cammelspit

@Jason Carr Those of us with collections already imported, is there a way to scan and add the new playlists without having to reimport? Is this something that is planned, hopefully before 7.8 final? Reimporting my super collection is more or less off the table right now as it stands.

Having an issue where games are not being removed from an auto-generated playlist. Expected behavior would be that they are added to an exception for being parsed but they just stay there.

BTW! I was just able to reproduce the slow startup while populating playlists! If there is a playlists folder and no XMLs in there then it just sits there for ages, had to force quit. Remove the folder entirely and it starts right up like normal. I was restoring my backup before I messed up my batman games, hehe...

I half lied, it seems to inconsistently do it that way and also merging into the one platforms game. Seems my 8-bit PC versions of batman the movie combined the bad way. I was just curious to soo how it would behave and I got my answer. LOL EDIT: After expanding it seems to think they are all dos version and the C64 version is now int he DOS platform... Looks like I am not going to try that again

@Jason Carr Auto Playlisting for the win! Now you can get rid of that custom filter nonsense. This is MUCH better and it's FASt to populate the lists too! I did come across a few small things I think you might want to think about. I just made, on a whim, a playlist with all the batman games for every system. I had to revert my combined roms because of issues before and I haven't gotten around to recombining them because I can only do one platform at a time. So what I thought would be cool is to combine all versions of batman returns into one entry, pick my favorite version for all platforms as the main rom and have one entry. I didn't expect it to work that way but here is what I found when I tried to do it. All roms were combined but I ended up with one entry for each platform, not a bad fail safe and probably what most people would want. I think it would be cool to be able to allow it to combine those into one entry if I prefer it for my playlist if I desired. I know this would require you to separate combinations into playlists and platforms separately but it's something to think about at least. As always GREAT work Jason!

I couldn't agree more Brad, couldn't agree more.

I get that. I mostly didn't want to go and derail the whole thread bashing on RA for personal reasons, I only wanted to have a little fun with it. Either way, yeah. I mean, as a general rule, I have had contact with a BUNCH of DEVs over my years of working with emulation. I think Jason is clearly one of if not the most awesome of the whole bunch. The Dolphin DEVs are also super cool. They try to be as helpful as they can be and if they find they can fix something, they usually do and are happy to help. The only other time I have had a hard time with any kind of DEV is the PPSSPP guys. Made my interaction with that RA DEV look like an exchange of the kindest pleasantries. They actually told me to just get bent and not use their emulator because I was apparently not the kind of person they wanted using their emulator. Funny, because all I did was make a simple bug report but apparently that was offensive to their code in my implication it wasn't perfect. At least someone like Jason actually pays attention to his users and doesn't take bug reports personally. And this, my friend, is why I love this community right here so darn much. EVERYONE from the new user to Jason himself and everyone in between has been just great people. The whole team really are awesome folks. I have found no community on the internet as inviting and genuinely great as I have here. Maybe I am spoiled? I almost expect, as a rule, that most people are as kind and helpful as they are here but it seems that is clearly not the case. Really, I am not the kind of person to really get involved with forums or communities at all really. I basically have this and the Steam Controller discussions and that's about it. I am what one would call an internet hermit i guess.

Honestly, i can't actually remember which one off the top of my head since it was a while ago nor would I name drop because I am not in the business of complaining like a little girl about someone who hurt my feelings. I mean, if I were I would take up being an SJW or some such nonsense. Sorry i even brought it up, I was just trying to make light of it and clearly it backfired some.

I was poking fun at the BS Jason had to deal with about the whole including RA and how he was refused just because LB was not open source. It takes a special kind of person to think that everything can be open sourced and the world still keeps turning. I know it was only one of them that caused any real problems but I was more or less making light of that. As for myself, you all know I am generally a nice guy and am kind and thoughtful with my questions as well. They treated me like scum and I even had one of the devs flat out tell me I was essentially too stupid to use RA so I shouldn't even try. This is one of MANY reasons I don't use RA unless I absolutely have to. I felt I should at least qualify my statements for those of you I have not told the story to before. More to the point, those who aren't on the streams regularly.

My vote is for changing the name to 'USemuNEVER' or 'iPOOPemu'

This is exactly why I would say 'Ark' since that is how architecture is said. In reality, the name is terrible and a full rebrand wouldn't be a bad idea anyways. Especially considering the toxic nature of their community and how poorly their devs treat users, namely myself. Heck, they even were being a pain to Jason and we all know he is such a nice guy, how can you not love him? Oh well...

ARK and AARCHitect are the same sounding arch.... It would be Arch like the structure or Ark... I say it Ark like any reasonable person would.

@Jason Carr Here is the UUIDs I use to import the games. There is NO ROMS here, just the UUIDs. WHDLoad Export.zip

I am also having a similar problem to what @Pacman56 is having. Though, I expect what I am doing here is a bit of a fringe case. I am using my Commodore Amiga games via UUID. This means that the games file name is something like "d2152856-6923-5caa-a051-a7dec3ad6ade". The games name is taken during import from the folder name and not the rom name which has the format "1869 [AGA] [WHDLoad, v1.2, AGA]" as an example. So, it seems that when a game is imported using the folder name, the detection of what the games name is breaks down. Just thought I should point it out.

@Jason Carr Alright, after testing 7.6 and 7.5 stable I observed the exact same behavior. I have however tracked down what the setting it is that is causing this slow startup. Voice Recognition. See, I have recently purchased an entry level condenser mic and audio interface and I had enabled voice recognition in LB. Strangely, it didn't work at all but I had forgotten to disable it thinking that I would troubleshoot why it wasn't working. Now on the latest 7.7-12 with voice off and it starts in exactly the same amount of time I expected it to. Sorry for raising the alarm here, this is not a regression. This will be something to look into for later versions but it works properly now. Next time anyone has any major performance issues we should try and remember that voice recognition might be a possible cause. Now I feel better.... Whew...

@Jason Carr Was just thinking, maybe it's the late hour but I think I may have a suggestion for tracking things down. If you have ever used it, Dolphin actually has a bisecting tool. What it does is it has a database of all the versions of Dolphin and will download and install a separate copy of Dolphin into a folder. From here, a user would test this version to see if their issue exists and if it does, it will download an older version. If the issue does not exist it will split the difference between the version known to have the issue and those known not to have it and try again. So, essentially, the user does the testing but the tool does all of the tedious work of downloading and setting up each version till the exact revision the issue started to happen is found. This is then reported to the DEVs so they can inspect the changes made to find the bug or regression. This kind of tool could be invaluable in the right hands. Heck, maybe even make a small team of dedicated users and make them official testers for the new features before they roll out to the stable release. I, for one, would wholeheartedly volunteer for such a task. Just another one of my random thoughts... And now, I sleep!

As I mentioned, it seems that LaunchBox itself is also having problems too but they are less apparent AFAIK. I attempted to use my data from before I merged anything and the same behavior was observed so I can safely assume the merging itself is not the cause. Though, it could have something to do with checking them while loading the database. It's rather late right now, nearly 1AM so I am not going to be doing a huge amount of testing right now but if you like, I can try and bisect where the issue occurs. All of the installers as far back as November are there so I will see if I can backtrack it, version by version and see exactly where the problem first happened. Just wish they had the actual version numbers on them instead of random strings of letters and number. I likely would have been able to point it out earlier but I have had some silly stuff going on around the house to the point where my last few weekends have been taken up installing security cameras around the property and I have had very little time to mess around with LB/BB since before then. Never fear Jason, I think you know me well enough by now to know how determined I can be in tracking down this sort of thing and beta testing the snot out of it... I love breaking things.

@Jason Carr Hey buddy just wanted to let you know now before you do a release. I am silly and haven't opened BB for a few betas. I thought LB was seeming a bit sluggish in startup speed but now that I have done a few launches of BB, it's MUCH worse now. I have uploaded a video to show you what I mean. See, normally, BB was launching just barely after the first playthrough of the startup video. As you can see in the video, this is no longer the case. It plays all the way through quite a few times before launching and the city zone background video starts frozen. This time I was actually able to get control of the cursor but three launches before this, I was not able to get control and BB had effectively frozen up, so this is actually the fastest and most usable of over 5 launches. I had made a backup of my data folder before combining roms and restoring this made zero difference. If there is anything else I can do to help you troubleshoot this further, let me know! EDIT: Forgot to mention that the menus and such are MUCH less peppy and some of the time while recording this video I lost control for a few seconds before it would move to the next platform. Also, same drive, same drivers even, literally nothing has changed in my configuration since it was working fine.

@Jason Carr I did not see any, no. Then again, I hadn't actually done much testing either.

Well, that simplifies the process some.

try doing a consolidation on sega model 2 and it happens every time like clockwork. The other times were just random and worked fine after a restart. I assume there is something special about the Model 2 platform that is just triggering it more. Also, the beta 9 still does it just to let you know. Data.zip

@Jason Carr Sure, you know me, I will be there. I did find a way to replicate it 100% of the time with my setup so I will zip up another copy of my DATA folder for you. Take care and see you tomorrow!

Firstly, I would just like to say that this new feature is working exceptionally well. I have already cleaned out more than ten thousand superfluous entries in my launch box. Thank you very much for including this as it makes me very happy. The Amiga WHD Loeb collection alone has gone from twenty-eight hundred-ish ROMs down to seventeen eighty-eight, pretty impressive if you ask me! I have however encountered, twice now, where launch box crashed. There was no error thrown there was just a simple not responding box that came up. This seems to not be an issue if I just restart launch box again but I thought I would let you know. I am also curious about the MS-DOS platform. Now, I remember on the stream yesterday when you mentioned that ROMs platforms would not be able to take advantage of this feature. The thing is, my MS-DOS platform is imported as batch files from the EXODOS collection and DOSbox is being used as an emulator. Is MS-DOS hard coded to be considered not a ROMs based platform? Because there are some games that are multiple versions in that collection that I would like to consolidate. Thanks again!

Hey, Jason, I noticed that there isn't a specific way to set a default version of the game when you launch the game by simply double clicking it. So for me, every time I double-click a ROM it opens up the European version or Japanese version on some games rather than the USA version, which would be my preference generally speaking. Also, super cool that this feature has been added. I have been waiting for this for so long, you have absolutely no idea how happy this makes me.

Alright, so I just went on ahead and recorded a short demonstration of how exactly to do it. I hope this helps!