LaunchBox with Linux and Wine: almost works

[francis]

Hi,

I have tried LaunchBox with wine. it can be installed, but doesn't work very well.

In fact, it is useless. It randomly craches, and there is a lot of glitches in some menus.

But there is a lot of things that work very well, so it is not hopeless.

Here is the method, tested with Linux Mint 17.3, Ubuntu 15.10 and Wine 1.8 :

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa

sudo apt-get update

Install Wine wine1.8:i386 and Winetricks.

sudo apt-get install wine1.8:i386

Configure Wine : Windows version 7 or above.

Do not install mono, it's useless.

Install Framework 4.5.2 (as explained here : https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=31023 ):

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks

bash winetricks dotnet452 corefonts

Finally download LaunchBox and install it.

What works?

You can launch LaunchBox, import ROMS and import datas from TheGamesDB. A lot of other things work.

What does not?

As I said, it crasches randomly. Menus for import games are hard to read. Besides, it's impossible to launch games... Too bad, but I would say it is not so far to work. The two big problems are: some menus and to launch games.

Edited March 1, 2018 by francis

[SentaiBrad]

I am very surprised you got that far. I tested it for about 2 or 3 hours and got no where, Wine did not want to cooperate.

[francis]

Have you installed wine1.8:i386 ? wine1.8 won't work.

[SentaiBrad]

I don't even remember at this point but it really doesn't matter I guess since Its still broken. We want to officially support Linux and Mac in the future but right now we're just trying to focus on Windows. The issue was .Net Framework is, or was, broken in wine. There is a new version coming that is supposed to be more usable in Wine. Once that is available we might try again, but even then it might still be broken.

[francis]

Invisible choices :

[Jason Carr]

That's pretty cool, @francis; glad it's at least partially working now. How is the game scrolling performance, etc.? I'll add an item to my list to review this and see what I can troubleshoot. It's hard to say how difficult it would be to fix those WINE bugs until I experiment a bit.

[francis]

When it works, scrolling is not very good, not too bad either, it is reasonably usable. But general performance is good, there is no problem to access menus or to import roms, it is fast. There is problem to edit games, the display of the edit window don't allow to valid directly the modifications (it is possible with "enter"). I can post the general error message. I have notice that, after it has crashed, LaunchBox finally works when I try two or three times to launch it. If I have the time, I will make a video.

Spoiler

System.IO.IOException: Pas d'accès à l'emplacement mémoire. at System.IO.__Error.WinIOError(Int32 errorCode, String maybeFullPath) at System.IO.FileStream.ReadCore(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 count) at System.IO.FileStream.Read(Byte[] array, Int32 offset, Int32 count) at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.ReadData() at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.ParseText(Int32& startPos, Int32& endPos, Int32& outOrChars) at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.ParseText() at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.ParseElementContent() at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.Read() at System.Xml.XmlTextReader.Read() at System.Xml.XmlLoader.LoadNode(Boolean skipOverWhitespace) at System.Xml.XmlLoader.ReadCurrentNode(XmlDocument doc, XmlReader reader) at System.Xml.XmlDocument.ReadNode(XmlReader reader) at System.Data.DataSet.ReadXml(XmlReader reader, Boolean denyResolving) at System.Data.DataSet.ReadXml(String fileName) at LaunchBox.Search.LocalDb.get_DataSet() at LaunchBox.Search.LocalDb.GetEmulators() at LaunchBox.Data.DataManager.Load(Boolean settingsOnly) at LaunchBox.Data.DataManager..ctor(Boolean bare, Boolean settingsOnly) at LaunchBox.Program.Main(String[] args)

[francis]

And there is a little error of translation when importing rom : « Coisir un émulateur: » > « Choisir un émulateur : ». Edit : in fact, scrolling is very good with almost 280 games.

[francis]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0i1hN_RdRCk

[Jason Carr]

Wow, very cool. That's exciting. That error looks to be a glitch with the XML reading apparently under WINE. Not sure what I could do to fix that other than to completely rewrite the XML engine. Do you know if there's someone we can report the glitch to?

[francis]

It is possible to add launchbox to the Wine Application Database and to describe the problems.

[DarkPhoenix]

Unfortunately, .NET as a cross-platform option tends to suck. Badly :-/ Too bad, because C# actually is a half-decent programming language (I had to use it on my last full-time job).