Fursphere

Unfortunately not at the moment. I get so frustrated with the "login in now" with an obscure account i never use that I just close it and move on. Maybe I'm just getting old. Give me single-sign-on or give me death.

I've been getting a lot of .NET crashes / errors when importing games, scraping media, editing playlists, and even just exiting BigBox with 13.9 Beta 1. The .NET error screen with the REPORT button - I'd use the heck out of that if I didn't have to lookup my bitbucket username/password everytime on my cabinets. Anyway you can allow anonymous error reporting to bitbucket? Or maybe a token generated by the license associated with LB/BB install that bitbucket accepts?

LB / BB caches all images. So.. the original image or only read periodically and cached to a smaller, faster size. And since the vast majority of source images are JPG and PNG, you'd have to do an on-the-fly conversion from those formats to WEBP if you wanted to use that for caching. Basically, I assume its a ton of work for questionable gains. Some info on the subject: https://siipo.la/blog/is-webp-really-better-than-jpeg Long story short, WEBP is better than some JPEG codecs, but not all.

Do yourself a favor and repackage your games as single .WUA files.

You can also run a scheduled task (that's set to admin) with a simple batch file. Shouldn't need to write code.

Makes sense. I only saw it on one out of four installs. Thanks.

After upgrading from 13.8 to 13.9 Beta 1, I'm seeing a constant popup to install .NET Core. Closing BigBox makes it go away. I went ahead and installed it and it seems to have fixed the issue. Guessing new requirement not included in the current installer package? This was the specific package the notification pointed me at: windowsdesktop-runtime-3.1.32-win-x64.exe

Sounds like MAME is waiting to write to the NAS disk. Do you have your disks set to automatically spin down in the NAS? Can you add an SSD write cache disk to your NAS? Might solve/help those issues.

I hope you live somewhere where energy is cheap. Those HP enterprise servers and storage arrays are hungry beasts. (noisy too)

I suddenly feel attacked. lol Thanks for the clarification.

Couple of questions about the behavior auto-importing Windows based games w/ the new Manage Storefront feature (took me forever to find where you moved this! lol) 1) Does auto-import trigger when BigBox is launched? Or only when Launchbox is launched? 2) Auto-import seems to only download a small "minimum viable" collection of media. I have to re-run the media download routine to get everything. (not a big deal, just would like to understand the intent here) thanks for all the hard work!

Ah, that makes sense. I just got a stream deck mini myself for the cabinet. Haven't played with the multi-action buttons yet. Just hotkeys.

That's a great idea. Do you have the AHK script shutdown and relaunch BigBox at the same time? Like ... Shutdown BB, rename folders, Launch BB ?

I've been considering having multiple launchbox installs (with shared media libraries) to accomplish this. A simple version of guests, and a monster version for me. I recently used the BYOAC forum "all killer no filler" game list to create a new Arcade (MAME) list that dropped it to around 650 games, Which is so much better than the original MAME list with thousand of games of crap.

If feels like it always refreshes all metadata, even using option 2. As far at the "limit to 1" behavior, I never know it worked that way. "find 10, only grab 1". Thank you for the explanation.

Is there a way to get launchbox to download / update media without having to re-download the metadata? I've found that when I download media for something like GameBoyAdvance - EmuMovies will tell me I have thousands of items to download. Then after a few hundred it'll stop. (I suspect there is a daily cap or something?). So I'll have to do it a few times over a few weeks. But everytime it downloads metadata first.. why? why do I have to download metadata over and over again if its already preset?

You might run into an interesting problems with all the emulators, unless you put them into the container as well. The container won't be able to talk to them unless you make some kind of interface / api that the container calls, since the applications outside the container will be isolated. Or mount them inside the container I guess? But at that point, you haven't really isolated anything, have you? I dunno. Just thinking out loud here.

Yes, the idea of a container is universal compatibility. An abstraction of the application from the operating system. Generally anything should work. But its also kinda of geared towards shared environments where multiple applications can run, but have some amount of isolation from others. And the resources can be governed per container (per app if you will). One app cannot suicide another (or the OS itself), which is a common problem on Windows. One app goes stupid and kills the whole system. As Launchbox is not an enterprise app, and is intended to be used on somewhat dedicated systems, I'm still not seeing the benefit to running LB in a container. Containers run headless. Launchbox is not an HTTP app. So.. how will you access LB running in a container?

Does it work in Windows 10 too? Or Windows 11 only?

As someone who administers Kubernetes (amongst many other things) for a living, I'm not sure I see any benefits to putting LB into a container, especially with how big LB installs can get with all the media.

Just an observation I made this morning. With the new auto-import functionality on existing installs. I enabled it in LB, closed LB - opened Steam (was not previously running), installed two small games, then reopened LB. Lb detected the new games and added them. Cool. Except, I have my Steam games in a "Steam" platform, not the generic "Windows" platform. The auto-installer put them in the generic "Windows" platform. (I have EA games in an EA Platform and Epic Games in an Epic platform in similar fashion). (I have them setup this way because they games do not function without their related platform) No big deal, just maybe added a note to the auto-import setting about where they're going to auto-import to (destination)?

I''m at a loss for words here. I'm getting attacked because I asked about symlink behavior in the latest Launchbox Beta. I think your project is very cool. But I do not like the way it merges into my launchbox installation. If you want to talk about the pros and cons of various emulation strategies, lets start a new thread - as this has nothing to do with the LB Beta.

RetroArch w/ the Puredos core can 'run' most of the DOS games straight from the ZIP file (like a ROM). No need to unzip / install / etc. exodos is setup to unzip and install every game, and then you get to deal with dosbox controls to arcade panel mappings. RetroArch just overlays its default config - and while not perfect, just "works" more often than you'd think. exodos also assumes you want your entire /exo/ collection instead your launchbox folder structure. I just moved all the exo /images/ /videos/ /manuals/ files over to my LB folder structure, then treat the /exo/ folder with all the zipped games as a ROM directory, and import it into my setup using the LB ROM importer. I haven't looked at the metadata to see if what LB downloads is radically different than what exo comes with - so thanks for the idea. I left the rest of the exodos setup in place so the updater still works - which is pretty cool in itself.

Installed fresh copy in \launchboxtest\ Upon loading LB for the first time, I see a Windows platform has been created, and it appears all of my Steam and Epic games have been imported. Personally, I like to have Steam and Epic in their 'own' platform, and not together in Windows, but that's just me. Next it started auto-downloading metadata and images. So it appears to work as expected. Pretty cool!