for Android (yes, it's coming back) early next week. We would really appreciate some translation updates, if you can fit it in. Thanks as always for all your work. @Kondorito @Cauptain @Nyny77 @Opak @dukeemu @cyanjiang @Just001Kim @MajKSA @gamehacker @alexposad @k_kutsugi @Bardock

Yeah, we do, but I feel that those are much less intrusive than having gameplay videos of so many different games on our servers. That's not really as big of an issue as the other two, though. We do have a lot of changes/fixes planned for the database, and also quite a bit in progress. It doesn't sound like our vision completely matches yours, but we do recognize that a focus on improvements to the games database is a good idea. We didn't put it on the poll, because it's in progress, and we're working on it regardless of poll results. That's not a bad idea, but it would also be a huge undertaking and I'm not necessarily convinced that it would appeal to the majority of the audience. Still, it's a great idea for the next poll.

This is not currently in the plans. There are several issues with the idea: It's a legal gray area still (much more of a legal gray area than fair use with images, and it might not be likely, but it could get us into hot water with overbearing companies like Nintendo) Our games database server costs are already extensive, and it's only getting more expensive as it is; therefore, I'm not really interested in the massive additional server costs that would be required We don't want to deal with the likelihood that people will just start uploading EmuMovies videos to our servers; we have no good way of preventing that and we don't want the bad press or drama involved with it

I've confirmed that neither Dig nor RESET Collection work with the latest versions of Mupen64Plus FZ or FZ Pro, so unfortunately, it looks to be a lost cause. The emulator developer ruined any chance for frontends to be able to launch games when they changed to the new Android storage model. This issue is Google's fault, through and through. The new storage API is horribly designed.

So previously I was able to test the old version of Mupen64Plus FZ successfully, back a year ago or so, but the newest version does not seem to be working for me at all on my S10+. It refuses to launch any of the games with a "Failed to open ROM file for reading" error. I believe this is because Mupen64Plus "upgraded" to the new Android data access model, which in turn basically screws us and makes it so we can't use a frontend with it at all. This issue is part of what turned us off from Android in the first place; the new Android data model gets in the way of being able to share ROMs with emulators. So honestly, I don't know if there's any way to make either the free or the pro versions work. I'm going to try the other frontends that are available to see if any of them work to launch either version. If not, it's probably safe to say that it's not happening.

We do have a friendly relationship with Circo from EmuMovies, but we do not have a business relationship. Money has never exchanged hands. Just wanted to make that clear. EmuMovies is working on a better API. The current API is the reason for the lackluster search; in fact, there's not much we can do to improve it ourselves. When the next version of the EmuMovies API comes out, it should be a significant improvement.

Beta 5 is out now with a couple of things: Improvements to the quality of the generated thumbnail images (some devices like the Nvidia Shield TV were not using bilinear filtering as they should have been when generating the smaller thumbnail images) Fix for platform images not showing up properly when the Scrape As field was set to an empty string (sometimes caused when exporting to Android from the desktop) How are the betas working for everyone? We're hoping to put out the official release some time next week.

If they have different platforms between them, it should be just a matter of copying all of the files into the same set of folders. For the data files, just copy over all of the platform XML files together.

We would love the ability to automatically send out license emails to everyone who previously purchased, but sadly we don't have that option. Google Play got restricted because of GDPR and we can no longer see the email addresses of users who purchased the app. It's really dumb, because we can *search* for an email address and see if a user purchased, but we can't just get a list of emails who purchased. Go ahead and send an email to support@unbrokensoftware.com @foleyjo.

You should have received two emails, one with a link to download, and one with your license. The download is not public yet, and the website isn't all there yet, which is why that link doesn't work (yet).

I assume the slow startup happens before any text messages show up at the bottom of the screen? If so, unfortunately that's pretty much out of our control. It's just Android's magical loading mechanism before any of our code is really run. It might help to reboot the device to see if there's just too much running in background on the device and not enough free RAM left.

The Nvidia Shield TV is unique in that it only allows you to write to the "NVIDIA_SHIELD" folder in the root of external storage. Where is your LaunchBox folder? It should be under "/NVIDIA_SHIELD/LaunchBox" for any Nvidia Shield TV devices (and it should default to that if that "NVIDIA_SHIELD" folder exists).

The auto-update code is in beta 2. Just make sure you check the box to update to beta releases, and then restart the app. Multiple people have tested that functionality without any issues, so I'm doubtful that it wouldn't be working. If it doesn't have a stable connection, though, then it will just silently fail. As far as startup time, sometimes Android will just on one-off occasions take longer to start new apps, but the startup time should be exactly the same as the previous version, because nothing changed in that regard at all. So yes, I would say that's abnormal if you're getting that issue regularly. What device are you using? Thanks, good to know. Yes, we will be adding features to manually add media here soon. The new Export to Android functionality will also allow you to achieve this by editing things on the desktop first. Good to know about screenshots as well.

Thanks, sounds like it's probably going to require an uninstall. There's an automatic update process now, so we haven't sent new emails out after beta 2. You can upgrade to the latest by checking the box to update to betas in the options. You should prompted on startup to update.

The text is there for accessibility reasons. Those arrows don't show up for me in those browsers, so I'm wondering if maybe it's a DPI thing. I can fix it though just with a CSS overflow: none on that element. Thanks for the report.

To be honest, that's been unclear (seen different results on different devices). Can you test on your device and see if it works to install it without uninstalling the previous version? If the install errors, then you'll probably need to uninstall the previous version first. Make sure you do a backup because Android of course will delete the entire app folder, if your data is underneath the Android folder. Okay, that should be what's happening. If you allow the permission, the device should grant write permissions as well. I've heard that there are some third party devices that don't behave as they should, however. There might be a setting on your device somewhere to enable writing to files and folders in the root of external storage. One thing that we changed with this new version is that by default we're using a folder in the root of internal or external storage, called LaunchBox, instead of Android's convoluted default folder paths under /Android/data/com.unbrokensoftware.launchbox. The problem with using those folders is that newer versions of Android don't allow one app to read another app's data folder, which ruins the potential for firing up an emulator pointed to that folder. So I'm not sure what else we could do at this point. We may be able to revert to the old method as a failsafe, though.

I see, thanks. At least that points us in the right direction. Before those errors popped up, were you prompted to allow reading and writing to the file system? Android should be showing you a popup requesting those permissions.

Hey all, beta 4 of the Android app is out now with a fix for missing metadata in some situations. Also, a new desktop beta just came out with the Export to Android process back and updated, so you can now use that to export your desktop collection to your Android device. Any testing that you guys can do with that process would be appreciated. I will send you an email with a link to the latest beta so you can test with the latest to see if it fixes the issue. The best option would be to use the export process added to the beta I just put out. I'm honestly not certain how flexible the Android app would be with custom folders like that.

Hey all, beta 3 is out now with the Export to Android option added back in. We plan to release the new Android version at the same time as the 11.16 official release. For more details on the Android version, please see the Android beta testing thread here: We will be back to the remaining issues in this thread shortly.

Can you explain exactly what's happening? Did any of the previous betas work? We're bringing back the Android export process in the desktop app. Once that is out, you'll be able to do that.

Beta 3 is out now with a fix for an issue that caused platforms to disappear on rare occasions. So beta 3 is an important update. This also gives us an opportunity to test the auto-updates system. You should be prompted to update when the app is started up. Please let me know how the update process goes. Okay. Performance should be pretty much on par with the desktop version as far as download speeds, but of course it depends on the network. Less media is downloaded than on the desktop, but we are now downloading more media than we used to in order to support all the new views.