NinjaBurg3r

VLC, although I've tried both to equal results. I have an interesting wrinkle to add after doing a little more troubleshooting. I unhooked the 10TB external drive from my desktop and hooked it up to a laptop, and BigBox video stuttering is completely gone. This is odd as the desktop is much more powerful than the laptop. I've tried several different USB ports now on the desktop all with the same result which makes me think there is a setting or program unique and new to this desktop that is causing all the fuss.

Startup times aren't bad for either LB or BB. They both startup rather quickly, it's just the jerky/choppy scrolling/animations/video that are the bother. I went ahead and took a look at my playlists (don't ever use them, only sort through platform) and there were a bunch of auto-generated ones. Went ahead and removed all of them to test and the performance is still the same. No caching currently going on either. I went to the "All" category in LB, and ran a keyboard macro to slowly go through the list giving each box time to load. Even after they are fully populated performance is still very bad and scrolling is not smooth at all. I also went into BB and ran the options to force populate all game wheel images and all coverflow images with no improvement either unfortunately.

I'll preface this by saying I have a somewhat large library at 21,565 games that is all on an entirely self-contained portable installation on a 10TB external HDD. Once I finally got everything setup the way I liked it, this setup ran beautifully, both LaunchBox and BigBox, with silky smooth animations and snappy menus. After a hiatus of a few months, I've come back to find that this is no longer the case. While LaunchBox and BigBox load quickly, all of the animations are EXTREMELY sluggish and choppy. Scrolling through a list of games for a system is no longer smooth and responsive. Worse yet is that BigBox is even slower. I am using the default theme and all of the system/platform stylized background videos play very poorly, as in single frames per second. Scrolling through the BigBox system and games menus is very slow and chunky with long load periods. Interestingly, once inside the system category and in the game lists, all of the game preview videos play smoothly, however, it is the animations here (such as the text coming into the screen, ratings and whatnot) that are very slow and choppy. I've gone in and checked random videos within Windows and all play just fine. All of my ROMs play fine and RetroArch runs without any issue. I've defragmented, ran "sfc /scannow", installed a new copy of LaunchBox over my existing copy, Installed a copy elsewhere on the drive along with copying the data folder from my old install, and am currently running the extensive version of the media cleanup tool. I can't stress enough how smoothly this portable setup used to run on my PC which is why it is so shocking how poorly it is currently running. The PC is an i7 7700K, 32GB 3200Mhz RAM, 2080Ti with Windows installed on an NVMe drive. Any help is greatly appreciated because I would love to get to the bottom of this and get back to enjoying the heck out of my LB/BB retro setup!

In the past, I kept non-merged MAME collections and would only update by downloading a full new set once in a great while. I've recently switched over to a split rom set as I would like to stay more up-to-date with the monthly MAME releases and from my understanding, split sets are the easiest to update as they do not require the use of other programs such as CLRMamePro. I saw this quote from SentaiBrad in a different thread on this forum that led me down the split set path: As this is my first time updating a MAME set with an update pack, I'd like to make certain I am doing this correctly. I am currently on the MAME 0.208 split set and I downloaded the "MAME - Update ROMs (v0.208 to v0.209)" file from PD. I simply drop the contents of this file (72 zipped roms) into my MAME folder? Will I have to overwrite any existing files? I did not see any distinction on PD between these MAME update sets (such as merged, non-merged, split; just the one file to update from 0.208 to 0.209) - is this okay? After I have updated my MAME folder, what is the proper way to get these into LaunchBox? Select my Arcade platform and then Tools => Scan for Added ROMs? Thanks for any help you can provide!

Can I sort platform lists differently between LaunchBox and Big Box? I’m aware of the option within LaunchBox. Thing is, I’d like to keep LaunchBox platforms in alphabetical order, but in Big Box, I like the clear logo wheel views for platforms and would like to group them by manufacturer, in order of release. Is this currently possible?

Have you had any success initiating it through LB? After a lot of trial-and-error, we are finally able to actually connect to one another, but we have to do it through RetroArch. The right-click netplay menu item in LB simply does not work for either of us. I thought it may have something to do with our directories not being scanned within RetroArch (since we both use LB exclusively for game organization), so I went ahead and did that and still no dice. Not sure if it matters, but we are having to connect to one another using the relay server option. I'd love to hear if anyone with AT&T internet has tried the direct connect method and had success. My cousin is on Comcast and he has no issue, but AT&T does not have that port open. No biggie (or so I thought), I'll just open it and be good to go. Unfortunately, RetroArch keeps telling me that it failed to map the port. If I test the port status online, it shows as closed but opens whenever I initiate netplay and RetroArch will not connect afterward, even though the port is showing as open in my web browser.

My cousin and I are attempting to get netplay working in RetroArch through LaunchBox. However, when I right-click on a game (in this instance, Sunset Riders on SNES using the SNES9x core) and select "RetroArch Netplay", I'm having a problem. After inputting my nickname and clicking OK, nothing happens. LaunchBox is acting like it is not even registering anything when I click OK. LaunchBox works perfectly fine with RetroArch for all other aspects except for the netplay launching feature. Is there something I am missing or doing wrong? I've combed through all the options and can't find a reference for netplay functionality within LaunchBox. We are both using the latest stable RetroArch, 1.7.6, but upgraded to the latest nightly through the "Stellar" updater from these forums in an attempt to suss out the issue. All of our cores are fully updated and we are both using the exact same ROM file. As the host I have also verified that the port required by RetroArch is open. I've read the RetroArch netplay FAQ and watched the tutorial videos form Unbroken Software and ETA Prime on YouTube. In these videos, it appears dead-simple to host/connect through LaunchBox, but it simply is not working for either of us. I've been a premium user of LB for a while now and absolutely adore this program and consider myself pretty well-versed with it, but utilizing netplay is something he and I both are trying to work through for the first time together. Any help is greatly appreciated!