Jason Carr

Beta 3 is out now with the following: Fix for the LaunchBox interface appearing to be "stuck" when navigating Additional fixes for launching games Corrected issue where the Download Metadata and Media tool would download a theme video even though you already had one when selecting the "Do Not Replace" option Fixed custom field filter duplicates Corrected issue that required you to restart LaunchBox when adding a new custom field to see it in the Sidebar filter drop down Fixed pack:// URIs Add/Edit Metadata page now uses alternate names to set the region-correct title You can now change the main title of the game from the alternate names page Fixed DPI issues with some windows This beta does not address everything in this thread, but I wanted to at least get out what we had for today. Thanks for bearing with us as we work through these issues that have come up from the .NET Core migration, and thanks for the reports.

This isn't true either. The pause screen does work with some exclusive fullscreen mode emulators, and just because a game uses exclusive fullscreen does not necessarily mean that it won't work with the pause screens.

Thanks all for the testing and feedback. Beta 2 is out now with the following: Fixed all known cases where folders weren't opening and/or games weren't launching Fixed column visibility not sticking with the LaunchBox list view Hopeful fix for LaunchBox plugin issues (tested with Steam Scraper and YouTube Scraper plugins) Fixed EmuMovies credentials being forgotten Fixed Epic Games importer not showing any games Made the Region and Image Priorities check box lists less confusing to use (selection vs. checking) The setup now prompts you to download and install .NET Core 3.1.6 if needed Hopefully this will address most of the issues. Apparently with .NET Core, you can distribute it so that it does not require the framework to be installed, but it requires separate versions for x64 and x86, and would require an extra 100 megabytes on top for the download, so we've decided to not do that and just prompt users to download and install .NET Core if needed during the setup.

Thanks for the reports guys. I know what the plugin issue is and I can get it fixed and into a beta tomorrow. I'll look into the other issues as well.

The first 11.3 beta is out here:

Hey all, the first 11.3 beta is out now with the following: New Feature: Alternate names are now downloaded from the LaunchBox Games Database when importing or downloading metadata for your games, and they are editable in Add/Edit New Feature: New fields have been added for Max Players, Release Type, Video URL, and Wikipedia URL, downloaded from the LaunchBox Games Database when available Improvement: LaunchBox and Big Box have been upgraded to .NET Core 3.1, which brings with it many advantages, such as no longer requiring a .NET Framework installation, better performance, increased security, and potential cross-platform support Improvement: The LaunchBox options screen has been overhauled to remove the "legacy" portion and organize everything much more cleanly Improvement: The Installed, Games Database ID, Application Path, Max Players, Release Type, Video URL, and Wikipedia URL fields have been added to the LaunchBox list view Improvement: Date formats should now more closely reflect the Windows settings Improvement: Using custom fields in the sidebar now supports multi-string fields similar to Genre and Series Improvement: Plugin developers can now perform a search in Big Box using PluginHelper.BigBoxMainViewModel.Search(string query) Fixed: Rare image cache reading error Fixed: Screenshots pulled from GOG were sometimes cut off Fixed: Some games imported from GOG were not using DOSBox correctly The .NET Core 3.1 upgrades are a relatively big deal, and a lot of work went into them (and basically everything needs tested as a result). There is one known issue with this beta: the new Release Type field is not currently downloaded from the LaunchBox Games Database on imports and metadata updates, but the rest of the fields are. Let us know how this beta fares.

I have a feeling that something is wrong with how your collection is configured, but it's really hard to figure it out without seeing it and your media. My best guess would be conflicting folders or something of that nature. Big Box should randomly pick from the highest-priority available videos as you browse your collection, but yeah, there's nothing in Big Box to show all the videos at once at this point.

Thank you for the progress here guys, especially @static. I have everything upgraded to .NET Core 3.1; we're just doing some final testing and fixes before releasing it in beta form. I plan to release a new beta before the end of the week, and I expect things to run at least a little bit more smoothly on Linux with the .NET Core 3.1 beta release.

We are currently in the process of upgrading to the latest .NET backend, which could address some of these issues for some people if we're lucky. We'll come back to this after upgrading everything to .NET Core 3.1 to see where we're at.

Responded in the beta thread. But yes, logs would help. And yes, that does not appear to be a LaunchBox error, so my hunch is that maybe it would be caused by a plugin.

Welp, zero changes were made across any of those versions that should affect the speed of filtering or populating games. So all I can figure is that there was some kind of outside influence there.

I'm lost as to why you have videos that would be showing up on incorrect games, but I'm confident that that isn't happening for other users, so I'm not sure what's going on there. Any chance you had that video duplicated across multiple games before? Hmm, that error is very weird, because that doesn't even appear to be a LaunchBox error. Are you using any plugins, by chance?

Odd. Are you using Windows Media Player or VLC @Wanderer189? I don't think any of that code changed for any recent versions, so I wonder what might be causing it.

Hi @Equilan, BitDefender has proven itself to be a very poor product to us many times over, due to the ridiculous number of false positives that it produces. This one is especially odd because it seems to be removing things from the Nvidia folders, which we don't touch, so I have no idea what it's trying to say, but it's obviously a false positive of some sort.

You mean the right-click menu is getting too big? Not quite sure what you mean. Just tested with 11.2 official and MAME and it worked fine. What emulators are you testing with? Good to hear. This seems to be a rare issue, but we'll be restructuring the way this works before the next official release, so it shouldn't be an issue going forward.

Since the release of LaunchBox 11.2, we've been working on getting LaunchBox and Big Box running on Linux using Wine. Keep in mind that this is not for the faint of heart, and you may still run into issues at this point. That said, both LaunchBox and Big Box now at least mostly work, since version 11.3-beta-9. Thanks to @static on Discord for some additional tips and tricks that we hadn't yet discovered. Here are some current known issues: Only the VLC video playback engine works (of course the Windows Media Player video playback engine does not) Compared to Windows, it's not quite as pretty; fonts and WPF image resizing aren't up to par with their Windows counterparts It's a tad bit slower than Windows Launching games may or may not work, as we haven't done much testing with it Various other features may be broken that we haven't discovered yet Any features that use the Chromium Embedded Framework (web browsing) do not work With those caveats, here is a script to get LaunchBox 11.3-beta-9 running on Ubuntu 20.04 (updated on August 5, 2020): You can either run this script manually (not recommended), or download the attached "launchbox-install.sh" file and run it all automatically (recommended). In order to do so, download the file, open up a terminal to the folder where the file is, and type the following commands: chmod +x launchbox-install.sh ./launchbox-install.sh You will be asked for your password at least once, and eventually you'll have to click through several installers for .NET and the like. If all works correctly though, you should eventually see the LaunchBox startup process. If all else fails, try starting with a brand new install of Ubuntu 20.04 64-bit. Going forward, we hope to make LaunchBox and Big Box more compatible with Linux, to the extent that is currently possible without completely re-writing the apps. Let us know how it goes below and let us know what is and isn't working. Good luck! launchbox-install.sh

My systems are pretty straightforward; Intel CPUs and nVidia graphics at various levels of performance. This day and age, though, you do not want to be running LaunchBox off of a mechanical drive, so if you're looking to spend money, that's where to spend it. Get a 1TB Samsung SSD, and you can throw everything but the games themselves on the SSD. That will make an extreme difference in performance, though I have no idea whether it will affect stability or not. Just to be clear, it's not like Big Box *never ever* crashes on my test machines. My typical tests run for two or three days, and every once in a blue moon, I do get a crash, but it's very rare. So if you're testing for 2 weeks on end, I would not expect it to be perfect, but I have no idea what you're currently running into. Again, I'm working on improving the stability, but even Microsoft's own code isn't necessarily stable enough to run attract mode in a WPF app for 2 weeks straight with zero issues. That is the goal, but it's a pretty lofty goal.

Not all crashes are due to RAM issues, as stated previously. But if the log files are saying that it's running out of RAM, then it clearly is, and there's probably a memory leak in whatever theme is being used if the RAM on the system is more than 8 gigs. Addressed this earlier; please stop drawing ridiculous conclusions.

Yeah, crashing after 3 to 15 days with only 8 gigs of RAM is honestly a known issue that I can easily replicate. Unfortunately 8 gigs of RAM is just barely not enough when running Big Box for long periods of time with some themes and views, unless you crank down the quality settings, and even then it might eventually run into the same issue. I don't currently have a solution for that, but at least I can reproduce it. Simply adding more RAM should get rid of that specific issue. MrSco's issue is completely different. I do know that underpowered systems (such as an Intel Nuc) can run into CPU and/or graphics card limitations and can cause attract mode to fall behind and eventually crash the app. I still don't understand why he would be seeing an issue on his more powerful machine though. Regardless, it can be incredibly difficult to identify sources of crashes like this, because they can come from anywhere, including OS or driver bugs, conflicting apps, or any number of other things. I'm really not trying to cop out of fixing these stability issues, and I'm always working on it, but unfortunately it's far from simple to even identify the problem in some cases. On top of that, it really doesn't help to draw conclusions, because it's almost never as simple as it seems. Still, I'll keep working on stability. I do regular stability testing for each new version, running Big Box attract mode with various themes on multiple systems for days on end, and I never release without stable results. That said, of course it's impossible for me to test with every hardware and software combination out there, so I can never be certain that there won't be an occasional crash on certain systems. All to say that we're doing the best we can here, guys. We'll keep working on it.

Sorry for the late reply, and the late update. I just updated everything for 0.222. Remember that you'll need to force update metadata from the Help menu.

Yeah, the maximum folder/file length crap in Windows can be a real pain. Unfortunately there's no good and consistent way to get around that issue globally, so there's not much that we can do about it. There are ways to make Windows use longer paths, but from I hear, it requires Windows 10 Pro and custom Windows settings, so that would already ruin any opportunity for us to fix that issue for a good chunk of our user base.

Hi Fry, we can look to add that soon here, yes.

That is a good idea, but there are already solutions available to do that. I'm not an expert because I don't do it myself, but there's a large community here on the forums that use the Steam Link approach to stream Big Box to their devices. There are other solutions out there as well. Sure, we could streamline it, but developing streaming software is a major thing to tackle, and would probably require months worth of development, so it's probably best to just stick with pre-existing solutions.