mcfilmmakers

So I've been playing around with my Examu Ex-Board issue and came to the following results: All scenarios are in the Examu Ex-Board platform. 1) Importing the exe files as roms into the platform causes the "You NEED to set an emulator" popup issue to appear. Expected since emulation is enabled. Disabling emulation does not prevent the popup from appearing. Not expected and annoying. 2) Importinf the exe files as "none of the above" avoids the "You NEED to set an emulator" popup issue entirely. This means the popup is not dependent on the platform name. 3) Do step 2 and then go into Manage Emulators and set Examu Ex-board as an associated platform (default) and accept out , accepting to set the emulator as default for all existing game sin the platform (I did this by accident! I had to set a lot of platforms as default to MAME...). Without editing the game metadata, go back into the Manage emulators and remove Examu Ex-board from the same associated platforms list. Now try editing the game metadata. Disable the emulation tab (since the emulator was set as default for all game sin the platform) The popup now appears, even though the game was not imported as a ROM. So, it would appear that the issue is not platform dependent and not dependent on method of import either. It appears that disabling emulation simply isn't disabling the expectation of having an emulator.

Examu Ex-Board 95% of the time, it takes 10-20 seconds to wake up out of sleep. When it doesn't I'll wait 5-10 minutes before resorting to the platform scroll. Once I let it sit during lunch about 30 minutes and it never woke up by itself.

Always in 10.14... I have several games that do not require an emulator (exe files). The platform does not have a default emulator assigned to it. In the game metadata, the emulation box is disabled to indicated I do not want to use an emulator. When editing data, a popup appears saying i "You'll need to add an emulator in order to play..." I can import the exe manually and tell it 'none of the above" to import as a regular windows exe. In this circumstance, the popup never appears when editing metadata but all the tabs settings are identical to the older games. I cannot be expected to re-import every single game. Therefore, I can only conclude that disabling the emulation option isn't disabling the popup warning like it is supposed to, unless it isn't supposed to disable that popup. In which case, how does one go about doing that? To test, you can import a Rom as a rom into a platform with no default emulator. then edit the metadata file path to an exe and disable the emulator setting. The pop will appear when selecting ok. Contrast to importing the exe directly as "none of the above" into the same platform, then edit the metadata. No popup appears when selecting ok. Granted the above likely happens in all versions in the past as well, but I'm at a point now where I have to edit several rompaths which cause this popup to appear and the alternative of re-imporitng isn't attractive from a metadata perspective because the data isn't from the launchbox database. Just something to consider.

That's fine for new imports, but if you have older imports, disabling "use emulator' should also disable that popup and it doesn't.

Precisely. Launching games isn't a problem, it's the popup when editing them that is annoying. It's something I COULD live with, but not all things require an emulator and the message says that you NEED to specify an emulator, which lends to confusion since the reality is you don't need to do anything at all.

Well, updating the drivers did not solve the issue, though there is a noticeable improvement in performance (0% CPU usage on idle, 1.4 GB ram on idle) resulting in reduced delay when saving data but that sleep problem is still hapenning (though it happens far less frequently with the blur at 0%).

I updated my graphics and video drivers to see if that works. Will report back.

This doesn't work. For example, in Examu you selecte the application path as the gameloader.exe, set no emulator in the emulation tab and Launchbox still pops up a message saying "You'll need to add an emulator to play..." If you create a dummy emulator with a txt file, launchbox will open the empty txt file in notepad instead of the game. Do we have a solution for this that does not involve Rocketlauncher?

The sleep issue has reared its head. Blur at 0%.

No USB drives. Everything is one your bog standard hard drive. Still, none of the cores ever gets maxed out so while it might use more resources, I'm never actually out of them. I mean, I'm running After Effects concurrently with Premiere and Photoshop while watching Twitch and don't run into slow down issues. So as much as I'll admit my CPU is old, it is far from being outperformed. Anyhow, seems that the blur is indeed the culprit. No idea if anything can be done about that but at least it's not a more dramatic issue.

Using the default theme. I never used any other themes. As for the sleep issue, so far there have been no issues.

Renaming my images folder provided a MASSIVE performance boost. CPU usage at 0% when idle, RAM usage at 1.8GB when idle. CPU usage at 21% when scrolling but the scrolling is smooth as butter. The difference is juts as noticeable in list view. The sleep time when editing metadata is the same though. This got me thinking: Launchbox must either a) be trying to cache images when scrolling, even in list view when it doesn't need to or b) the background images feature must be causing the lag. So, I reverted back to my old images folder and disabled the background blur from 50 to 0. CPU usage at 0% on idle, 30% when scrolling. Scrolling smooth as butter. 1.2 GB ram usage. CPU usage at 40% on image view but ram usage still 1.2GB and smooth as butter, The long delay when editing data still exists, but expected due to database size. So it's the blurred background causing the lag, even on idle. I can expect more cpu/ram use to create the blur effect, but not necessarily to that extent and not all the time. I'd expect the increased use when a new image has to be loaded but once loaded and effect applied, for the cpu/ram usage to dissipate. So that addressed the scroll/cpu/ram issue. As for the bigger issue of the games list not waking up, i'll keep the background blur disabled for the next little while as I do more edits and report back on whether things change there.

I figured it had to do with media... so here's the thing. Running the media clean up tool gets me THOUSANDS of duplicate files that I would love to delete. But there's no option to delete only duplicates and keep the files not in use, you can only select all or select none

I agree that the sheer size of my database would cause a performance hit so I don't see that as the big issue. it's the faded games list that doesn't always wake up on its own that's the problem. I'll zip up my data folder and PM you.

Well, i can't pin this on 10.14... I just imported Mame so that's a massive data inflow but given launchbox is built to handle Mame, I can't imagine this is in and of itself the root cause. I will however backup previous claims about RAM usage. Launchbox uses 2-2.5GB of RAM just being open and about 4-5% CPU (i5-3570K). When it's handling data changes, RAM usage doesn't change but CPU usage goes to 60-70% (but none of my CPU cores max out). Scrolling the games list causes CPU usage to jump up to 40% (though it varies from 20-40%). When i stop scrolling, it'll drop down to 4-5%. There is no unbearable lag when scrolling (though i wouldn't call it smooth). The real annoyance is the irregular failure to wake up the games list. I've been playing around using image view and there doesn't seem to be a difference in either lag, hang time, sleeping games list problem, cpu usage or RAM usage compared to list view.

In launchbox, when you click on a category, you see all games inside all platforms under that category. In bigbox, you only see all the platforms but no games. Is it possible to enable bigbox to show all games within that category alongside all the platforms WITHOUT creating an "All Games" playlist?

Further testing is inconsistent. Seems to have nothing to do with the length of the game list. It can have 200 and work (lag notwithstanding) or have 10 and never reactivate without the platform list scroll technique... happens whether its a single game being edited or a bulk edit.... my PC CPU doesn't max out nor does the RAM so those aren't the problem...

I don't know if this happens in the beta versions, but in launchbox 10.14 the system is very slow when editing metadata. After making the edits/importing/whatever on game data, emulator data, platform data... Launchbox hangs for 10 seconds or so before letting me scroll through the library (items are greyed out and I can't scroll the library, but I can scroll the platform list). Sometimes, it won't "wake up" and the only fix is to scroll up and down the platform list, which must set off some sort of refresh trigger and only then will the game list turn white (normal) and I can select items again. Example: Select game 1 -> edit, make changes, press ok. Game list goes grey as data gets saved... takes around 10 seconds before game list is active again. Most of the time however, after saving changes, the platform list will refresh (it scrolls to the bottom) and the game list will remain greyed out. At this point,I have to scroll up the platform list and when I get about halfway up the list, the game list will wake up and be active. My game list is very long and my platform list is fairly long too (though I don't have issues with the platform list itself). Launchbox is even in list view to avoid loading pictures so I'm not sure what the issue is though my theory is that Launchbox is forgetting to wake up the game list (maybe it forgets what platform it is supposed to display?) for an unknown reason. Naturally, given the size of my library, I'm terrified of updating to the betas... If I'm looking at a short game list, then the game list will activate fine... so this is a long game list issue. Not sure where the cutoff for the issue is. Will do more testing. So far: platform containing 2 games = no problem (10 second delay but game list activates). platform with 4000 games = problem (10 second delay, game list remains inactive)

Any chance we can see a tiny QOL feature added: You can select/deselect multiple files from the Clean Up Media tool. It's either all or nothing and when you have thousands of results and only want to select half.... (just the Duplicates or just the File not in use), you can't do that without individually selecting each of the thousands of results... which makes the tool impractical. \ Just a tiny request that shouldn't be hard to do.. if time permits of course. Thanks.

I have several thousand files found by the Clean Up Media tool as duplicates and Not in use. I only want to delete the duplicates. I want to keep the files that are not in use. However, I seem incapable of unchecking multiple files (although it is possible to select multiple files) and there is no humanly possible way for me to reasonably uncheck them individually. Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug?

will do, thank you.

I unticked everything because I want to import everything EXCEPT the System/Devices and System/Bios files. Again, my point is Launchbox won't let you do that and it should.

That's what I did. However, there's a difference between a working game, a non-working game, and not a game at all. Many people want to import non-working games and hide them while other don't want to import things that aren't games at all. Launchbox doesn't allow you to do that. The systems/device and system/bios genres are the filters required to do so.

I suppose... but there should be an option to ignore particularly the System/Device genre regardless. Just a thought.

I'm looking for a way to delete hundreds of roms imported into launchbox accidentally via Mame Arcade Full set importer... I thought my folder was clean but turns out it was still full of hundreds of device zips that got imported and obviously, I don't want them there... I have a DAT and an XML file of the list of files I want to delete (from http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/) so now I need a way to run through the Launchbox setup and delete the "games" from the MAME platform in launchbox... any ideas? PS. Arcade Full set importer should have an option to ignore devices and bios files... you can skip many other categories of actual game types but not these....