mgtroyas

I'll try it. What I did in other front ends is to add the year of launch before the name, so they are chronologically ordered.

This would be great. Also adding alphabetical ordering option.

I've done so to point a locally installed LaunchBox to "Images", "Videos", etc folders stored on the NAS without having to change every path on the XMLs . But in this case I need to create a symbolic link inside the NAS "Images" folder, with name "Cache" pointing to the local disk folder, and it's not possible (and with reason, the link wouldn't be consistent when accessing the NAS from another PC).

Well, I've done some testing, and found some interesting points: 1) Seems obvious but can be easily overlooked: size of images impacts on performance, box images downloaded from Emumovies can be very high resolution, so loading and creation of thumbnails can be much slower than using smaller images like i.e. 3D boxes. I plan to mass resize my box images once finished downloading them all. 2) Once cache images are created on disk, performance is much better. Is there a limit on maximum number of cache folder content? Allowing to create a cache of all the collection thumbnails couldbe an option. (BTW the performance is now much better, have you optimized the caching on latest betas?) One solution to slow performance when running from a NAS, related to what @Gazoo also suggests, is allowing to have cache folder on local disk, for instance Windows temp folder. This way: a) Cache images are created faster as Launchbox is reading from the NAS but writting locally (mixed read/write to same drive hammers performance, specially on networked drives, could also allow other users to store the collection on a slower HDD and caching on the OS SDD). b) Cache images are logically loaded much faster, allowing snappy browsing. So my suggestion is to add an option to locate cache folder on a local system path, or an option to define this path manually. I haven't found a way to do so, and as it's located on a subfolder inside Images folder, if pointing images folder to the NAS there's no way to point cache to a local path.

I have it maxed out at 4GB.

I've just tested, yes when switching from Launchbox to Process Explorer, after about 5-10 seconds disk access stops. As soon as I give focus again to Launchbox caching continues. So yes, in my case it seem to work as expected. The problem is when in focus, cachin hangs Launchbox about a minute on every movement. I select a category with about 300 games, I open it on Launchbox and it starts caching the images, I left the PC unattended for some hours expecting it to cache all the images, and when I came back Launchbox was idle. As soon as I scrolled minimally the list, it started caching again, hanging for about one minute. Then settled and when I scrolled again, hanged again. I switched from Image to List view but caching is working even if no image per game is needed now. If is of some help, I suggest some behaviours: 1) Fetching the complete list of games and files once, then only request the images and info for the few games currently shown on screen, not all the games every time. 2) No caching at all. Perhaps they could be user selectable, and/or with different settings for local and remote drives. I find the browsing slower than it should be even locally on my SSD disk.

Hi, I also do maintain a multi-TB romset collection on an external NAS, and have ran emulators and frontends from a shared drive, for many years now, with great success. I was also surprised when I saw the big performance hit of running Launchbox from that setup, I haven't found other frontend that behaves this way. I did some tests and I found Launchbox is continuously looking for all the images of all the games on the collection, instead of quering only the game I select. Is listing the contents of the media folders even when idle, and that hogs the network drive completely. I'm sure it also hogs local disks, but as they are much faster nwadays it's not so noticeable (in my tests I have one image folder on local and other on remote folder, both are being queried constantly). I used a little Microsoft App called Proccess Monitor, from Sysinternals, to capture activity. It can be downloaded here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processmonitor.aspx I've attached a sample screenshot and a small activity capture in this tool format, so you can open it with it and see it. If you need more testing or information please say so, I'm willing to help to get Launchbox running smooth from a network drive. Launchbox.zip

Merry Christmas and thank you very much for your hard work!

Hi, Let's start saying I love Launchbox and want to use it for my DOS and Win3x game collection. it I've tried before to use Launchbox for big collections and noticed just after opening Launchbox reads no-stop from the disk. I have my collections on a NAS and Launchbox stalled and was very unresponsive all the time. But now I have created a collection of 6282 games, and at this point it's completely unusable. I left the launcher creating the thumbnails images it stores on the "cache" folder and had to stop it two days later as it hadn't finished yet. I copied over all the files to my SSD system hard disk and although everything was faster, it was still slugish anyway. I left it running few hours until it generated all the "thumbnails" on the "cache" folder and then it ran well from the SSD. But I tried copying all the collection back to the NAS and although the tumbnails weren't generated again, it was still slugish and unusable. I've used "procmon" from "Sysinternals" utilities collection by Microsoft and have seen Lunchbox executes thousands and thousands of disk I/O queries so it's hogging the disk access for normal operation. I suggest some points that could be changed to loghten disk access for big collections and/or slow disk: * On launch the program reads all the thumbnails from the collection, instead of only the ones shown, and reading the newer on scrolling. * It also generates thumbnails for all the collection on launch, it should generate them when scrolling. I'm attaching a CSV exported from procmon so you can see all the calls the program is doing continuously. I think it's room for optimization as, although people can have smaller collections or use an internal faster disk, I'm sure thery are getting a lot of disk and CPU usage. I'll be glad to gather more logs or do some testing to help with this isue.

Yes, images are on the Capture folder. I did a clean install of D-Fend and imported some simple games and generating captures, then I imported them on Launchbox, but it still didn't get the images. I've compressed the profiles of one collection, many of them have captures, not all of them. Hope they're of help. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2CsKiPBLtZ3NzgtR0F2UE9rQlE/view?usp=sharing

Hi, First of all many thanks for the great work you are doing on this frontend. You won't probably remember me but I did some betatesting and suggestions on one of the first versions. I'm trying to import an already-existing D-Fend Reloaded collection and the games are imported great, with all the metadata, and work ok. But no image is being imported. They are on the "Capture" folder of D-Fend, with a subfolder for each game, and they show on D-Fend. Format is JPG. I do leave the "import images" option checked. Is there something I must do to import the images? Any way of debugging why are not being copied over?