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MazJohn [Mr Arcade]

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Posts posted by MazJohn [Mr Arcade]

  1. So, is this a bug in Launch-box or an issue with my install?  At this point I've already re-installed a new copy of retroarch, wiped and re-added the entire platform, re-scraped all media and bezels for the platform, but this issue still exists. My platform for neo geo CD is named "SNK Neo Geo CD" ...  which seems to be the default. I am using the 13.0 final release of Launchbox/ Bigbox.

    I would rather have no Bezels being used at all, rather than have inconsistency between platforms, so not sure what my path is moving forward...  but THANK you for taking your time to respond and try to help.

    • Like 1
  2. Thanks C-Beats-   So yes, the issue is that the names do not match. The names in the cfg are different than the actual file name for the entire set.   Is there a list with proper naming conventions posted in the Bezel project that I can use to manually rename my set?  I dont see any other way to fix this.

    I deleted and re-added the entire platform, but I dont think the Bezel project is using the launchbox file name-  I think the bezel project is using the proper expected file name of the rom. I tried renaming the file name inside the cfg but that still didnt work.  - this is rough.... If only Launchbox could automatically re-map when names mismatch it would be such a relief.

  3. Thanks C-beats - Much appreciate: Please see this through...   I can confirm The bezel folder does exist in Retroarch>Overlays>GameBezels, and I can also confirm that the bezel images are all correct for each game.

    For example, below: The game has 2 files within... a cfg file and a png file

    overlays = 1

    overlay0_overlay = "World Heroes 2 Jet (Japan).png"

    overlay0_full_screen = true

    overlay0_descs = 0

    ---------------------

    Inside the platform, in the game launching screen for the same game above, here is the loading path:

    Games\SNK Neo Geo CD\World Heroes 2 Jet (Japan) (En,Ja)\World Heroes 2 Jet (Japan) (En,Ja).cue

     

    *** I am using .cue files to load the game, but I do see the file name is different in the loading screen. 

    I am scraping metadata by folder name (since each BIN/cue is in its own folder).  Do i need to delete the platform and re-add it using the launchbox default names? 

    In summary, i assume the issue is being caused by incorrectly matched files names.    Do I manually need to rename each file or just use the default names for each game when adding the platform? What is the best way to fix name mismatch for a platform causing bezels not to map properly?

     

    Thanks again.

  4. I have 2 platforms that have Bezels downloaded into retroarch using launchbox, but they are not getting mapped when the game is loaded. How do I troubleshoot this? Not sure what to look for or what would cause certain platform bezels to download but not map... Neo-Geo CD is one in particular- and its using the standard FB-neo core which works fine with other platforms.  I did a fresh install of Retroarch but still having the same issues. Appreciate any support or ideas.  Does it have something to do with how the platform is named? I tried renaming the platform but that didn't work. Bezels are not getting picked up for some platforms still - Thanks much, tia.

  5. @C-BeatsThanks for this explination ... which explains why i have a few platforms that have fully downloaded bezeis that never show, From what i can see unless mistaken, , Checking the names on the github page does not seem to be very useful when dealing with large collections- it also seems that the github page truncates anything over 1000 titles so for PS2 it only shows up to letter C.... So it seems some of my rom sets may not be named correctly but i never worried with some platforms because they were close enough and i rely on launcbox to rename them in its own database. While i appreciate this feature being added and have been waiting a long time for it to come, It seems like in current state functionality wise,  the Bezels just wont work 100 percent for me with a few of the systems, Too much manual overhead to hunt down file names im afraid.... If there was somehow a way to use the file name provided by the Launchbox database naming convention instead to parse the bezels for download,, that would solve this issue for every platform... I guess easier said then done... the majority works- i'd say about  25 percent or so are missing bezel sets,. I still dont get why the default system bezel is not always being substituted...,,,thanks.

  6. @C-BeatsAppreciate… So if the bezel is derived purely from the rom name or game file name, and the file name is tagged and named the same as in the Launchbox database, what would cause the bezel not to be assigned after its downloaded? Is that some sort of bug?  Im out of ideas… thx

  7. What data ties the bezel path location to the platform itself? I have some platforms such as ps2 and 3do which show bezels collected inside of retroarch, but not being populated in the platform.. is there a way to manually rename the configs to fix this? Also, the default bezels are downloaded but are not populating in the platform…Appreciate…

  8. HI there---   Kindly asking for some help please with the Bezels. Can someone more knowledgeable than I, please provide details where Bezel data is stored? I am aware that Retro-arch stores all of the .cfg and PNG files inside of the overlay folder, but when Launch-box collects its Meta-Data for the Bezels, where is it being placed inside of Launch-box?  I need to manually replicate these files across a second Launch-box system without having to clone the entire drive.  I also have some platforms such as PS2 which seem to be storing the Bezels inside of Retro-Arch but they are not being displayed at all inside of Launch-Box for that system...  need to understand how to troubleshoot these paths.. thank you much!!!!

  9. same error here only on certain platforms oddly …
    "Object reference not set to an instance of an object"

    The issue is even worse when I use symbolic links to the rom-path. I get very nervous when file handling access gets changed. I worry it will permanently prevent symbolic link access to a remote path and wont be fixed - making my remote game path broken. went back to 11.15 and all is working again correctly.

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  10. 19 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

    Hey all, I am considering the possibility of opening LaunchBox for Android back up for development and release. That said, I've done literally only a half hour of research and already I'm running into the same nasty problems that plagued us the first time around:

    • Having to place ROMs in ridiculously deep and ugly folders in order for them to be able to be launched
    • Security issues launching games (Retroarch basically just crashes if Android doesn't allow the launch)
    • Issues with app switching (you can't load up a new ROM in Retroarch if you don't manually close the previous one)

    Needless to say, my hope to get back into Android development was dampered pretty quickly. It's a real shame, because most of these issues are superficial, but they're also out of our control, and they make for a confusing and lacking experience on Android no matter what we do. If anyone knows of any solutions to these problems though, please let me know. I will say that all three of these issues are still problems in Dig and Reset Collection, so I doubt that they can truly be solved, but I am all ears if you know any solutions.

    After running the latest versions of the other frontends, I am convinced that there is still plenty of room for improvement. The other frontends still make for a confusing and difficult experience, if nothing else. And with most people having an Android phone that is quite powerful these days, it would certainly be nice if there was a better emulation experience available.

    Anyways, if we do end up getting back into Android dev, we will probably do it without the Play Store, as our experience was so terrible over there. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on whether that is a deal breaker for you, and how you personally get around the above issues. Thanks y'all!

    Hey Jason,

    I would agree There definitely seems to be room for improvement on the Android side now. I tend to agree that the android store is a mess and probably best to avoid. Well heck, the android file system and access in general is difficult to develop for such a wide range of devices and Google is prone to changing permission access and discontinuing things on a whim.  I currently Use Launch Box/Big-box on PC hardware because quite honestly, the PC is where all the muscle and power is to best run these emulators and should remain the primary focus-  my thoughts are simply this:  I personally wouldn't want to see development sacrificed on the Windows platform side just to begin development again on the Android side unless more resources could be given where the windows DEV side wouldn't be impacted. I rarely use android much but I also feel it is *very* important to get Launch box/Big-Box coded on an ARM platform in general because ARM is a strong force going forward and may be necessary at some point as an alternate platform. I have ZERO interest of running launchbox on a phone or tablet....there are China made portable handheld devices dedicated for that such as the rg351-  Windows 11 will run Android apps, so this also may  impact your decision  going forwards as well-. As a *secondary* emulation system to a PC, I would personally love to see Launch-box running on a low powered arm device with lots of storage capable of emulating everything the windows version could- Maybe windows 11 on arm will take off or NVIDIA will make ARM chips that can go into systems soon to help make this a reality - I would want launch-Box to follow a trend such as this and would be supporting it for sure if it did!!!  

    A dedicated lauch-box LINUX/ARM distro could be awesome...  ?

  11. On 4/5/2021 at 10:48 AM, C-Beats said:

    Disregard. I'm pretty confident I have found the reason for this behavior. Thanks for the report.

    @C-Beats - Thanks. I can confirm The "Launch With" issue is resolved for me as of  the 11.10 Final release.

  12. Having Issue with betas 8 & 9... not able to use "launch with" and choose a retroarch core...  games do not boot with any core when using "Launch with"..

    When using default core game boots properly, but with "launch with" the default core does not boot the game.  I've been using "Launch with" for a long time without any problems before. Not sure if this is already a known issue or not , so just sharing.

    Note : the above issue only occurs with Bigbox - Launchbox not experiencing this issue.

     

  13.  I Suddenly have an issue with 11.10 beta 8 where the Launch-Box instance wont close on exiting the application. the task just continues to run in the background preventing me from being able to relaunch the application, If I kill the task in task manager, it relaunches fine, but then the same issue returns again after I exit... cannot relaunch.. nothing changed in my setups and have been updating without issues prior...

    EDIT; Issue resolved. was not related to beta. there was an extra file copied by error into the data folder and it caused the application not to shutdown. 

     

     

  14. 14 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

    Beta 5 is out now with an *actual* fix for the check boxes and some extra logging to help with some other issues.

    I'll be reviewing the clear logos issue in Big Box. I haven't seen it happen yet myself, but with everyone experiencing it, it should be easy enough to reproduce.

    My understanding was that @C-Beats fixed this for beta 4. Perhaps we need to review? What version did you test with?

    Just tested beta 5, and yes indeed the above issues with check boxes and select/clear all seem to be fixed and working correctly now.? thanks Jason. @Jason 
    By the way, to answer your above question, my testing was primarily done with beta 3 & 4 when the above behaviors had occurred.

    - Mazjohn-  aka Mr. Arcade

    • Like 1
  15. When tagging a launch-Box ID to a game, i am finding that I have to save first before downloading metadata. If I assign a launch-box ID and then try to download images (Metadata) without saving the game ID first, no images are found. Only happens in the past few betas, including Beta4. Happens equally across all platforms. Also, the uncheck all button does not work, and you have to click twice on a metadata object to make any changes to it  - the first time to select it, and the second time to check or UN-check it.... many extra mouse clicks than before.... Ditto on the Clear image wheel caching problem...

  16. Just reporting back that since clearing up my core.net issues (unfortunate Fresh win10 install) described earlier in this post that Launch-box/BigBox is now much more responsive in startup and when loading large image collections with the 11.3 final release.  Nice improvement in comparison to 11.2. Thanks. Please Keep up the good work.

    • Like 1
  17.  

    17 hours ago, MazJohn [Mr Arcade] said:

    Nvidia card in use is Latest generation RTX card running at stock speed (no overclock). The PC is a dedicated Emulation build without any special software running on it. Launch-Box has been continuously updated on it over the last 4 years- Since around Launch-box V5 or 6. Windows and Steam games have no issues.

    The PC has older .net run-times installed dating back to .NET 2008 ... Wondering if i should I delete all previous instances of the .NET runtime? I assumes some older games might need them to run. As for the latest .NET core, I've UN-installed and rebooted, then re-installed a number of times. Guess I can Refresh the Windows install as a worst case scenario and report back if it had something to do with the OS side itself. Thanks anyways for the help.

    17 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

    I hate to ask you to do that, but I am curious if that would resolve the issue. My apologies that we don't have a more obvious solution. Let us know if that fixes it.

    @Jason CarrReporting back: My Big-Box Theme and video corruption issue is now resolved . What was required to fix it, was for me to completely Re-install Windows 10. My best assumption to what caused this is that when I had Updated to Core.net it had exposed some sort of driver corruption conflict which was causing Big-Box Theme issues that for me were impossible to resolve. (Issues did not occur in Big-Box 11.2)  So, the fix again was to perform a clean install of Windows 10 and add back all drivers. Since doing so, All of my Big-Box Themes and Menu's are now working as expected in Latest Beta (at time of this writing is 11.3 Beta 16).   <Thanks>

    • Like 1
  18. 16 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

    @MazJohn [Mr Arcade] Come to think of it though, that corruption is different than anything I've ever seen, so I'm wondering if maybe it could be a hardware issue, unfortunately. Perhaps an issue with your video card? Have you overclocked your video card by chance (maybe that could be causing it)?

    Nvidia card in use is Latest generation RTX card running at stock speed (no overclock). The PC is a dedicated Emulation build without any special software running on it. Launch-Box has been continuously updated on it over the last 4 years- Since around Launch-box V5 or 6. Windows and Steam games have no issues.

    20 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

    The only other thing I can figure would be a corrupted .NET install, which isn't always as easy to remedy, unfortunately. But that is probably worth a shot. I would uninstall any instances of .NET Core or .NET Framework that you can, and then reinstall them. Is there anything non-standard about your Windows installation?

    The PC has older .net run-times installed dating back to .NET 2008 ... Wondering if i should I delete all previous instances of the .NET runtime? I assumes some older games might need them to run. As for the latest .NET core, I've UN-installed and rebooted, then re-installed a number of times. Guess I can Refresh the Windows install as a worst case scenario and report back if it had something to do with the OS side itself. Thanks anyways for the help.

  19. 1 minute ago, Jason Carr said:

    I see, thanks for the details. All three of those themes are known working themes, so don't worry about trying to remove the plugins. Unfortunately it looks to be some kind of weird driver or Windows bug (if I had to guess it's video drivers). It's strange to hear that you don't have issues with 11.2, but you do with the betas; my guess is that means that there are some bugs with .NET Core that don't exist with the older .NET version (which is probably going to cause us some trouble when the official release goes out).

    So, as far as solving it, I would manually run Windows Update to make sure you're 100% up to date, and then look for the latest video drivers and install those to see if that helps. You are on Windows 10, correct?

    I updated previous post to include the plugins used inside each theme folder....  Windows 10 is up to date- Running latest Win 10 build 2004 which was the update from 1909. I removed the NVIDIA driver using the DDU tool in safe mode to ensure it was completely removed from the system, then re-installed the latest Nvidia driver.  also made No difference.

  20. 32 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

    It makes zero sense that the video resizing issue that @neil9000 is running into would make the frontend "UN useable". Either you have a completely different issue, or you're finding a very minor issue to be way more significant than makes sense. The video resizing issue we were discussing only happens in LaunchBox. Is your issue in LaunchBox or Big Box? It sounds like it's in Big Box.

    Probably the best first step in troubleshooting your Big Box issues would be to turn on debug logging under Tools > Options > General > Debugging in LaunchBox. Then if you can send me some log files from your LaunchBox\Logs folder after running Big Box, that might help.

    1.jpg.6a2e17c1e8c645e2af187dcd92a12ec3.jpg2.jpg.70e6b65261e5e5b11fff4da6b6eab304.jpgscreenshots attached showing garbled text or missing text. occurs as you scroll through menu list. This happens on all 3 themes that I currently use which include unified, Unified Redux, and Unified Refried.  Logs enabled and attached after booting into Big Box for a short time.  Issue has nothing to do with "Launchbox" .... it happens in BigBox only. Game video glitching is hard to screen cap because it keeps resizing in and out very quickly.  I wasnt aware themes had their own plugins such as as stated by @Neil9000 so i guess i will check that next.   Thanks.

    * Update -  My Themes folder includes the following plugins:

    1- unified.hyperbox.dll (in unified and unified redux)

    2- unified.hyperbox.dll +unbroken.launchbox.plugins.PrioritizedPathSelector.Dll + Helpercontrol.v4.dll+ Newtonsoft.json.dll

    Logs.zip

  21. I am also still experiencing the game videos re-sizing issue as well with Beta 15.  In my previous description within this thread, I referred to it as video Glitches. Respectfully speaking, It honestly makes the front end UN useable for me at least in its current state. My scroll wheels are also experiencing artifacting, and the text inside my themes option menu keeps expanding , then de-spanding in size and the text garbles.

    Ive tried everything imaginable on my end to no avail.  Only solution is to go back to 11.2 official release, then all the problems go away.  @Jason Carr also asked if I was using any Plugins in a previous reply (thank you) .... to answer that, I am Not using any plugins. My plugins folder is empty.

    Does it come down to a fresh install of windows 10 for me?  I really don't think it is the OS since reverting to Previous 11.1 and 11.2 builds work fine for me.

    Thanks-

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