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cammelspit

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Posts posted by cammelspit

    LaunchBox Beta Testing - 6.8+

    in Features

    Posted · Edited by cammelspit
    Made it a ticket too

    Frankly, I have already been using the Audit feature a lot recently. OFC, since it is new there are some missing features I would like that we all talked about on Wednesday but other than that, it is already very useful. Just being able to sort and exclude games you already know have a video for downloading those is a HUGE benefit. The audit scan takes a lot less time than the time it would take to have the media download wizard scan those hundreds or thousands of games that are already fully populated. SUPER cool.

    Suggestions for future Audit functions that would make it ten thousand times better than it already is.

    1. Custom columns or even just a search box so you can type what you want to sort by. Mainly for tags and such that are not already included in the audit feature, specifically useful for more obscure systems with unique tags. Amiga having (AGA) in the filename for example.
    2. Really need to be able to allow or disallow auditing the LB name OR the FileName.
    3. Ability to output an XML or RTF file with the results of the audit. This will keep me from having to rerun the audit multiple times or keep the audit window open while I search for certain missing media or data. I could just open it in notpad++ while browsing and such.
    4. Ability to run the audit while downloading media or metadata would be SUPER useful. This way, I could sort and do those kinds of things as it downloads media and such int he background.
    5. Need to be able to tell it not to close the audit window on edit unless the download process is actually started. I had a case where I can accidentally closed the media wizard and had to run the entire audit again rather than just restarting the wizard.

    Again, this feature is totally badass and super useful but those are the things I would like to see so we can greatly increase it's usefulness even more and improve workflow. I am loving it so far in any event. Thanks Jason for all your hard work! :D

     

    EDIT: Just thought this would be better to be a ticket so I copy pasted it there. If you guys would please vote for it, that would be super amazing since I kinda need a few of these sooner than later. :Phttps://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/2335/suggestions-for-audit-feature

    • Like 2

    Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool

    in Emulation

    Posted

    44 minutes ago, Antropus said:

    Weird! Keep me informed if you find anything. Did you start with a fresh library or are you exporting into an existent library?

    I will keep you posted. I will also try to import into a fresh LB install.  I will say, though, I keep all of my roms, the LB cache and most of everything in different folders to what is normal. I even have all of my stuff split onto miltipleHDDs and even my SSD. Further investigation will be required but if I find anything or have a theory I will be sure to let you know.

    LaunchBox Beta Testing - 6.8+

    in Features

    Posted

    Personally, I feel the biggest concern is the fact that most of the video players out there do not rely on internal decoding, VLC does. This means if you wanted to play a certain kind of file not included with Windows, you can't without manually installing splitter, filter, codecs... It's a real mess. This would also mean that each person would have a completely different setup so the amount of bugs and work needed to make them all function will be multiplied many times over. VLC is also a great little player and even supports many non-standard formats like VGM and they play just fine as audio clips or soundtracks too and OFC this is not specifically intended to be a thing in LB but is a happy side effect. Now that we have found out why VLC had been performing so badly recently, we can focus on sussing out the last few issues and should be fine.

    • Like 1

    LaunchBox Beta Testing - 6.8+

    in Features

    Posted · Edited by cammelspit

    After a successful audit and download of a big chunk of missing videos for my N64 platform on beta 3 I tried to audit again and got this and then LB died. 

    


Version 7.5-beta-3







System.ArgumentException: An item with the same key has already been added.



   at System.ThrowHelper.ThrowArgumentException(ExceptionResource resource)



   at System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2.Insert(TKey key, TValue value, Boolean add)



   at (Game , String )



   at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Data.Game.GetImageFilePaths(String imageType)



   at (Game , String )



   at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Data.Game.<GetActualFrontImageCount>b__328_0(String imageType)



   at System.Linq.Enumerable.WhereSelectArrayIterator`2.MoveNext()



   at System.Linq.Enumerable.Sum(IEnumerable`1 source)



   at (Game )



   at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Data.Game.GetActualFrontImageCount()



   at (AuditForm , Int32 , Game )



   at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Desktop.Forms.AuditForm.PopulateRow(Int32 index, Game game)



   at (AuditForm )



   at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Desktop.Forms.AuditForm.PopulateGrid()



   at (AuditForm )



   at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Desktop.Forms.AuditForm.<AuditForm_Shown>b__46_0()



   at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.RunInternal(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state, Boolean preserveSyncCtx)



   at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state, Boolean preserveSyncCtx)



   at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state)



   at System.Threading.ThreadHelper.ThreadStart()

     

    LaunchBox Beta Testing - 6.8+

    in Features

    Posted

    @Jason Carr The only issue I see with not having DXVA enabled is that now, with VLC ignoring the main config you can't easily change it if you want to and will require the user to manually edit the config or launch VLC with the same command line options you do to change via the app. So, I have a suggestion to make that simple for the people who don't know how to do it manually.

    1. Make a setting in LB to enable it.
    2. make a link somewhere in LB that opens VLC with those same command line options so they can be changed by the user in an easy way.

    Has anyone tested to see if enabling DXVA manually on a system that doesn't support it will actually harm anything? It may be that DXVA will just not be used on those systems or it could be that it crashes or errors out. If the former is the case you can safely enable it for everyone since that one seemed to have the greatest benefit to the VLC speed in BB as far as I could tell.

    • Like 3

    LaunchBox Beta Testing - 6.8+

    in Features

    Posted

    @Jason Carr As per your request on the stream today I have posted a snippet of the settings I am using right now for VLC. As a reminder, this is because LB is not using the portable version of VLC so it is using your systems global settings.

    The big one is enabling DXVA and turning off post processing. This makes a HUGE difference. The others I set were animation and max decoding speed but I am not sure if that makes such a huge difference. I figured the videos for games are animation so optimizing for that was a good idea.

     

    Screenshot (32).png

    • Like 1

    Who has the largest collection currently standing in Launchbox?

    in Collections and Builds

    Posted

    @cleverest ATM I am at about the same size as your collection right now. Kissing the 5TB range. I feel like I must have all the regional variations because they can be interesting to try out from time to time. My PS2 collection is not very large because of a few reasons. Mainly, because they are HUGE 4 to 5 TB for the US set alone. I only get those game that I intend to actually play at some point. Currently, my PS2 games number 63 and I am more or less happy with that. I have two 4TB HGST NAS hard drives, one is exclusively for emulation and the other one pulls double duty as my steam library and even more emulation. I have room for another 2 drives in my machine without any hassle but I have to mirror my setup to my brothers PC and my sons PC so that is just plain wasteful. So all of our 4TB drives will go into a NAS later this year after I financially can afford to put a nice server together.

    @SentaiBrad Thanks for the info there. I did watch that one but I must have missed it. I have all of my PS1 games in 7z archives to save a rather substantial amount of space. PS1 games are rather fast to decompress so waiting that few 10 seconds for launch doesn't bother me. The ones that are a little annoying are GameCube and PS2. They can take a goodly long time to unpack but the space savings is well over the hundreds of GBs range and that leaves me more space for more games. :) This way they also can be used from my OS SSD which is tons faster so for me this works out. It's funny, I have as much compressed as I possibly can so I am literally the opposite you are. I used to decompress them manually and load them by hand but with LB it makes that whole process so easy. Anyways, thanks again!

    @LukeArio Keep telling you that you need to be slightly less anal about it. There is nothing like hitting the select random game and launching it without even a care in the world. :P Dunno why it tickles me so much to randomly play something I have never played before.

    My Big Box CriticalZone City Hunter Set Up

    in Collections and Builds

    Posted · Edited by cammelspit

    The A10 APU, because it is an APU shares system memory with the GPU core on the die. The biggest problem with an APU like that is that the ram in the system is substantially slower than what you would normally find on a dedicated GPU. That CPU is also entirely too weak for any reasonable expectation for it to run Dolphin or PCSX2 at full speed even most of the time. It may be high on the Ghz but AMDs IPC (instructions per clock) is entirely too low. The way I see it you have only 3 options...

    1. Say to heck with it and replace the entire machine, from personal experience with that specific APU, even overclocked, this is the best option.
    2. Get a MINIMUM of 8GB of the absolute fastest memory that board can possibly handle. The faster the better.
    3. Get a dedicated GPU. This will solve the Slow RAM access of the APU by bypassing it but even still, 4GB is simply too low for a modern machine even if it is just used for emulation.

    With AMDs ZEN architecture right on the horizon, likely coming out this month, there should at the very least be a rapid drop in price for really good CPUs. Basically, if you do decide to get a dedicated GPU you may be able to run some or even many GameCube titles with only a little slowdown but not all, or even most, games will work well. PCSX2 is actually quite a bit more demanding on your hardware than Dolphin is so you will likely be running into the problem of slowdowns very often. I put my son together his own PC, it is based on the Pentium G3258. Since neither Dolphin nor PCSX2 can really take good advantage of more than two cores, to begin with, his PC at stock speeds runs pretty much all of the GameCube games he wants to play. With a moderately decent air cooler, you can easily clock that bad boy into the 4.5Ghz+ range and that makes pretty much anything you throw at it buttery smooth. Point is, you don't need a fabulously expensive system to run these high-grade emulators with ease and speed. You just seem to have picked the worst combination of parts you could to be able to run them well.

    Sorry for breaking up the fun talking about sports but I saw this and I just couldn't let it go without commenting.

    • Like 1

    Who has the largest collection currently standing in Launchbox?

    in Collections and Builds

    Posted · Edited by cammelspit

    Oh, then yes, they are all merged into one entry per game and not per disk yeah. :D

    As far as multi disk stuff goes, yeah I know about the way LB doesn't handle multiple disks. Some emulators do have formats that have more than one disk in one file and those do work but others do not. To work they need to have all of the disks in the command line at startup, somehting like this... 

    
Emulator.exe -l -floppy -disk1 "disk1.img" -disk2 "disk2.img"

    Or they won't work at all. I will ask you, however, PBP, is this for Amiga specifically? Do you happen to have a link somewhere that I can get some more info? I am at this point unwilling to modify my entire set seeing as they are a complete and untouched no-into set ATM. BUT, that might just be convenient enough to be worth fiddling with.

    I also read the post you mentioned about hoe eXo is going to use LB instead of Meagre. I am super happy this is happening but TBH, I just couldn't wait! :) It could be a month or two or it could be another year and I wanted my stuff to work and work right now so I MADE it work. I mean, had to get some SimCity2000 action going on, right? lol

    In reality, I only went to my friend with my problem asking his help if he knew of a renamer that could base the rename off of a directory that was two steps back. Same directory they are all over the place but not basing off the name of another directory. Took him maybe 15 minutes to write it up for me and i didn't have to do much of anything so i would certainly consider that the easy way, at least for me it was easy! :P

    • Like 1

    Who has the largest collection currently standing in Launchbox?

    in Collections and Builds

    Posted

    @SentaiBrad If you are referring to the eXoDOS and win3Xo packs then yeah, I guess. I am not sure what you mean by merging because that is not how I thought those packs worked. Either way, I have them all setup so that if you run one that has not been installed yet, it installs just like normal, if it has been installed it just runs like normal. The problem with LB is that it expects to do the install itself so you can't just import exes or bats right in there in bulk, only one at a time. If you import them as roms, you can't remove the emulator because it is not available in bulk edit. So I ended up using a third paty app as the emulator to launch the normal eXo BAT files.

    The Artwork, now that was a bit of a challenge. A buddy of mine actually ended up writing a renamer that used the directory name of the game and applied it to all of the images in the Maegre folder and then copied it out to a work directory. At that point, it was just a matter of deciding what art type I wanted to go into what folder in LB for it to show up nice and purdy.

    I actually intend to write a guide on how I did it, precisely, and include a copy of the renamer app but my friend said he wanted to include the source and clean up some rough spots first before I could release it to the community here. THis is why I haven't said anything till now and it was just a passing mention.

    If this is not what you meant, let me know. When it comes to C64, the only ones that LB can handle are the tapes and carts. The disks, like amiga, commonly have two disks. Same buddy from the DOS expedition above is writing a new kind of middleware to handle all of that itself with scripts. Somewhat of a spritual successor to Proxy DETAILED HERE. Imagine it being able to do most of what Rocket launcher can do only with a focus on user experience and extreme ease of setup and use. THis, however, is only in the beginning stages of development so it will prolly be a few more weeks at least before anything approaching usable happens.

    Unfortunately, for the time being, I simply have to manually start the emulators and load the disks myself for systems that use multiple disks since LB simple can't handle them yet. So I leave those out of my imports entirely ATM. You CAN, however get WHDload to work via LB because those are modified version of the games so they no longer even have disks to swap out. It's complicated and I know a guy who has done it but I just haven't figured it out personally yet.

     

    Did any of this answer your question? Not too sure about that so if not let me know. :D

    • Like 1

    Who has the largest collection currently standing in Launchbox?

    in Collections and Builds

    Posted

    Currently up to 57,784 games and counting. This is not including most of my OLD 8-bit computer stuff except it does include the Tandy CoCo, Commodore64 but only the tapes and I also have the amiga imported even though I haven't gotten those to work yet. I did find an awesome way to get eXoDOS and win3Xo fully imported into LB with the artwork all at once so that is a good 6K+ games right there. My PS2 collection is only about 60 games large but I don't have enough HDD space for the whole set, about 5-6TB worth. I am also missing the EUR and JAP Gamecube collections, even though I do have a good chunck of those games not released here. At least this is the largest collection here so far in the thread. I am curious to see how many people have such large collections.

    Now all I need to do is put a NAS together, too much hassle all being local. :P lol

    • Like 2

    LaunchBox Beta Testing - 6.8+

    in Features

    Posted

    I had some insanely slow downloads for the last beta and I am in Arizona. It is usually nearly instant and it took nearly 3 minutes. Not that it's a real problem or anything, I just let it finish in its own time. The 7.0 stable was the same way too.

    LaunchBox Beta Testing - 6.8+

    in Features

    Posted

    @damageinc86 I would hardly call RocketLauncher easy for anything. Not something you can just jump into without having already had an intimate knowledge of its use. Maybe if you were to volunteer for making a proper guide? I am sure the community as a whole would love you for it if they used it or not.


    Man, this whole AHK thing sucks. I mean, I never used it personally because I use my steam controller so I always just have it close the emulator, whatever shortcut that may be for that specific emulator, bound to holding the select button for 5 seconds. LBs implementation of AHK was built in code and not a separate program? GPL is a very restrictive license and use of third party apps that use it should probably be avoided. Open source was not meant for this at all and if it causes projects like LB to have to remove features or even worse, have a chance of legal backlash everyone should just leave it at a bus station like a red headed step child. I am confident, though, that Jason is the right guy to find the perfect solution. Never fear Jason, I believe in you. :P

    LaunchBox Beta Testing - 6.8+

    in Features

    Posted

    So, it seems that the number of displayed games vs the number of total games is no longer reflecting accurate numbers. It says it is displaying 51,584 out of 51,335 games. Of course, this is not possible for it to be displaying more games that there is total. I snapped a pic for you just in because.

    Screenshot_(26).png

    • Like 1
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