Search the Community

Hi everyone. I asked a similar question in the MAME forums a couple of weeks ago, but I haven't got any responses. I'm hoping someone here may have some advice. I'm seeing performance issues (slowness, audio stuttering) when enabling HLSL and bezels at the same time, but only at a specific resolution, or when hooked up to a TV instead of a monitor. My monitor's resolution is set to 2560x1440. If I enable HLSL, but bezels are off, I don't have any issues with any games that I've tried. Everything works well. Similarly, if I turn HLSL off and turn bezels on, I have no issues. The sweet spot seems to be setting my monitor to 1920x1080, then I can turn HLSL and bezels on and have no issues. I'm only having these issues when HLSL is enabled, bezels are turned on, and my monitor resolution is set to 2560x1440. My question is, is there some setting that I have wrong in my mame.ini file, perhaps in the OSD PER-WINDOW VIDEO OPTIONS section, that would allow this to also work when set to 2560x1440? It was my understanding that HLSL can put a lot of work on the graphics card, but like I said above, it handles it fine when bezels are off. I didn't think turning bezels on would affect the performance. Is it likely that bezels affect performance just enough to only matter at that specific higher resolution? I get that that wouldn't be unheard of, but I'd like someone who knows more about this stuff to confirm for sure. For some reason I feel like this is just a settings issue or conflict that I'm missing somewhere and can't figure out. I realize I don't need my monitor set to anything above 1920x1080, so I'm fine with this limitation. I'm just looking to better understand what's going on with the resolution/screen/view/layout settings, so that if I need to make adjustments to work with whatever display I'm using, I can do so effectively. Maybe it's a botched setting in an .ini or .lay file? Just recently, I tried hooking my PC up to a TV. I'm seeing performance issues there, even if my display settings in Windows is set to 1920x1080. Big Box runs smooth, but if I launch a MAME game and have HLSL on, things get sluggish. Refresh rate is set to 60. Is there something else I should be looking at or tweaking? This is a 4k TV, but like I said, I have the Windows display settings resolution set to 1920x1080. Does it seem weird that everything would work fine when hooked up to a 2k monitor with the resolution set to 1920x1080, but a 4k TV with the resolution set to 1920x1080 would cause issues? I'm trying to figure out if this is a settings issue or an issue of my PC or graphics card being under powered. Anyone have any ideas or thoughts? Help is much appreciated. Thanks for taking the time to read this lengthy post. My current specs are as follows: MAME 0.240 Monitor: 2560x1440, 144Hz Intel i5-4590 CPU 3.30GHz 16 GB RAM 256GB SSD Windows 10 Pro NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030 (low profile D4 2G)

As a long time licensed Launchbox / Bigbox user i want to give you my thougths.... Maybe i am to critical but i think it is beneficial for developers and all users to have this discussion. I love Lauchbox / Bigbox however.... There are some serious performance and stability issues. Last week i have been doing fresh installs on my 2 cabinets with a lot of problems. One was with a fresh windows 10 install and one was with a half year old windows 10 install. First the performance. It is really really bad right now (12.6). As mentioned in other posts sometimes the menu's react very slow. Seems the longer you run launchbox the worse it gets. As i read in another post there is a 12.7 beta that sort of improves the problem. The word "improve" in the post triggered my attention. Sometimes the menu hangs for 10 seconds. This is not an improvement but a bug. I have also seen for years now that graphics load very slow in big box when you enter a large system like mame. If you scroll to the letter S for example the wheel art loads very slow. Sometimes it takes a couple of seconds to load the wheel art and sometimes it takes 10 seconds or more. I have never seen this poor performance on other front ends. It is not that i have seen this once. Have seen it over the years on many installs. Second the stability. I have seen different stability issues over the years. Now with my 2 installs i encountered: A couple of system freezes. On both cabinets. I have also seen that when launchbox is downloading media and you close launchbox it should resume downloading after you restart it. Most of the times this works. Not always however. I also notice that after importing games downloading media is a hit or miss now. Some other problems that i have forgotten My PCs should be more enough to run a graphical front end: CPU >> Benchmark score of around 5000 on passmark GPU >> GTX 950 RAM >> 8 GB My thoughts. It feels to me like the development of Launchbox is heavily skewed towards developing extra features instead of focus on performance and stability. It feels like we are building the fifth roof on top of a house where the foundation is crackling. Maybe the developers can send out a poll to all users and check if more people experience this. They can ask where the focus should be on the coming year, on Features or Performance/Stability? I am not a coder but the performance of other front ends suggests that better performance should be possible. A raspberry pi can run a decent front end like ES. Maybe the coding is done in a language/environment that asks for too many system resources? Maybe Launchbox itself is too complex? I do not know. Maybe it is a good time to make a fresh start? Maybe not. When you do I would choose the most efficient coding environment and i would start with basic features everyone needs. What is the most important? Add that and make the core stable with high performance. Evaluate what is not important and can be left away. I can think of a few important basic core things to focus on like: Importing systems/rom sets Automatic downloading of media/videos Settings up the emulators Sorry again for the critical message...... I love LB/BB for the easy of use and active development. I hope we can add performance and stability in the near future!

So - Let me start off by saying - I love launchbox and bigbox. They're great and pretty much do everything I want. I own a license. That being said, there's some serious performance problems that need to be addressed (and I say this as someone who helps write software). I'm running an emulation only box: Win 10 64bit build 19044 Intel Core i3-8121U 2.20 ghz (4 cores) 8gb of ram Radeon RX 540 1TB NVME drive It's an Intel Nuc Gen 8 and its been slaying pretty much everything pre-PS2. It has 14,288 games at the moment. Launchbox brings it to it's knees. About a minute after start up, it consumes ~2gb of ram. I left the system up for days with Launchbox running and this climbed to ~7gb basically consuming 99% of the system memory. It doesn't seem to matter if I'm in list view or images view... it eats resources all the same. It also doesn't seems to 'lazy load' things by not loading things that aren't on screen... I'm also wondering if it uses a database, ala sqlite - because ~14,000 records should not take ~2 gig of ram... On top of being 'slow' - there's also resource leaking issues it seems over time... Is there any word on performance improvements coming? Honestly, this is more important to me than any feature that could be added.

There is a tutorial or YouTube video to optimize LaunchBox and Big Box that are installed on computers with few resources? I have an Intel NUC NUC8i3BEH Intel Core i3-8109U and in general it goes well, but I would like to optimize it for maximum speed and performance. My specs: Windows 10 Intel Core i3-8109U - 3 GHZ 16 GB Ram Iris Plus Graphics 655 M.2 500GB PCI Express 3.0 NVMe

(Forgive any formatting issues, it's my first time posting here.) Hi there, recently I have been having some weird and frustrating issues with both LaunchBox and BigBox. Launchbox itself works perfectly, however it immediately freezes whenever I try to go to options. BigBox, however, I can hardly get to launch. I see the splash screen and it just sits there. Any clicks on it and it will show up as not responding, in the task manager it starts at ~27% then almost immediately drops to 0% CPU while the whole time still using almost 1GB RAM. If I just leave it alone it takes roughly 10 minutes to finally launch. I have my installation on my SSD, to try and troubleshoot I installed it on my 1TB HDD and only imported 2 games, still the same thing. I was wondering if anyone else had encountered this issue before? What I'm running: Windows 10 Pro Intel i7-9700K 16GB DDR4 RAM GeForce GTX 1080 FTW 512GB NVME (Windows) 256GB SSD (LaunchBox) 1TB HDD (Misc) 4,500+ games Running just the stock theme

Hi, just purchased BigBox but I have really slow and jerky interface performance. Running Windows 10, 16GB RAM, i5 6400, Vega 56, SSD. Thanks!

Hello! I recently upgraded from a gaming laptop to a gaming desktop. I took the SSD out of my laptop and put it into my desktop to put the OS and games on. When i copied over all of my launchbox files and roms i put them onto the secondary stock mechanical HDD that came with the computer to save space. Of course, it is much slower within BigBox and all of the menus compared to when i had the SSD in the laptop. I dont want to eat up my main drive with roms, but if i put the Launchbox installation onto my SSD along with all of the images and meta data, and kept the roms on my secondary mechanical SSD would it benefit the menu speed? Or should i move the roms to the SSD as well? Not sure if BigBox looks at the directory for roms constantly or just loads them off a list of what i have loaded. Thanks!

Hi. I bought BigBox and love the interface and have had fun setting everything up. Everything seems to work ok - certainly in terms of displaying my ROMs and loading up emulators. However I have an issue with Retroarch. I have retroarch set up as my default emulator for some of my platforms - for example Sega Genesis and it works exactly as it sould. However with N64 BigBox loads the emulator and game except the is a noticeable, unplayable stutter and lag. Of course I tested outside of BigBox by loading the games directly in Retroarch and they play perfectly, even with BigBox minimised. My system is plenty powerful enough - Core i7, Geforce 660, 16GB ram etc. Its almost as if BigBox launches the Retroarch N64 core with some sort of option or switch or setting which is causing issues because like I said its fine to play directly inside of retroarch. Any ideas? How should I start troubleshooting?

I have a new computer build with 250GB M.2 SSD (largest I can afford at this time) and WD Black 5TB HDD. I need to place emulators, roms, bios, etc in different partitions. What should be on the SSD to get best performance. Could really use the advice. Thanks

I just built a new computer, and I am in the process of porting my collection from my laptop over to it. I currently have a 250 Gb SSD, and I will be getting a 2 Tb Hard Drive. Launchbox is on the SSD, because I want it to be as fast as possible. However, due to space limitations, I cannot put my entire library on the SSD. I don't want BigBox to lag when browsing my library; I want it to be as smooth as possible. Because of this, would Bigbox perform the smoothest with all games (aside from Steam) being in the Launchbox folder on my SSD, or would keeping my games in a separate folder on my Hard Drive not matter? For those wondering, these are my specs: Windows 10 x64 GTX 1050 Ti Graphics Card AMD FX 8320 Processor 8Gb of DDR3 RAM Thanks in advance for the help!

Review your image sizes; I've reduced the size of my images by 50 - 75% and noticed a significant reduction in memory use < 300 Mb (while using City Hunter theme) and it's much snappier. For example, all wheel images are now a maximum 600 px as the theme doesn't enlarge it more than a couple hundred. I've done similar steps to box art, etc. I've kept a copy of the original image for the future-use when resolutions increase. I'm currently on a 1440p monitor.

Hi Everyone, I have been getting some unusually large load times when opening Big Box or the Options Menu within launchbox for some time now. I was hoping someone could help me out or shed some light on the issue Here are the load times I am experiencing with a clean Launchbox install on my Intel 750, running as administrator with only one game imported Big Box: 1 Minute 5 Seconds Tools>Options Menu in Launchbox: 30.9 Seconds Many Thanks PC Summary.txt

For some reason Big Box is just very sluggish in it's animations and response to input. Coverflow is the worst culprit regardless of image quality settings. The sounds of changing game selections seem to be in sync with the input commands but the animations are dragging way behind and seem to be well under 30fps. However even down to the text list view (the fastest mode) there is some hesitation especially if you rest a hair to long on a game and let the imagery and description load. Moving your selection in the middle of that transition always causes sluggishness and frame rate reduction. This sluggishness gives an overall taxing feel to the whole interface....like the computer is struggling with something. I do have a massive collection indeed, however I also have a massive computer and this sort of performance should not be the case. I have tried disabling animations, details, and transition types... still the same performance. Any suggestions or help would be great! Attached some system specs below. As you can see a very high end system so I'm not sure what's happening.

@Jason Carr I said I would record a video of the performance issues I was having with BB. I mentioned it Monday on the stream but have had this problem only much worse for the last month or two at least. You asked me to remove the custom filters from my LB altogether and I must say, it has helped immensely. The video is after I removed the filters. Thing is, it is, as you might be able to tell, still very very slow. At least BB doesn't freeze for over a minute while changing platforms anymore. I was wondering if you could take a quick peek at the video and tell me if that kind of hitching and slowdowns is a normal thing for BB with a large library. My LB is installed onto my Samsung 850Pro 512GB SSD so the storage throughput is certainly not an issue. I also tried putting my LB on both of my 4TB HGST NAS drives and on an old as the hills and twice as crusty 1TB Toshiba desktop drive and it performs essentially identical with the only drive causing even slightly slower browsing being the Toshiba, which is to be expected. The long load time for BB to open initially is no big deal for me, really. I would gladly have it take minutes longer if it could just scroll smoothly. I know it is not for me to say here, since this is your baby and all that. LB seems to very rarely if ever use more than one core. Would it not be a good idea to have subsequent cores load games ahead of time instead of relying on just the one core to do it all? Also, I recall you mentioning on another thread some time ago that LB/BB has to scan through the entire library while loading metadata or images, something like that. Pre-loading ahead of time might be a good place to start. But you don't have to take my word for it... Core i5 6600K @4.5Ghz | R9380@1010Mhz | 16GB 2x8 G.Skill Ripjaw @ 3200Mhz | Windows 10 Pro X64 | Samsung850 Pro 512GB SSD | LaunchBox/BigBox 7.0-4