Retrofrogg

NAS is setup as per usual - NAS connected to router, with other devices in the house accessing it over wifi or ethernet.

Because the standard one doesn’t do NAS, right?

Backblaze personal doesn't do NAS though, right? I see that the business plan does "NAS backup via B2" but this costs $5 per terabyte per month. So say you have 25TB of data on your NAS, that is $125 per month or $1500 a year. This is not a tenable solution for a Launchbox user. Is there any affordable way to back up a NAS to the cloud?

I would echo Fistydollars’ point about the total game counts - the total game count is useful to know how many actual games you have for a platform, and including duplicates as contained in various playlists doesn’t seem to fit with this.

Many thanks for your replies @Jason Carr. If you haven’t come across this problem elsewhere then it is likely something specific to my machine. The funny thing is that I’m fairly sure that the problem didn’t exist up until around a month ago, and I have been using Launchbox (including with MAME) for around 2 years now. Interesting thought regarding the under-performing. The CPU does seem to be almost maxing out though - with LB using around 85% on average at these times. Is it possible that it is an image caching problem? I have wondered about this as my LB seems to re-cache images fairly often. Does caching use CPU or GPU? Also, if I "narrow" the windows contents in MAME by doing a search for a game and then editing, the problem doesn't occur.

Are any of these online services good for users in the UK?

Sorry for the delay in my reply. The problem is still happening unfortunately. Main problem is with MAME - likely due to the larger number of games. Computer specs: Machine: Macbook Pro 2016 model 17" CPU: Intel i7-6700HQ; includes Intel HD Graphics 530 GPU: Intel Radeon Pro 450 RAM: 16GB OS: Windows 10 (running on a Bootcamp partition) Monitor: external LG 27UK600 4K monitor Collection size: 25,968 games - but I think this includes duplication as the total count seems to include both platforms and playlists Thanks again @Jason Carr!

Brilliant Jason! Really impressed with the constant updates and improvements here. For what it's worth, here is my "wishlist": 1. Nested folders 2. Being able to set image parameters (size, spacing, aspect ratio etc) per system/platform, instead of one setting across the board. 3. An increased focus on the systems/platforms, rather than just the games. In BigBox we get the nice screen with the platform info & platform video. We do not get this in Launchbox, and have to go to edit platform where we get the info but no video. It would be great in Launchbox if there was an easy and slick way to view the platform info & video. Also include more options for platform images - instead of the current banner, clear logo, device and fanart, have extra categories like device box, controller, device manual etc. Also, allow more than 1 platform video. 4. Ability to easily view the videos fullscreen in Launchbox, like you can do with the images. 5. An improvement to the image viewer in Launchbox. When viewing images in fullscreen, it would be nice to have small icons to the left of the screen so the user knows which images are there to cycle through. 6. Incorporation of the MAME info files to add more depth to the MAME metadata. 7. A "true" 3D box option, which can be rotated & flipped just like a real box. 8. The ability to use a second screeen in Launchbox to display the art, just like you can in BigBox. Also, the ability to use 3 screens. Just some food for thought!

Care to share @rexryan?

That looks pretty good! How did you get the logo? And do we want 2D or 3D boxes?

HI Jason - I have Windows defender that came with Windows 10, though looking at it just now, I don't think that I have any "virus and threat protection" enabled. The other options under that menu say "no action needed". I don't have any other antivirus, antispam or antimalware apps running I don't think.

Hi Romfrosk, glad to hear that you are still around! I finally managed to download all (I think) of your flash games via FTP. When I imported them all into Launchbox it (only!) showed around 120,000 games. So if there are more, I'm not sure why Launchbox isn't showing them. Maybe there are duplicates and LB has omitted or combined them. Still a lot of games anyway - and too many in a single platform for Launchbox to manage, at least on my machine. It might be better once nested folders allow some separation of them. I'm having a look at the BlueMaxima flash games project too, as mentioned by another user here. Worth a look if you're interested!

Just a small thing regarding the MAME importer - it would be great if there were some way for Launchbox to display this "history" and "info" that comes with the MAME games!

Actually @Jason Carr I spoke too soon - it seems to be still doing it! Just edited a MAME game to add a 3D box, and on clicking OK and returning to the (already cached) platform, my CPU load for Launchbox goes up to 85% with the fan becoming audible. It remains up there for around 2 minutes before the CPU load for Launchbox drops down to around 1% (with Launchbox still idle). Task manager shows the GPU at about 4% total. Memory is at 25%. Also, just not it is re-caching (the green progress bar is showing) my MAME/Arcade platform; I'm not sure why, as it has been cached already. As mentioned above, I would be surprised if it was due to my hardware or collection size - as this problem wasn't happening until recently. All I had done recently was remove all my MAME roms and then run the new MAME importer on a new (0.200) MAME set. I don't believe that I had made any other particular changes - other than keeping pace with the latest betas of course! Any help would be greatly appreciated, as this problem makes the browsing & editing experience somewhat poor. I've not really any ideas myself what is happening. I do notice that when scrolling through the MAME games after the cache, some take 1-3 seconds to appear (some of the thumbnails I mean). I wonder if this suggests that things have not been cached properly?

Hi @Jason Carr - thanks so much for your reply. Thankfully, the problem has disappeared with the latest beta! So I'm left wondering what was going on, but happy that using Launchbox is again smooth. Will keep an eye on things to make sure it doesn't recur. My collection isn't huge at the moment by the standards here - 17,682 games. And my hardware specs are OK I think - i7-6700, 16gig RAM, SSD for all the Launchbox stuff.

Odd problem I've just noticed today. Using the latest beta. After the image caching is done for a platform, things seem to be OK - I can scroll through the games and CPU activity (i7-6700) remains between 10 and 60%, depending on scrolling speed. I'm wondering if this is also too high as there is a slight delay before some thumbnails appear, but this is not the main problem I am describing here. If I edit a game, and then return to browsing, I get a prolonged CPU spike at around 80-90%, as if it is caching all the images again. When I browse at this point, game thumbnails are slow to load. There is no green progress bar appearing again however. Once the CPU goes back to normal, I can browse OK again. This is most noticeable for platforms with large numbers of games - e.g. Arcade/MAME with 3658. After editing a game the CPU stays up at around 85% for a few minutes - maybe roughly the amount of time it took to cache the images in the first place. Also happens if I open another Launchbox window, like the options Window - on returning to platform browing, the above problem recurs! Any help appreciated!

Regarding the "bug" I had identified in the previous release - regarding the double click on single clicking problem - I feel like a bit of an idiot as I've now noticed it in other apps too. Both in Windows and OSX. So I'm wondering if it's something to do with my mouse or KVM switch. Will experiment further. At least others also reported this bug so it wasn't just me

Great to see the ongoing progress here, thanks so much Jason I will probably download the latest MAME set tonight, remove my current MAME set from LB and then add the new set using the new importer. Do I just "delete" all the MAME games via Launchbox - does it then keep the roms themselves and the associated metadata? Looking forward to seeing what the community can do in terms of themes for Launchbox Next! I wonder how customisable the interface can be - can we completely rearrange the screen parts, or even remove some, or add others? For example, have a theme that displays front and rear box images at the same time. Also really looking forward to nested folders and, as a few above have mentioned, the ability to set the image display settings (spacing, etc) per platform! Keep up the great work!

Ha that’s a creative one. Will be funny if the logo ends up as the main one for the flash games :)

Hehe maybe. But doesnt that apply to all ROMs

Funny logo - but what is the relevance of vultures to flash games? Signifying that they are a dying breed, soon to be devoured by the annals of time? If you need the flash games, I would get in touch with Romfrosk. Otherwise I may be able to help you out.

I have the Win3xO collection, but not loaded it into Launchbox yet. Waiting for eXo to release his updated pack and then I'll give it a go. Worth a look if you're interested in Windows games.

I'm still getting that single click to launch bug at times. I just ran a MAME game in LB, exited MAME by pressing ESC which brought me back to Launchbox. I then single clicked on an adjacent game, and it launched.

Sounds great. With so many of us working on a similar thing, it’s a shame we can’t somehow combine all our efforts to save us each doing it all individually - and we’d end up with a stupendous collection no doubt!

Many thanks, that looks awesome Starbuck! I wonder how that will be implemented with nested folders, and whether BigBox will have nested systems also.