Scoremonger

This was requested awhile back for box covers/fan art, and I made an issue for the same thing mid last year not realizing it had already been entered! Now it's been entered again, haha. Which is great in a way - I'm happy to see such support for this feature. If anybody wants to upvote the tickets, here they are: Original request: https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/298/default-fanart-for-every-platform My request: https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/1123/add-ability-to-set-default-box-front-image Latest request: https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/1803/default-artwork-when-missing-covers

Thanks for the responses! I've put in an official feature request for this since it sounds like at least a few of us would find it useful: https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/1123/add-ability-to-set-default-box-front-image

Hi, I'm loving Launchbox, but I'd like to replace the default empty thumbnail that's shown when you don't have box art for a game. I can do it manually by adding my image to each game with missing box art (one by one), but is there a way to define a new default image for a missing box? Or a way to mass-replace box front images? Thanks!

@Jason, I wanted to follow up on this and confirm what you suspected was definitely correct - LaunchBox had nothing to do with the data loss; that drive was a piece of junk. It managed to nuke more of my data without any assistance from any software, and was constantly suffering file system errors. I've since returned it and moved to a slightly smaller but much, much more reliable drive. I've had no lost data since and have been having a great time with LaunchBox. For anyone wondering, the faulty drive was a 5TB Seagate Backup Plus, purchased at Costco (who accepted the return without packaging and without question.)

Thanks @Jason Carr, This drive is using NTFS, and is quite new (I bought it a few months ago and only started using it in the last few weeks.) I've also had file system errors in the past that nuked whole folders, just never with a drive so new. But people sometimes get brand new drives that won't even spin up, so all sorts of problems are possible. Based on what you're saying, I'm guessing that LaunchBox had all those files open and the file system lost its marbles at the worst possible moment. I'll just make incremental backups as I scrape data and cross my fingers that my drive keeps itself together. @DOS76 thanks for the comment - checking the disk didn't yield any files this time, but it's good to know that's a possibility.

Wow, that was maybe the fastest support request I've ever gotten, thanks. To show you where I'm coming from, I should mention I have worked professionally with software that occasionally and inadvertently corrupts data, either through a fault in its own code or through some obscure underlying .NET/DevExpress/ flaw. I didn't delete the files myself, and the files are definitely gone (I've searched the whole drive and verified the paths LB is using are correct), so I'm confident in saying it's not user error either. All that said, since you're certain LB isn't to blame, and given how flaky drives can be (especially external ones, as you say) I'll assume your conclusion is right and a file system error is to blame here. I find it odd that it has only affected all the scraped data and nothing else. But since I don't have any deep knowledge of drive tech I'll assume that's not as unlikely as it seems. Regarding backups, I agree - I have my game collection backed up twice-over. Thumbnails, movies and such are fairly new toys for me, so I haven't yet made any backups for them. But that's no big deal. Launchbox downloaded them easily the first time and will get them easily again. I'm not here to complain about that, just to alert you to a potentially terrible bug. If the trouble is all on my side, that's fantastic. Truly, because I love LaunchBox so far and have no desire to use anything else.

Hi, I've had a catastrophic crash with Launchbox 5.9 that erased all my covers, art, movies and manuals. Sadly, I didn't capture the exact error message at the time of the crash, not realizing how bad it was, but here's my best recollection of what happened. Sorry it's long - never know what clue might be the key to fixing a bug so I want to be as thorough as my sleep-deprived brain will allow. ;) I have an external drive with my LaunchBox setup (emulators, roms, covers, etc.) so I can move it from machine to machine. After scraping some covers, videos, etc. on my desktop PC I moved the drive to my laptop and launched LaunchBox.exe. I got a .NET-style crash complaining about being unable to find some path. I assumed it was just something to do with the drive letter mapping on my desktop PC vs. laptop - I have the external drive mapped to L: on my main PC, but it defaults to D: on my laptop. I'd run LB once before on my laptop without issue, but I'd done a bunch more scraping/emulator setup from my desktop PC since so I figured it had to do with that. I closed the crash message, ran again, and got another crash. So I remapped the drive on my laptop to L: and launched again. This time it didn't crash, but all my thumbnails were gone. I checked the folders on the drive and sure enough they were ALL empty - no covers, no movies, no manuals, no nothing. I closed LB and looked at the config files and xmls for clues, searching through the folders for .jpgs, etc, but no luck. So I tried relaunching LB, and it crashed again - this time no error message, just the standard "LaunchBox.exe has stopped working..." message. I tried BigBox and it launched without crashing. I shut down BB and rebooted. After the reboot Windows 10 tells me my drive has errors that need to be repaired. I let it do the repairs, and the drive seems to be working fine, although all the scraped data are still gone. At this point I'm thinking, "OK, maybe I've got a bad drive - it's brand new, but these things happen." but then I start searching the forums for similar problems and notice this loss of all cover images has happened to at least one other user on an older LB release. So I think the problem lies with the software. As a test, I tried reinstalling LB in another folder and that one launches fine. So I copied the exe from the original installation folder and ran it from the new folder, and it also launches fine. But launching from the original installation directory still crashes. So the data it's accessing in the original installation folder is corrupted and LB is not handling it well, I guess. Hopefully this helps you track down the cause of this bug - luckily I only had a couple gigs of movies, screenshots and manuals to replace, but I can't imagine how long it would take to recover a really large collection.