Asterra

I see. Well, what I'm gathering is that the timed delays for the various visual assets are indeed hardwired. The flyer art, which is what appears in the lower-left in FutureState's Games List View called "Vertical Wheel 1", has a built-in delay of 0.5 seconds. Switching to the Games List View called "Text List With Details", the flyer art has been moved to the upper-left, and now in the lower-left we have the game's screenshot, which has a delay of 0.0 seconds -- instantaneous. So in that Games List View, the screenshot pops in immediately, followed 0.5 seconds later by the flyer art, right on time, and then the other artwork 1.0 seconds later. There is nothing that can be changed in the menus that has any impact on these timings. I wanted to say a workaround would be to tweak the Vertical Wheel 1 view so that it displays the screenshot instead of, or in addition to, the flyer art, but it's probably best if I take time to come to grips with what I've learned so far.

I already tried tinkering with those. I changed every last one of them to "none". The only effect this had on any aspect of the theme was to cause the background animation to vanish rather than fading to the new animation. The new animation still appears with the same delayed timing, and the lower-left corner flyer image also still appears the same 0.5 seconds after choosing a new game. I briefly thought I might be onto something when I spotted "Minimum Startup Video Duration", but that was already set to "No Delay".

I'll try it, thanks. For now, I'm not seeing "animations" in any of the text in the entire menu so I haven't found the correct navigation option.

I had to edit in the rest of my post because the editor killed everything after the YT link. It elaborated what I was trying to highlight. I will simplify my main concern: You see the first asset to appear? The screenshot in the lower-left? This is not part of the video. It is a separate asset, and appears even with no video asset to load, as my current setup confirms. Watch how it waits for the wheel to stop animating before making its appearance. Let's ignore for the moment that this happens in every theme I've examined. What I want to do is make it appear with no delay, even though the wheel is still animating. At this stage I just want to see this done in order to confirm that this phenomenon is not the result of a limitation of the front end.

I'm trying not to be confusing. There is a difference between the stutter caused by realtime caching and the deliberately-paced image pop-in that I took pains to describe. Take a look here:

Maybe this was silly of me, but I had always assumed that when BigBox undergoes the process of launching a target emulator, it pauses everything so as to properly allow the CPU/GPU to focus elsewhere, and that the remaining CPU drain was attributable to other app maintenance. It is surprising to learn that those videos continue playing. I daresay that dings a humble Raspberry Pi pretty mercilessly.

Then I'll try to keep this simple since there's really only one thing I'm trying to do for one platform only (MAME). What I'm trying to do is: Filter out all systems, bioses, and other fundamentally non-functional roms. Filter out all non-arcade platforms, including computers, consoles, PDAs and all the sundry esoterica that MAME now covers. Filter out handheld games, but have a different list set aside that includes only them (for a handheld-specific category). Filter out all clones... but keep certain self-defined clone ranges and/or specific rom sets because, despite being technically clones, they are unique enough to justify keeping in the list. Avoid filtering out other things due to mis-categorization or other possible errors. The above sorting is achieved on-the-fly in AttractMode because MAME has a category file associated with it called catver.ini. Ultimately I only need two rom lists from MAME (arcade and handheld) and I do not actually intend to make changes to either list once they're done, which I suspect is the primary capacity being unfulfilled by BigBox's current sorting implementation.

I thought the entire point of RocketLauncher was to make it so you don't have to keep LaunchBox running in the background, as its CPU sapping potential was well established. Is this not in fact the case?

I've tried out four themes now, including the default. All of them, when I scroll the wheel by one unit, do the same thing with images, with the same exact timings: 1. Scroll the wheel. Smooth, 60fps, takes about 0.33 seconds to stop on the new entry. 2. Rotate/fade image 1 into visibility, or else make it appear without rotating/fading. Rotating/fading also takes 0.33 seconds, but in any event doesn't begin until 0.5 seconds. 3. Rotate/fade image 2 into visibility, or else make it appear without rotating/fading (if applicable). This also takes 0.33 seconds, but doesn't begin until 1.0 seconds, even if the first image didn't rotate/fade. So, for example, the FutureState theme, in its vertical wheel art variant, will rotate the wheel, wait until 0.5 seconds, make the flyer appear in the lower-left corner, wait 0.5 seconds, and then begin fading in alternative art as the background. Basically what it looks like is that the menu system either cannot or by-design refuses to do several things at once, or at least in tight sequence. Or it could be that the methodology of creating themes for BigBox lends itself defacto to giving everything this visually satisfying yet functionally bankrupt 1-2-3 presentation. On the other hand, a text-only variant of FutureState is able to display the screenshot immediately, possibly because the text does not need to visibly rotate, meaning the screenshot does not need to "wait its turn." So I suppose this is a two-pronged question. First, is this just how BigBox works? Everything absolutely needs to take turns like this? Second, if that is the case, then is it at least possible to force a graphical wheel to skip the smooth-rotation process and just blink to the new game? That should, if I'm judging things correctly, permit the next graphic to appear immediately. While I am on this topic, I have to ask whether themes (user-made or otherwise) in BigBox have their own customization menu. Cycling through presets is one thing, but what if, say, I don't _want_ graphics to waste time doing a fancy rotate? Some things look good but aren't all that useful when you're trying to pick from thousands. The front end I most recently tinkered with, AttractMode, gave theme creators the option to institute user customization, accessible from the menu. It's the kind of thing that sounds frankly obvious, so I have to suspect I'm simply overlooking it. Last question, I promise: If I tell BigBox to pre-cache wheel images, is this "very long" process a one-time deal that it won't have to repeat when I restart, or does it lose that effort when I exit?

I recently had to abandon a front end called Attract Mode because it could not be forced to use hardware acceleration on PC for video snaps, despite being able to do so on the lowly Raspberry Pi. Even on a reasonably fast PC, this generally gave a result of video/audio sync issues. It was clear there would never be a resolution to this. I was able to gauge that BigBox either does use hardware acceleration or is simply not quite so taxing on the CPU. So here I am. Well, there are inevitable bumps in such a transition. A biggie is themes, but I will tackle that later. For now, I want to focus on rom filtering. AttractMode's solution to this was a simple, intuitive and effective as you could ever hope for: You tell it exactly what you don't want (by name, title, category etc.), and then you tell it what exceptions to that rule you want it to follow, and then if you need to finetune the results even further, you can. This is all done without the need to physically move files around, or interact with a secondary app in an exhaustive restart-from-scratch process. Given that this issue absolutely has to be something almost everyone setting up a front end finds they need to deal with, I'd like to assume I have options when it comes to BigBox. So how do I go about it? ;p

Ah, now we're getting somewhere. Is there a way of generating all of the necessary caching in advance so that the image fetching doesn't reliably take such a long time? Not sure how well that would work since it happens even when there's no image to fetch, but if I can solve this one issue I'll be a lot more comfortable with forking over the dough to get the app into its fully functional state. Just so it doesn't seem like I have some sort of uniquely incapable machine, here are a couple of examples of the phenomenon which I quickly found on Youtube:

I get it. The app was not written with complete collections in mind, the way an old MAME GUI would be. The very first thing I did with LaunchBox was have it scan my complete MAME collection. Navigating the result is basically hopeless, as each adjustment to the scroll bar causes a three-to-five second wait while the app checks 15 individual titles to confirm there's no cover art. Given that such a thing shouldn't take that long under any circumstance, there's not much choice but to recognize that the app must have been optimized for some other kind of use. That said, I imagine many people are like me, and were hoping to have everything in one nice, tidy package without having to truncate collections just to make the launching interface behave. Therefore I feel that people may have found workarounds to make large collections of games work better with LaunchBox, and I'd be interested in hearing about those potential solutions. Note: Let's not go back and forth over PC specs. We are talking about the default theme which is manifestly plain. The image load times under scrutiny should make it plain that specs are not the issue.

Been perusing my front end options. Had to abandon HyperSpin because its video playback (for everything -- transitions, video snaps, etc.) is extraordinarily dodgy and can't keep a solid, tearing-free framerate, even on my desktop PC, let alone the laptop I intend to use for this. Had to abandon mGalaxy because its video snap playback is jerky. Had to abandon GameEx because it can't be done in a portable capacity. I can't judge LaunchBox because the free iteration only provides its (sorry) rather sluggish default theme, which doesn't seem to include any sort of video playback option. But I've seen hints that other themes can flow smoothly, so I thought I'd see how feasible it may be as an option. One of the things I really liked from GameEx was how, when you selected a particular game during your browsing, it would by default provide a list of all the other (available) iterations of that same game. So, for example, you're browsing "Atari 7800" and you find Donkey Kong, well in addition to playing a video and giving you some information on the game, it provides a list below: Atari 2600 version, Arcade version, Vic-20 version, etc. And highlighting each shows the corresponding video snap so you can very quickly compare them. Quite a neat idea. I haven't seen anything to suggest that this is currently possible in LaunchBox, and if that's the case, then I suppose this can be considered a request to add to the pile. That said, the directions for flagging this post as such are a little vague.