SentaiBrad

Conehead said i was thinking about a simple search box right above the Platform or any other category in the left panel , this makes it easier for a person to find his game without going to filters and then applying it(even though we can do this in the title section in filters) just a thought guys, waiting for your response Something to this effect I believe is planned. Nice to see support for it though, thanks Conehead.

ps4isthefuture said No, never new about it until I watched a youtube series called The Video Game Years by Retroware. It was the first cartridge based console and released in 1976. I actually applied to be their editor.

ps4isthefuture said SentaiBrad said ps4isthefuture said Just a quick thought. To have a game count next to the platform name. Helpful to make sure your whole collection has been imported, trying to complete a collection, and also for screen captures of your collection. Example: Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) [758] Or something of the sort, you get the idea. However not sure about the coding involved and how difficult it may be to incorporate into the program. Anyway thanks for listening and thanks for the great program! When you select a filter from the new UI, on the bottom bar it should say 758 of 6501 (what ever your numbers are); I know it worked with the old filters system, but what about the new system? Oh sorry thanks, didn't see that before because I do not display the bottom bar when I use LB. It's ok.

ps4isthefuture said Just a quick thought. To have a game count next to the platform name. Helpful to make sure your whole collection has been imported, trying to complete a collection, and also for screen captures of your collection. Example: Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) [758] Or something of the sort, you get the idea. However not sure about the coding involved and how difficult it may be to incorporate into the program. Anyway thanks for listening and thanks for the great program! When you select a filter from the new UI, on the bottom bar it should say 758 of 6501 (what ever your numbers are); I know it worked with the old filters system, but what about the new system?

No problem. Have fun.

ps4isthefuture said SentaiBrad said That's... odd. It does seem like an XML error. If you still have the messed up one and a different machine, install LB and put the XML file there. Operate it like you were and that could tell you. Have you tried the earliest XML backup as well? It doesn't keep a lot but... If it is an XML corruption, upload the corrupted XML. Jason may be able to see the affected area's that cause the corruption.... MAYBE. I don't know how easy that would be or if at possible but if its able to be done it could save you all that time. I don't make any promises on his behalf though. Edit: Actually as I just typed that, if you know the last few games that were being imported, look in the XML and go down to the games that were latest. Delete their lines in the XML. SentaiBrad, Thanks. I just renamed the the folder and installed 3.5 again, replaced the xml with my old one and it works no errors yet. Now I am copying over my images and see if every thing is still ok. I did notice a few items not in the new installed LB that where in the other, like the two directX files, AeroWizzard.dll,Interop.WMPLib.dll, and dosbox.conf. Just so you know. Will update you shortly if the error is gone or not after the images are transferred over. Because as of a few versions ago all of the files that were previously separate are now all contained in the exe. You no longer need them; just the exe. There may be a conflict there so make sure to just keep the files that LB creates.

That's... odd. It does seem like an XML error. If you still have the messed up one and a different machine, install LB and put the XML file there. Operate it like you were and that could tell you. Have you tried the earliest XML backup as well? It doesn't keep a lot but... If it is an XML corruption, upload the corrupted XML. Jason may be able to see the affected area's that cause the corruption.... MAYBE. I don't know how easy that would be or if at possible but if its able to be done it could save you all that time. I don't make any promises on his behalf though. Edit: Actually as I just typed that, if you know the last few games that were being imported, look in the XML and go down to the games that were latest. Delete their lines in the XML.

xShad0w said hi guys i need to ask why launcher box not have time played Feature ?! We need this Feature very much I think Jason and I talked about this at one point. It's a bit harder to implement then just say, write the code. Since we don't have servers and accounts we can't do it that way. Since LaunchBox is a portable install that mean's it doesn't put any other files on the system other than the folder you have the program in; So we can't use the Registry to store that info or anything like that. It's one of the trickier features we want to implement.

geckogirl191 said SentaiBrad said Would pressing Ctrl then selecting multiple options you want achieve the same result for you? You could select all the Genres you want and just not Ctrl + Click the ones you want to exclude. I've tried ctrl-clicking, and that doesn't seem to work, not even when I try to select genres to filter. Seriously, I have looked in every single nook and cranny of the program itself, and I haven't found a feature like this anywhere. Maybe I should rephrase that, if Ctrl + Clicking was implemented would that solve the problem? Yea, right now there isn't too much in the way of multiple filters from the same category, even with the old filter method.

geckogirl191 said So far, I haven't seen the ability to filter certain games based on what tag(s) they don't have (unless I haven't looked far enough). Say I want LaunchBox to pick a random game for me that isn't in the "Strategy" genre. Even typing in a long list of genres except the one I don't want doesn't seem to work. Another potential new feature, perhaps? So just the ability to exclude something rather than include it? Wouldn't that be the same thing though? I mean... if you wanted to exclude one item at a time then that could work. Though, I think using Ctrl to select multiple filters at once would achieve this as well. Especially with the new UI and the way filtering is going to go. Jason may have already planned on something similar though. Also, considering there is no way to really select multiple filters at once right now with the new filter system this could do what you want. With the old filter system you could use multiple filters like: Platform- PS2; Publisher- Atlus and narrow down your results but never exclude. Would pressing Ctrl then selecting multiple options you want achieve the same result for you? You could select all the Genres you want and just not Ctrl + Click the ones you want to exclude.

frostmute said Is this still available for testing? I would love to try it out. Of course. Jason will have to get you setup when he gets back. I am unsure if he opened it up to anyone just yet.

Opening more connections to a server is generally not a good idea, they don't always like that. Also, using multiple scrapers at once is an idea, but that would be a premium feature as Wikipedia is most likely going to go in the Premium version. Also, the speed of TheGamesDB does vary wildly. They do get a surprising amount of traffic too. I also don't think they have the greatest speeds to begin with anyways. They're sure as hell not using my full 11mb/s download. xD

Wolfereign said Conehead said Wolfereign said The problem with option 2 is when you reimport the system you have to redownload all the pictures for each game even though all that data is still in the image folder. For large ROM libraries this can become an extreme problem very quickly. After removing a platform if you ever think that you have to remove extra images from any of the games from any other platfrom and perform the "Clean up Images" task, you will lose all the images from the removed platform and you will have to download everything again, so it would be good if Clean Up images could be done for specific platform or games or any other according to users choice. Actually If the Image puller used the TheGamesDB unique ID for each game as the image folder for the games rematching images wouldn't be to difficult. As it is now though the program doesn't do any rematching from what I can see, which is perfectly fine at this point in development. Something like that however shouldn't really take priority at this point though. A game library cleanup task would fix the main cases for the image issue without having to take up the additional dev time to rework the image system that LaunchBox uses. Well, we're not sticking solely with TheGamesDB. We're working on Wikipedia and other scrapers, so it honestly wouldn't do much to change that. If we built our own data base with unique codes for each game, that could solve our problem easy, but it would take forever to do something like that. For now, the way we have it works... mostly. There is probably another way to handle images that might be useful, but the problems are generally localized. I had some issues that were not common or didn't happen at all for another user. That is why for now, there is a Clean Up Images option, there will probably be a Rescan option to rescan your entire library to see if there are any info changes or images changes. The problem is trying to create a system that works very well for our uses. That said, we know that some people don't have fast internet, or have bandwidth caps. So I do think on that merit alone, there could be a system devised to keep a centralized folder of images, no matter if the games were just imported. There really isn't anything that can be done about data, but that isn't honestly a big data drain like images can be. Also, that said. Just shy of what just happened to me and I specifically needed to re-import all of my games because a Hard drive changed its letter, there isn't any reason to just pair a persons images folder with the same XML file.

Conehead said Wolfereign said The problem with option 2 is when you reimport the system you have to redownload all the pictures for each game even though all that data is still in the image folder. For large ROM libraries this can become an extreme problem very quickly. After removing a platform if you ever think that you have to remove extra images from any of the games from any other platfrom and perform the "Clean up Images" task, you will lose all the images from the removed platform and you will have to download everything again, so it would be good if Clean Up images could be done for specific platform or games or any other according to users choice. That might start to get to the territory that we're afraid to go. How many options is too many? Not to mention, where does what go in what version. Free or Premium. We want to add all the options in the world, but at what point does that just confuse most users or they go untouched; Or it just makes the program inoperable and hard to fix bugs.

yattaah said SentaiBrad said Actually, you can. Since LaunchBox hasn't been fully changed over to the new UI there are still remnants left over. One of those is the old filter system. Top right corner, click filter then type in to any of the boxes you want. If something you type works, it should populate. This should probably be something that carries over to the new sorting method somehow, and it shouldn't be too bad. Yeah I know. The emphasis was on "directly" without using the filtering menu (sorry, wasn't that clear in my post ^^") Just open LaunchBox, start typing, the right game will be selected or filtered out, press enter and boom that's it (maybe even a little bit like Indicator-Synapse on Linux). You can press a letter and you will be taken to the first letter it see's.. as long as its not E or T... that also opens the edit menu and asks if you want to delete the item. xD Yea, a catch all search however could be pretty advantageous, and obviously the old Filter menu is going to go away, so hopefully this will be carried over in a new fashion.

Wolfereign said 1. An option to rescan All Games or Individual platforms for images and metadata. This would only pull new stuff or missing stuff. This would speed up the process if you have alot games missing info and the online game database has been update with the stuff your missing. 2. Before Downloading images check to see if they are already in the image directory. basically if you're forced to delete a entire platform of games you and reimport them you won't have to redownload all the images again. This would only work if you hadn't done a clean job on the image directory. This may be harder to implement depending on how LaunchBox does its unique identifiers on the image folders. This has also been planned for a while now. The UI changes are currently taking up a lot of time for one developer. Better library tools have been talked about at length between Jason and myself. He's just one person however, and things move a bit slower because of it.

Wolfereign said It would be very nice if there was a tool that deleted games/roms that no longer exists. As it is now if you delete a rom, or even worse alot of roms, from their source folder LaunchBox doesn't automatically detect that they are gone and delete them. At this point there are 2 options: the first is to manually delete every game in launchBox that you deleted from your disk and the second is to delete all the games of the relevant systems where you delete games manually then reimport the system. The problem with option 2 is when you reimport the system you have to redownload all the pictures for each game even though all that data is still in the image folder. For large ROM libraries this can become an extreme problem very quickly. TLDR: A tool that can be either automatically or manually run which deletes games from LaunchBox that no longer exist. This has been planned for a while actually. Good to see it has support though.

yattaah said I just found out about this really nice frontend and I will also test some nightlies from time to time I know that's not the place for feature requests but would it be possible to directly filter the games list (by title)? It's just more intuitive to just type the name (or parts of the name) and the list is filtering in real time (or jumps to the title as you type). I think now LaunchBox just jumps to the letter you type. Keep it up! =) Actually, you can. Since LaunchBox hasn't been fully changed over to the new UI there are still remnants left over. One of those is the old filter system. Top right corner, click filter then type in to any of the boxes you want. If something you type works, it should populate. This should probably be something that carries over to the new sorting method somehow, and it shouldn't be too bad.

Hafitz said thanks for the reply, I fully understand that dosbox wasn't developed by your team. I think I will try 3dfx game on the dosbox that comes with launchbox and see how it goes, if it doesn't work, maybe I can try and replace it with a 3dfx dosbox support while keeping the name of directories the same. But what I can suggest is that have a two separate Launchbox downloads, once that comes with 3Dfx dosbox support.. Well I just said that because Jason can only keep up with LaunchBox really for programming right now, so if the DOSBox that is bundled with LB is under par, there isn't too much we can do about that. Now, if the version that is bundled isn't sufficient, it should be fairly easy to supplant another version of DOSBox. Does this specific version of DOSBox perform worse? Jason included the main fork of DOSBox for various reasons, but if this other version is comparable I don't see why it couldn't be added... there has just been not much of a request for an alternate version. Also... doesn't the DOSBox config handle any type of hardware? I was under the impression you wouldn't need an edited version of DOSBox? I have several hundred games... and I've honestly never run in to issues. Now I have my config edited and I use different render... ers and altered settings, but is this 3DFX exe more efficient at later DOS games. I presume this version is for games that were starting to use more advanced video rendering techniques?

Hafitz said Hi Jason, Was wondering if the dosbox that comes with launchbox has a 3dfx support, if none, is there any plan to release with a 3dfx support? and can I simply use ykhwong's dosbox with launchbox? We don't maintain, develop or even really offer support for DOSBox honestly. We have nothing to do with their project. Also yes, as long as the DOSBox exe's are the same name, It should be as easy as just replacing the folder. I've had to install DOSBox separately before. I would say to keep everything named the same because I don't know if LaunchBox is smart enough to just pick it up, but there also may be options in LaunchBox so you can just tell specific games who need a separate version to just use that one instead of the pre-bunbled DOSBox config.

BD said I figured as much. No, not an external. That's strange. Has it done it since? Have you tried adding in 500mb or 1GB of RAM Cache too? That fixed my problem on the External and loading problems, but... if you're not on a slow read / write... it should work fine. Edit: However, it is a new feature so I wonder if Jason could be more specific with his help.

BD said When scrolling fast, dragging the scroll bar on the right, i get this error: System.InvalidOperationException: Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute. at System.ThrowHelper.ThrowInvalidOperationException(ExceptionResource resource) at System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2.ValueCollection.Enumerator.MoveNext() at LaunchBox.Caching.ImageCacheList.ClearOldest() at LaunchBox.Caching.ImageCache.DisposeOldImages() at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state) at System.Threading.ThreadHelper.ThreadStart() So pretty much, LaunchBox couldn't keep up with the HDD Cache. Are your images on an external?

CircinusPrime said Quick update: disabling RAM caching solves the parameter not valid error, but I'm still getting no box art drawing for all my 55 games, even though background art loads just fine. With so many games doing this, I wouldn't think it was a case of corruption? I can edit a game's entry and in the image preview the box art loads fine, same with manually navigating to the images folder and viewing the box art from there Do you have your images located on a USB2 drive or over a network by any chance? Maybe even an older drive with a poor read / write speed? I would say try deleting the images for one game as well, then re-download them completely and see if they have issues showing up.

Conehead said got back yesterday and saw this . the new interface is really good. bugs .. none so far awesome work Jason Yea, it is looking awesome. I also have a question for the Beta Testers. Do you guys use a controller with LB? Ideally in a "Steam Box" fashion? Or just on your TV like 5 feet away? Or do you use a controller at all? The question I have is, with the new UI would icons on the left be something that would make life easier? Maybe a 2 column system with an arrow at the bottom. 2 columns of game system icons.

ps4isthefuture said It's a little work until someone gets a database retrieval script and scripting for retrieving art work but it's a step in the right direction and something to pass time. Please feel free to contribute to this. This is really cool. Seeing what people could do with LaunchBox, but I think its safe to say that this is out of the realm of what Jason wanted. Im not saying that there couldn't be features like this in the future, way in the future, but I am certain he is more concerned about updating, maintaining and creating new features for games. I'm also sure he doesn't want to compete with Kodi (XBMC), its an extremely well established Movies, TV and Music front end; Though I just use it for TV and Movies. Not that we shouldn't compete with them, but there is really no point when they're this extremely well established with skins, addons and the like, on several platforms. It doesn't make sense to target that demographic just yet in LaunchBox's case. I still think however, this is frikin awesome. I love seeing what other people want to do with their programs and it does excite me when others take the normal functions of the program, and uses them for unintended purposes. Not malicious ones either.