Jason Carr

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.

I've put this on the list for the next community poll.

What version were you running before upgrading to 11.2?

Alright, just tested with your data, and I didn't have any issues on startup. So this means that either it's an issue with reading or writing to the drive, or it's possible that there's hidden files in that folder that aren't being zipped up and aren't showing (though that would be strange). Here's instructions on how to show hidden files: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4028316/windows-view-hidden-files-and-folders-in-windows-10

Looking at the code, it doesn't look like that's possible, unless somehow the Settings.xml file still exists but is hidden. So that's strange. If you can zip up and PM me your LaunchBox\Data folder, I can look to see what might be actually happening.

How long are you waiting for the initializing extraction process? It can take a while after the ThirdParty folders are deleted. Beyond that, it might be worth running chkdsk on the drive to make sure that there's no file system corruption or anything of that nature. The Logs folder is only populated if debug logging is turned on. Debug logging would help in this case, but it can't easily be turned on without being able to start the app. Still, if you have 11.1 working, then perhaps you could turn on debug logging under Tools > Options > Debugging and that will give us a bit more information.

Using Dropbox or Google Drive or OneDrive or any other file syncing service? Are the files in one of those?