UnderwoodNC

Startup Video Manager View File ***** Now Supporting Random Startup Videos ***** Startup Video Manager: A plugin to manage Startup videos for the user through a clean, simple interface. About the Plugin This plugin provides a menu item that will open a window to allow users to manage their startup videos, and optionally, to activate random startup videos. Random startup videos will be switched out as LaunchBox closes and Big Box opens. New and Returning Features: Reads from a "Startups" folder in LaunchBox\Videos to let the user select their desired startup video. Clicking "Preview" will let the user preview the selected Startup video through a custom VLC player with options for play/pause/stop, forward and backward, volume control and full-screen viewing. Double-clicking the video will also take you to and from fullscreen viewing. Pressing Esc while in fullscreen will also take you back to the normal view. Another way to get back while in fullscreen is to move the mouse to the bottom of the screen where a menu with the video name and a back button will appear. Copies the selected video in LaunchBox\VIdeos\Startups to LaunchBox\Videos and renames it to startup.mp4 so that BigBox will recognize it. Before replacing your existing startup.mp4 file, it checks to see whether or not your current startup.mp4 exists in the Startups folder. If not, it will copy your current startup.mp4 to the Startups folder, adding the Unix timestamp to the filename, to make sure you do not lose any startup video you may not have backed up. New in 2.0.0: Optionally lets the user select Randomize Startup Videos to have the plugin randomly select a startup video and adjust the minimum startup duration each time Big Box is started from LaunchBox. New in 2.0.0: With my system, I found that I needed to slightly tweak the minimum startup time from the actual length of the video. If you find you need to do this as well, in PluginConfig.xml for this that will be covered below. New in 2.1.0: Optionally lets the user update a configuration setting to match their actual load time of Big Box so that random videos will be limited to videos that are at least that long (no looping video on startup). Installation Instructions If you have the old version, BigBoxStartupSelector, delete that folder and unzip the new folder into the LaunchBox\Plugins folder. Create a folder named Startups in the LaunchBox\Videos folder and move all of your startup videos there. You may rename the startup videos in this folder to whatever name you prefer to help you remember each video. Optional Configuration These optional configuration settings can be applied by opening the included PluginConfig.xml in your favorite text editor and changing the appropriate number. StartupTimeOffsetInSeconds: In my case, I found that when setting the Minimum Startup Video Duration to the actual length of the video, even for longer videos, caused the video to start to loop for about a couple seconds. To accommodate this, you can tweak the number of seconds being set as the minimum startup duration for videos through this configuration setting. I had to adjust mine by -2 seconds, but this is 0 by default, which will set the minimum startup duration to the actual length of the video. If you notice that after setting a video through this tool, the video either stops early or starts to loop, you can set this time to adjust all videos accordingly. ActualStartupTimeInSeconds: This setting only applies to randomly-selected videos. If you set this to something other than the default of 0, only videos with at least this startup time will be considered for random selection. How to find out your actual startup time? Get the stopwatch app on your phone ready, go into the Big Box options and set Minimum Startup Video Duration to "No Delay". Now go back to LaunchBox, and as soon as you click to switch back to Big Box mode, start the stopwatch. Stop the stopwatch as soon as Big Box has finished loading. That time, rounded to the nearest second, is the value you should put as your actual startup time. But again, this only applies to randomly-selected videos. If you leave it as the default of 0, all videos will be considered for randomization, but you may have looping if the randomly-selected video is shorter than your actual load time. Usage Instructions Open LaunchBox or BigBox and browse to the Startup Video Manager plugin. Choose the Startup Video you would like to set, then if desired, click Preview to watch the video and make sure that's the one you want. If you'd like random startup videos going forward, make sure to check Randomize Startup Videos in the bottom-left corner. Note: the random selection setting saves as soon as you check or uncheck it. You can click Cancel or close the window from there. The Save button is only if you want to manually select a video to set as your startup video. Once you've decided on a video, click Save and the magic will happen. Otherwise, click Cancel. Enjoy! Please let me know if you run into any issues. Special thanks to angelobodetti for the random startup video idea! Thanks, Jason, for providing your amazing software and thanks again to Jason, the LaunchBox staff and the community for your support in developing this plugin. Submitter UnderwoodNC Submitted 05/25/2017 Category Third-party Apps and Plugins  

Thanks, glad it's working for you now!

Update is live, including initial logging support and support for Screenshot - Gameplay image types. @fromlostdays I'm still looking at Steam Banners, hoping to get that in soon.

Submitting an update now, when it goes live, please let me know if you continue to receive the error.

Hm. The code is looking from the LaunchBox.exe that's running, then looking for a Metadata folder from there, then that Metadata.xml. Not sure why it can't find it, but in any case, I need to handle that exception. Is this the path to your LaunchBox.exe? G:\Games\Current Launch Box\LaunchBox\LaunchBox.exe

Hi @jchasa -- I'll take a look at this. Currently, the code is trying to find your Metadata.xml file, which is usually in your LaunchBox install folder, in the Metadata folder. Do you have a Metadata folder with Metadata.xml in your Launch Box (main LB folder)?

@Chris Kant Thanks! I hope it helps to make the submission process easier for everyone. @fromlostdays Thanks! I'll definitely look into it. I'll probably need to put in a request to have the additional image types made available in the Plugins API so that I can write a more long-term solution, but I'm glad to extend the plugin to include whatever fields and image types are available.

Add To Games DB View File *** Updated for Initial Support for LaunchBox v.Next *** AddToGamesDb: A plugin to help automate the process of submitting all of your game information and images from your collection to the LaunchBox Games Database. About the Plugin This plugin makes use of an application traditionally used in automated testing (Selenium) to automate the process of submitting games to the LaunchBox Games Database. It will open an instance of your default browser (provided that browser is either Chrome or Firefox. If some other browser is your default, it will try to open Chrome), and attempt to submit the selected game to the LaunchBox Games Database based on the information provided in your collection. If the game does not exist in the database, it will create a new game entry and submit it to the database. If you have added additional information or images to a game that already exists in the database, it will enter the title and platform, then pause to let you choose the existing game, then add any additional information from your collection to the LaunchBox Games Database. Installation Instructions Note: For this plugin to work, you will need to have either Chrome or Firefox installed. If you have both installed, it will use whichever you have set as your default browser. If you are using Firefox as your default browser and have enabled Firefox Profiles, please note that this will run under the default profile. For any and all other cases, Chrome is the preferred browser. Unzip everything to the Plugins folder. Usage Instructions Note: If, in editing your collection, you are prompted to download an update for the LaunchBox Games Database, afterward you will need to close and re-open LaunchBox for the plugin to detect the changes. Open LaunchBox and browse to a game that is either missing from the Games Database, has additional information not in the database, or has images not in the database -- right click that game, and select the appropriate option, it will show either: Add Game to LaunchBox Games Database Update Game in LaunchBox Games Database Add New Images to LaunchBox Games Database The first time you run the plugin, you may be prompted to login to LaunchBox Games Database. If so, the plugin will pause here to allow you to login as normal. Check "Remember Me" to skip this step going forward. Your login information is not read or stored in the code, it is stored in Chrome or Firefox's normal AppData cache on your system. If you do not login, the plugin will time-out after 5 minutes and close the browser. Depending on the game, you may be prompted with a screen that identifies similar titles and you will be asked to either select the correct title, or click the button to add a new game. If so, the plugin will pause here until you make your desired selection, then automation will resume for the remainder of the process. Logging By default, the logging is only set to a general "Info" level and up that contains generic start and submission successful messages, along with any errors encountered. If you continue to encounter an error somewhere along the way, please take the following steps: Browse to the plugin's folder -- LaunchBox\Plugins\AddToGamesDb Open NLog.dll.nlog in Notepad or another text editor. Scroll down to the bottom and find the <rules> section of the configuration. Find this line: <logger name="*" minlevel="Info" writeTo="file" /> And change it to this: <logger name="*" minlevel="Trace" writeTo="file" /> Try to submit the problem game, if it is a particular game causing the issue, or another game in general otherwise. Browse to the log file in the plugin's folder -- LaunchBox\Plugins\AddToGamesDb\log\AddToGamesDb.log Feel free to post the error and preceding trace either on the plugin's support page or PM me either the entire log or the part pertaining to the last issue, whichever is easier for you. From there, I'll investigate and make any updates necessary. Supported Fields Auto-population of the following fields is currently supported: Name/Title Platform Release Date ESRB Developers Publishers Genres Wikipedia URL Overview Max Players Cooperative Images Known Issues Context Menu (right-click menu) does not refresh on Audit window. If you update the information for a game in LaunchBox (clicking Edit from the right-click menu for the game), you will need to click away from the game (click some other game, for example), and then right-click on the updated game again for the context menu to update. Even without doing so, however, the correct process should run even though the text and icon on the menu haven't yet updated. A lot of work has gone into stabilizing the initial release and this latest release, but if you encounter any issues, please let me know and I will be glad to work with you to update the plugin accordingly. Thanks, Jason, for providing your amazing software and thanks again to Jason, the LaunchBox staff and the community for your support in developing this plugin. Submitter UnderwoodNC Submitted 05/20/2017 Category Third-party Apps and Plugins  

Sega CD was working fine when I set it up in Retroarch 1.3.6, but then I updated Retroarch to 1.5.0 recently and it stopped working. I compared the config files and they were the same, so it appears that something changed within RetroArch or LibRetro. But, here's the fix that worked for me: If you haven't copied the default config, I'd recommend doing that and telling Retroarch to use that instead (open Retroarch, go down to Configurations, and Load the copied configuration instead of the default). Find "system_directory". For me, the line read as follows: system_directory = "default" Change that line to this: system_directory = ":\system" For whatever reason, Retroarch doesn't seem to like "default" anymore.

I was getting the same error everyone was seeing in the video tutorial for Neo Geo and Neo Geo CD set up. I tried changing the following settings through the GUI menus first, then saving the changes from the tools menu, but it wasn't actually writing those changes to the .ini, so I opened the .ini and wrote the changes directly, and now it works perfectly, no more errors. Here's how I solved it: 1. Go to your Final Burn Alpha emulator folder. Go to the config folder. Open fba64.ini in your preferred text editor. 2. Switch the following values to your monitor's resolution. nVidHorWidth and nVidVerWidth should have the same value, and nVidHorHeight and nVidVerHeight should have the same value. For example, a 1920x1080 monitor would change as follows: nVidHorWidth 640 to nVidHorWidth 1920 nVidHorHeight 480 to nVidHorHeight 1080 nVidVerWidth 640 to nVidVerWidth 1920 nVidVerHeight 480 to nVidVerHeight 1080 3. Change the bit-depth to 32-bit: nVidDepth 16 to nVidDepth 32 4. Switch to full-screen as soon as the rom loads: bVidAutoSwitchFull 0 to bVidAutoSwitchFull 1 5. And, most importantly, select the DirectX9 Alt blitter: nVidSelect 0 to nVidSelect 4 6. Save and close the .ini file, and now when you start your games, you won't receive that pesky "problem setting display mode" error.