Fursphere

There are a ton of "Shooter / (something)" Genres. The idea was to capture them all, excluding the single "Shooter / Gun" I would have to find all the possibilities, then list them all out: Is Equal to 'Shooter / Horizontal' <or> Is Equal to 'Shooter / Vertical' <or> Is Equal to 'Shooter / whatever' etc. And this is not forward thinking. If something 'new' gets imported that happens to be a 'shooter / <something not specifically mentioned in the rule>' genre, it wouldn't be included unless the playlist was updated to specifically accommodate. ...and least, that's my thought process.

Beta-4 Switched back to VLC. BigBox freezing / lockups is significantly WORSE than its ever been. Switched back again to WMP - no issues yet.

@faeran Here is an example I just ran across. Shooter auto-generated Playlist. Basic logic is "Genre Contains Shooter" (Had 1766 titles in my playlist) But this was picking up Lightgun games (Shooter / Gun). So I wanted to filter them out. So I thought to add "Genre Doesn't Contain Shooter / Gun" (also tried "Genre Doesn't Contain Gun"). This is a hard "OR" statement between the two rules. Now the playlist has 6114 titles. The evaluation between these two rules needs to be configurable to be an "AND" not an "OR" statement.

More to this. Importing "Nintendo Entertainment System" had no issues. All the roms linked up to a LB DB ID #. Importing "NES Lightgun" (scrape as "Nintendo Entertainment System" failed to match a single rom. Same for "PS2 Lightgun" "PSX Lightgun" etc... Any non-standard platform name - even with the correct "scrape as" system listed - fails to match a single rom. I'm fairly certain this used to work in previous versions?

Beta 4 Imported some NES games to my launchbox install this morning, and not a single one was matched against the metadata database. (Duck Hunt wasn't matched for example). If I manually assigned it (edit - metadata) to a LB ID, the media downloaded fine. But the import process / matching system doesn't appear to be working at all. I'm going to try a few more platforms (importing Lightgun Games to my cabinet) and see what happens.

I think PinUp Popper uses (virtual pinball frontend) (or used to use?) ffmpeg, And ran into serious performance issues with 4k videos. (playfield recordings for example for frontend purposes). I'll have to see if they dropped it for something else.

SQL?!?! Holy crap I never thought I'd see the day. Does this mean we're getting SQL query based playlists? I'll switch back from WMP to VLC and see if the lockup issues return too.

Just a quick update - I let one of my BigBox cabinets run for 24+ hours straight after switching to WMP. Not a single freeze / lock up. I can't be 100% sure, but it sure seems like a VLC issue at this point.

I switched both of my cabinets to WMP this morning as well, and haven't had an issue with BigBox locking up since.

This is great. Thank you so much!

Why do you want to copy them to the cache folder? You're not uncompressing them?

Makes sense. I'm happy to help. It was just a little surprising to hear "remove all your images and videos".

Have you tried reproducing this in house? Or is it so infrequent that its not on the current priority list?

Beta 3 seems to have a memory leak or something. After a few hours (5+ I'm guessing?) in attract mode, it freezes / locks up. Any interaction after that just causes the program to crash / close. My cabinet is in my home office, so I usually just leave it running all day while I'm working.

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.