LaunchBox Beta Testing

[SentaiBrad]

Are you on the latest beta? Should have been fixed.

[spycat]

Using beta 13.

[SentaiBrad]

Huh, ok. Well at least it's not out right crashing.

[cash84]

I was able to run zip files. I tried one of the playstation zip file and it would take about 10-15 seconds for it to unzip before the game loads. If I have the game unzipped and loaded into launchbox, launchbox would launch the game almost instantly. Have others discover how long this takes to unzip?

[SentaiBrad]

The bigger the game the longer the unziping or unraring process will take, that's just the nature of the beast. Your CPU strength will also dictate the speed of decompression as well.

[CADScott]

Where you have your LaunchBox directory also makes a very large difference to the speed of unzipping. I have my LaunchBox directory on a very fast SSD drive, and the zipped roms on on a secondary mechanical drive. This means that when the rom is unzipped, it is being read from the mechanical drive, and decompressed and written to the much faster SSD (In the 7Zip temp directory inside LaunchBox's directory). This make it very fast to decompress, and I actually don't really notice much of a difference between the speed of a compressed or uncompressed image for PSX games.

[SentaiBrad]

Be careful with writing data to an SSD that often it can kill the SSD faster.

[CADScott]

I am not too concerned with writing too much data to this SSD, it is an 850 EVO Pro, which is warrantied for 150TB of writes over 10 years, which amounts to 41GB per day, very day for the entire 10 years! I very much doubt I will ever hit that much, but it is certainly something to keep in mind for the lower end SSDs.

[CADScott]

On a separate note, I am no longer getting email notifications for forum posts on my subscribed topics. I haven't changed any settings and they are not going through to spam, is anyone else getting this issue? I have had it for about 3-4 days I think.

[SentaiBrad]

No, that's strange. I'm getting the e-mails from your replies. Unsubscribe and re-subscribe to the thread?

[CADScott]

I have tried that, no effect, and it is not just a single topic, I am subscribed to at least 4 active topics and all notification emails have ceased.

[cash84]

The file size is about 500mb and it isn't located on the computer, I have it on my server with a gigabit connection. I may just keep the games unzipped since I like things to load instant. I can see that it could take time to unzip. Would there be a difference in speed if you use different type of compression? Like either using 7z or rar or just a typical windows zip?

[DOS76]

When the feature was 1st implemented I tested it and yes different types of compression got different results I was also using it from files located on my server over Gigabit. I believe that a few of the post in this thread document my results.

[SentaiBrad]

If you choose a Store or Fast compression for the games though, yea they'll uncompress faster but be a lot closer in size to before you archived it. If you want it to load instantly then don't compress your games. The only compression I do on my games is CSO and WBFS games. They're not compressed with WinRar or 7zip, but it's only for PSP, PS2 and Wii. Apparently someone on the YouTube channel was saying that their cue sheet loaded up a ecmed PS1 game they had, I was under the impression that you needed to decompress the ecm off of PS1 games for them to work, so there might be that to look in to as well. These compression methods are more native and don't require extra programs to run, just to do the compression.

[Jason Carr]

Yeah, decompressing large disc-based ROMs isn't recommended for performance reasons. It takes a pretty killer CPU to be able to do that quickly. We're relying on 7-zip to do the decompression of course, so there's nothing we can do to improve the performance (I'm sure 7-zip already does a pretty killer job doing things as quick as possible). In the future it makes sense to add in a caching system so that frequently or last-played games aren't decompressed every time, but that's a ways down the road. @CADScott, I'm wondering if maybe your email provider (noticed you have a fairly unique sent.com email address) might have all the sudden just decided emails from us are spam. Actually, ha, I just checked my email logs:

Spoiler

Failed: forums@launchboxapi.com → e-mail removed for privacy 'Forum Post - LaunchBox: [How can we contribute to the Launchbox Games Database? Beta & Moderator Signups!]' Not delivering to a user who marked your messages as spam

So apparently somehow one of our messages got reported as spam from your email, and our email system says "okay, no more email for you!" when that happens. Lololol. Not sure how to reset that. I'll look into it.

[Jason Carr]

scree, I'm going to look into that error, thanks. It's an odd one but I'll see what I can do.

[CADScott]

Jason Carr said Yeah, decompressing large disc-based ROMs isn't recommended for performance reasons. It takes a pretty killer CPU to be able to do that quickly. We're relying on 7-zip to do the decompression of course, so there's nothing we can do to improve the performance (I'm sure 7-zip already does a pretty killer job doing things as quick as possible). In the future it makes sense to add in a caching system so that frequently or last-played games aren't decompressed every time, but that's a ways down the road. @CADScott, I'm wondering if maybe your email provider (noticed you have a fairly unique sent.com email address) might have all the sudden just decided emails from us are spam. Actually, ha, I just checked my email logs:

Spoiler

Failed: forums@launchboxapi.com → email 'Forum Post - LaunchBox: [How can we contribute to the Launchbox Games Database? Beta & Moderator Signups!]' Not delivering to a user who marked your messages as spam

So apparently somehow one of our messages got reported as spam from your email, and our email system says "okay, no more email for you!" when that happens. Lololol. Not sure how to reset that. I'll look into it.

@Jason, weird, I certainly don't remember marking anything from LaunchBox as spam! Though my email client is quite weird sometimes with keyword filtering and marking some normal emails as spam. If you can reset this that would be great, if not, I will have to change my email address for the forum. Also Jason, could you please edit your above post to remove my email address from the text, really want to try to reduce it from being easily known to reduce spam.

[SentaiBrad]

I went ahead and removed it since I saw it first. It might not even be your client but rather the provider. Outlook / Hotmail / MSN / Microsoft does some weird crap to mine. I wish the last 15 years of important e-mail addresses that e-mail me were all ported to Gmail or something. I don't mean forwarded, I mean completely moved over. My hotmail doesn't exist but it still all goes to my gmail or a new gmail since my current one I try to make it more business focused. xD

[CADScott]

My email is actually on online one, so my client and provider are actually kind of the same. I will have a good look at the settings in the online portal and try to turn off span for anything to do with LaunchBox, but hopefully Jason can reset the error at your end.

[Jason Carr]

CADScott said My email is actually on online one, so my client and provider are actually kind of the same. I will have a good look at the settings in the online portal and try to turn off span for anything to do with LaunchBox, but hopefully Jason can reset the error at your end.

Apologies, @CADScott. I looked into how to reset it and got nowhere. So I'm moving on for now. Pretty odd, that's for sure; sorry for the trouble, wish I had a good solution for it.