Fursphere

I ran the video marquees for awhile. A couple of them would flip back and forth between the marquee image and the control panel instructions - this was cool. But most would just play the 'preview' videos and ended up being annoying.

I may have found a bug this morning, but its a weird one and very hard to re-produce. If I let big box sit in attract mode for awhile (say 1+ hours), then exit big box - sometimes it doesn't send the "exit front end" command to LEDBlinky. LEDBlinky is just left running idle. If you open BB, then immediately close BB, everything works as expected. May be nothing? But I wanted to mention it just in-case.

Super close! but no rotary joystick specific stuff. thanks! in this context, rotary joysticks are not spinners. they're 12 position encoders.

Does anyone have one for Rotary Joystick games? Preferably something in this style: thanks,

So it sounds like the only way to clean this stuff up is manual local edits (or your plugin, but it seems arcade stuff hasn't been touched yet). If you re-sync metadata with LB Games DB, does it overwrite manual updates? Answered my own question. I see it does not, as long as you don't tell it too.

Thank you for taking the time to reply to all that. - Can the DB ID be exposed on the Games Database website, so you know you're looking at the same entry? - 'Playmode' has more values than just "Multiplayer, Cooperative, and Single Player" - there is actually a pre-made list of options (see screenshot). Where do these comes from? MAME.XML or something? Long story short - since this is a multi-value field, it would be nice if this was exposed for edit in Games DB website, and then we could tag games for "4 player simultaneous" (or whatever) so the playlist auto-generation could work (a lot) better. I'm not sure about full on replacing the existing tags, as that might screw up existing playlists, but adding a tag doesn't seem like a bad idea. And there are some weird conflicts too. "Max Players = 2" but "Play Mode = 4 player simultaneous" lol If this field was captured and exposed, I'd love to start submitting adjustments to help clean this up and make it more usable. Lastly, it would be really cool to add a field to the DB that included "Control Type" (or something) where a standardized list of controls types could be entered. "Lightgun" "360 Wheel" "360 Wheel & Hi/Lo Shifter" "Twin Stick" "Dual Twin Stick" "Rotary Stick" - Something like that. So edits could be made to define and standard control types and then games could be filtered based on available controls. Lightgun games are often in the ""shooter / gun" genre for mame, but just "Shooter" or "Action Shooter" in TeknoParrot, or just "Shooter" in Sega Model 2. Again, inconsistency. I guess we could just agree upon a unique 'genre' entry too, but that doesn't cover other non-standard control types.

Trying to understand the data source used to build out launchbox. When you add games to Lauchbox, they get 'linked' to a Launchbox DB ID# right? But when you click on the ID link in LB - it takes you to the Launchbox Games Database page for that entry, and the ID # isn't the same? (and you can't search LB DB by Game ID which seems weird) Launchbox DB seems to be the authoritative source, it seems not all fields are exposed in the web interface? like "playmode" for example. And if you edit the information in your local copy of launchbox, does it feed back up into the database? Or is it only a 'pull' from DB to local? thanks

I've been overhauling my cabinets lately, and re-evaluating how I've got the front ends setup to 'present' things. Let me see if I can convey my thought process on this one in a way that makes sense. lol I've got two 2-player stand up cabinets that can be physically linked (hardware) to create a big 4 player cabinet (with mirrored screens basically). I made the decision quite some time back that the stand up arcades would only have arcade games on them. Console systems are all on another PC hooked up in my living room. Looking at "Platforms" you get kind of a strange combination of things. Some are single system (Sega Model 2) and some are multi-system (MAME / TeknoParrot). But they're all Arcade games right? So how do you unify everything so the 'platform' doesn't matter? Playlists of course. You know this already. Building a custom 4-player game list that's auto-populated. Sometimes "max players" is what you look at. Sometimes its "Play mode". If I add "Field: Max Players" and "Field: Play Mode" in the same auto-populate list, its a hard AND. You can only do "OR" with multiple values under the same "Field" right?. So there is effectively no way to evaluate both fields? (Unless there is some way to do this that I'm not aware of). That's the one use case I was toying with last weekend when I made this point. I think I had another, but can't recall at the moment. What I really want is a T-SQL query based search.... heh But I know that's not going to happen.

Are there any plans to better support TeknoParrot within Launchbox? Things that are currently lacking in regards to TekonoParrot in LB, in no particular order: -TK game naming is well known and standardized, yet LB database doesn't have a clue what the games names are. (Anything I can do to help here?) (examples: contra.xml = Contra Evolution ; similar to how MAME does stuff) -TK uses XML files for launching, yet LB doesn't recognize them as 'games' in regard to importing a folder full of them (no files found) -Auto-Import doesn't see XML files. If you set your TK rom folder to /userprofiles/ - you could potentially have LB auto-add games as you get them working in TK everytime you start LB -TK isn't in the list of 'known' emulators. Would be nice for it automatically add the special command-line stuff to get games launching correctly. (--profile=%romfile%.xml then have all the 'remove' options checked) I have no idea how hard it would be to implement these things, but it feels like it shouldn't be that big of an ask?

If you select an /emulator/ or /rom/ folder that is on the same drive letter as Launchbox, I think it'll automatically choose relative pathing. I wish it wouldn't.

You know. I had this same problem. I just went in and hard set all the path names to fix it without even thinking about it. Relative path names are pretty dumb in my opinion. Never put an application in a state where its 'assuming' it knows what you're trying to do. Always be explicit.

If you look at that Steam survey, 0.15% is still using Windows 7. Assuming Steam has 100,000,000 users (pretty sure its actually more than that, but we'll use 100m for this example) that's 150,000 installs still using Win7. I'd be really surprised if Launchbox had 150,000 users.

They said that with Win98. Windows2k. Windows XP. Windows 7. Windows 8. Yet, here we are.

2.29% of the overall gamer user base is linux users, per Steam. You can see it here: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam Then they've got 6 unique flavors of Linux that have enough users to show up. Who knows how many didn't even make the list because the user base is so small. Launchbox users is a small fraction of overall Steam users, and I'm willing to bet the "linux vs windows" ratios are about the same. Its a solid catch-22 problem. Dev's aren't making stuff for Linux because there isn't a big enough user base to justify the effort. User's aren't moving to linux because dev's aren't making enough stuff for it. Then add in the linux community itself is fragmented all to hell, because every time someone gets pissed off at a distro, instead of working to fix that feature, they hard fork it and start their own. "Everyone else is wrong, and I'm right" type of thinking. Look at how many distros are out there: https://distrowatch.com/ If Steam ever releases SteamOS for PCs, there might be hope. But I'm not sure how many 'gamers' want to essentially turn their PCs into single purpose devices (consoles!) and not do all the other PC stuff that requires Windows.

Currently investigating a problem with "Clean Up Media". If I try to use the tool in the current beta - 13.19-Beta-2, LB freezes up / crashes every time. Going to roll back to 13.18 and try again. Update: Rolled back to 13.18 and 'clean up media' works fine. Going to upgrade back to 13.19-Beta-2 and see if it breaks again. Update #2: Confirmed. 'Clean up media' is broken in 13.19-Beta-2

Are there any plans to overhaul the playlist Auto-Populate logic to include proper 'and' 'or' support? So i can do an "or" between two fields for example? (instead of only being able to do 'or' logic between multiple criteria in the same field)

Fair enough. I'll keep watching for the next beta release.

"skip this beta version" maybe? (only apply to beta versions) I get that it auto-downloads updates when you have the setting enabled. But if it ASKS ME "do you want to install this update" and I say "NO" (because I read the forums and know this particular update is jacked), the "NO" button shouldn't just install it anyway. If that's the behavior, why even ask? Just auto-download, exit the app, and install. Don't even give the user a warning.

Why is it when I say "No, don't apply this update" in BigBox, it does anyway as soon as I exit? Shouldn't "No" mean "Skip this version, and don't ask again until the next version" ? I mean, its straight up non-consensual at this point.

Are new default theme files going to be included with the next update?

I did this: And that fixed an error when loading the theme (Unified Refried) But when I try and access the system menu, I get a black screen (as mentioned in the notes) AND a huge ugly .net error: This is on a Windows 11 install.

Not sure how much work it would be, but one path could be to update the LB installer / updater to ask the question: Include Pre-made playlists? Yes/No (default yes) if 'yes' Display pre-made players in BigBox by default? yes/no (default no) if 'no', check "hide in bigbox" checkbox on each playlist by default And then maybe if the original ones have been modified, rename them or move them to backups?

There doesn't appear to be a way to 'un-hide' them from BB in the LB GUI, or any indication that they're hidden at all. (unless I missed something???) Maybe that's the 'ask' here. Update the LB GUI to indicate what's going on. I mean, there is a setting for "Hide in BigBox" that could be used to accomplish this (checked by default in this case).

I'd accept this, but they do show up just fine in the 'Platform Categories" view by default. (Platform Categories is a whole different subject...)

I think I have this figured out, but I don't understand why. I've been trying to get one of the included playlists to display in the BB "playlists" view. "Arcade SNK Neo Geo MVS" (one that comes with the default Launchbox install) No matter what I did, it would never show in BB. I originally assumed it had something to do with the parent catagory relationship - but no matter what I changed nothing worked. Finally I decided to go XML hacking, and found this to be the solution: If that's set to 'true', it'll never show in BigBox. Setting it to 'false' solves the issue. Is there a specific reason for this?