cammelspit

You know, I don't really remember. It has been quite some time since I set this all up and several tens of thousands of imported games later. At this point, I don't think My wife or my son would ever even care about a CoCo game. I remember as a Kid having one, a tape drive, a few cats, it was certainly an experience. Though, if that emulator can launch automatically, I will have to take a good look at it. If the accuracy is up to snuff, I may just have to switch out for that one. Thanks for that one buddy and good luck!

Unfortunately, you are going to be forced to not have the game auto launch AFAIK. The only emulator I will use at this point is the MAME/MESS core. As such, it won't allow the automatic input of commands after the CoCo has booted up. So you will have to manually type in the CLOAD or LOADM command for tapes and so on and so forth. The one or two other emulators I have tried to play CoCo games with simply didn't cut the mustard in terms of accuracy and such. Though, to make it easier on yourself, I would highly recommend splitting the Tape/Cart/Floppy games into their own platforms. I know, it's not ideal but at least this way you know what commands you need to use once the emulation actually starts up, this is what I did.

It may be slightly more than the i3 but you could also consider a Ryzen chip. For the price, you simply cant beat the performance. Since thread ripper is coming so soon they just dropped the price of all of Ryzen lineup. You can get a 4 core 8 thread 1500X for about $180 which beats an Haswell mainstream i7 hands down and is almost equal IPC wise to a Skylake chip. Just a thought.

@SentaiBrad LOL, I also have a Toshiba drive. It is only a 1TB drive but it has been in multiple machines for so long and still works so I don't have the heart to retire it yet. If I do, I will only replace it with an 8TB, the space difference would make it worth doing. I can't speak to any of the more recent models, though. I have also owned many Seagate drives in the past and every drive has failed so far long before the rated MTBF, usually just past the warranty period. I also have owned a bunch of WDs, even a few more recent ones and I tend to think of them as the middle of the road in terms of both price and reliability, still lightyears beyond Seagate for sure. My security system is currently using a 4TB WD Purple and so far it has been on and recording 8 camera streams for about a year now with pure 100% uptime so I can't complain.

1-year warranty. What happened was they thought they could save some money by contracting a low-grade third party to manufacture them and it backfired badly. I hear they are back to normal as long as you don't get 3TB drives but they still have the highest failure rate out of all the major HDD brands on the market so I would avoid like the plague. I have an HGST 4TB NAS drive that is now older than my son, well over 4 years now, and it is purring like a kitten. I like the NAS versions because of that million hours Mean time before failure and that is in a 24/7 server application. When you use it with a home workload, they just last for ages and that 3-year warranty can really stretch out. I think the real problem these days is there are only two actual companies making drives, WD/HGST and Seagate. There is little reason for them to innovate and make a better drive because there is so little competition. I take the same tact with drives as I take with CPUs and video cards, I will buy the best I possibly can within my budget range so I kinda flip flop between AMD/Intel, AMD/nVidia, HGST/WD. It's just right now, you can't get a better drive, which is why I would get an HGST NAS drive. @spectral Even though you are right about failures and the worst is certain models from Seagate, they still have a higher failure rate on average above any other drive manufacturer on the market. I don't think anyone is unaware of the fact that a spinning hunk of metal with lots of moving parts will fail eventually and you will have some small percentage of premature drive failures, it just shouldn't be as bad as it is.

HGST Deskstar NAS drives are the only ones I will buy these days. They are faster than WDreds by FAR and are rated for 24/7 operation so in a normal PC environment they last forever. They have even been tested as the most durable drives you can buy without going into helium enterprise grade drives. I have bought a total of eight of the 4TB and two of the 8TB models. 5400RPM may not be bad for NAS systems where you have several in a ZFS pool for performance but a 7200RPM drive does make a rather big difference in seek times so you loading of games and other files will be snappier and your sustained transfer speeds will be noticeably higher. There is a reason that the only drives that have the lower spindle speed these days are NAS drives. Try copying a couple TB from one 5400RPM drive to another and then test the same with a high-quality 7200RPM drive and you will save literally a few hours on the transfer. HGST drives have also gone through a more recent price drop and can be had on Newegg for $20 cheaper than I paid for mine. ~$35 Per TB https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822146142&cm_re=hgst_8TB-_-22-146-142-_-Product Back in my day, WD used to be the bargain basement crap you never wanted if you wanted your data to still be there the next morning when you powered your PC back on again. They are much better now since they actually bought HGST and are taking a tiny bit of their tech and using it. They are distinctly different, though, as they have to be considered separate companies due to legal concerns and so the sharing of designs and tech is not 100%. Fun fact, HGST 4TB drives are the fastest 4TB spinning consumer grade HDDs you can get and the only reason that doesn't apply to the >6TB drives is there are helium drives. HGST are the clear better drives but cost a small bit more and I can not recommend them enough. Only get a 5400RPM drive if cost is the biggest concern with speed being a distant runner-up. And that concludes my two cents.

Turned out to be a plugin that was fixed but the DL link to the fixed version was broken. So no, not at all right now.

DO you have any plugins installed? Remove them all and reinstall them from a fresh download one at a time. I was able to find exactly which plugin was locking it up on boot, at least for me.

Just update to beta 9, still getting immediate exceptions and fully crashing LB/BB about half the time. I posted a bitbucket for it soon as beta8 came out but 9 is behaving identically. No changes from me. UPDATE: Had to clear my plugins folder 100% and LB/BB is working so something was working in beta7 that no longer works. No idea which one yet.

Yes, I am aware @Zombeaver thanks for the heads up. Yeah, the reason I want to use it this way is because I am trying to cascade more than one tool on the launch of any "game" from a custom platform. I know it may be silly to even want to do it this way but I am trying to assess the feasibility of using LB as a 100% replacement for actually loading and running tools and layered commands from the CLI and I have simply run across this need. Especially so I don't have to unload BB to load certain tools and apps.

What I posted there was just an example and the app I want to use MUST have at least one argument after the path. I know it can be done because Jason said it could be done but the bat file method is a possibility. Wee, the DEV stream is in about an hour right now so I can probably just ask Jason, he would know how. Thanks anyways! P.S. When I do figure it out I will post the procedure here so others will be able to find it in the future with a search.

Hey, I know that LB has a %romfile% variable that is supposed to allow you to have command line switches and such after the ROM path. Problem is, I simply cannot get it to work the way I want it to. when I add it to the command line variables the sample command comes out... XXXX.exe %romfile% /c "FULL\PATH\TO\ROM\FILE" But instead, it should be... XXXX.exe "FULL\PATH\TO\ROM\FILE" /c Unless, of course, I am missing entirely what I have to do to get this working how I want. Either way, the second example is what I want to actually be output to the command line. I really hope someone knows how to do what I want. There is no specific documentation on these sorts of things so I ended up having to look through several months of changelogs because I knew it was there but I could not remember what variable to use in the first place. Anyways, thanks, guys!

For some reason I had some exceptions thrown but after clearing out my whole plugins directory and reinstalling this and your other plugin for the menus it seems to be fine now. I put everything into a specific Steam Platform, copied over my videos and images into the Steam platform and for one, there are no silly dupes and every game shows up. Now, if only LB wouldn't mess it all up if I scraped as Windows I could get the descriptions and such applied. Thanks, buddy, seems to work fine!

You are probably right. There is just no other way that I can think of that would work better. Besides, nearly the entire time my CPU percentage is actually rather low aside from spiking. Since my collection is somewhat of a worst case scenario, it should be rather effective. Hehe, I do tend to bring out those quite often.

That is interesting. I am toying around with the idea of maybe wiping my machine and starting fresh. I haven't done anything over what I mentioned above but I would never entirely rule out Windows shenanigans. I also wouldn't want you do use fewer cores if this is something that only I am experiencing. I kept an eye on system explorer and it is tipping right up to a max of nearly 100% CPU usage ONE time and it is really for the smallest split second. Mostly, it's sitting at around 20% and spiking up to about 76%. My CPU is overclocked to 4.5Ghz so it's not underpowered or anything but it is an i5 and not an i7 so it has no hyperthreaded cores. I went and set BB to be below normal priority and it worked. Setting VLC to high priority and BB to normal, however, did not work. So, for me, if I could cap BB to use only 3 cores of the 4 I have that should work, for me at least because it only spikes to 100% for a tiny fraction of a second and is mostly in the 30%-60% range most of the loading process. I wonder, is there a way to set BB to below normal priority during startup and kick it back up after it's started? I dunno what the permanent fix here is because everyone has a different machine with different needs, cores and clock speeds. Blah....

Update In safe mode, I used DDU to clean out my video drivers and I then reinstalled the latest ones right off AMDs website, no change.

Object reference not set to an instance of an object. App: Big Box Version: 7.10-beta-6 Type: System.NullReferenceException Site: Void (Int32) Source: Unbroken.LaunchBox at (Int32 ) at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Root.SafeTerminate(Int32 exitCode) at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Wpf.BigBox.App..ctor() at () at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Wpf.BigBox.App.Main() Recent Log: 10:26:45 PM Exception Tried a 100% fresh install on another drive and BB won't even open. Ironically, the old install does open. I guess I broked it again.

Nope. I haven't even so much as downloaded any more steam games, roms, updated any emulators... Nothing. I watched youtube videos and played some castle crashers with my son but that is absolutely everything, other than the beta has been incremented.

I know right? I have no idea. I even tried clearing my entire data folder aside from the platforms to no avail. Seems it started right after the plugins update and I didn't notice it till I went to use BB yesterday. Literally, nothing else has changed AFAIK.

Doing some testing and my BB has started hitching and freezing during the intro videos. I reverted to beta5 and it's still happening. One day it was fine and literally the next, bam all messed up. Take a look at this video and you will see what I mean. I have tried deleting all plugins and playlists because that is just about the only thing I have changed at all since it was working fine. After this started happening I went and downloaded the latest drivers for my video card, there was one minor update but nothing changed. @Jason Carr You are my only hope! EDIT: Sorry, but I forgot to mention, it also seems my startup time drastically increased out of nowhere. Right after the startup performance beta I could have BB loaded right as this startup video finished once...

Whew, I was just coming here all "Oh my god my LB isn't opening! AAAAAAH! Run for the hills!" but you already fixed it. Now my blood pressure can return to normal.