Jump to content
LaunchBox Community Forums

7.7-beta-10 Released


Jason Carr

Recommended Posts

@Jason Carr Hey buddy just wanted to let you know now before you do a release. I am silly and haven't opened BB for a few betas. I thought LB was seeming a bit sluggish in startup speed but now that I have done a few launches of BB, it's MUCH worse now. I have uploaded a video to show you what I mean.

 

See, normally, BB was launching just barely after the first playthrough of the startup video. As you can see in the video, this is no longer the case. It plays all the way through quite a few times before launching and the city zone background video starts frozen. This time I was actually able to get control of the cursor but three launches before this, I was not able to get control and BB had effectively frozen up, so this is actually the fastest and most usable of over 5 launches. I had made a backup of my data folder before combining roms and restoring this made zero difference. If there is anything else I can do to help you troubleshoot this further, let me know!

 

EDIT: Forgot to mention that the menus and such are MUCH less peppy and some of the time while recording this video I lost control for a few seconds before it would move to the next platform. Also, same drive, same drivers even, literally nothing has changed in my configuration since it was working fine.

Edited by cammelspit
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, staticfade said:

@CriticalCidwith the update the theme (not the bundled one but the one in the forum) that doesn't have background video does that need to be updated to have the 2nd screen marquee to work? 

You have to update it manually. I just updated the version without the background video as well and it can be now downloaded in the download section :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

@cammelspit Sigh, odd. Haven't really touched Big Box at all for this release, since the remember views feature at least. The only thing I can think of would be having more additional applications and less games. Did you do any merging?

1

As I mentioned, it seems that LaunchBox itself is also having problems too but they are less apparent AFAIK. I attempted to use my data from before I merged anything and the same behavior was observed so I can safely assume the merging itself is not the cause. Though, it could have something to do with checking them while loading the database. It's rather late right now, nearly 1AM so I am not going to be doing a huge amount of testing right now but if you like, I can try and bisect where the issue occurs. All of the installers as far back as November are there so I will see if I can backtrack it, version by version and see exactly where the problem first happened. Just wish they had the actual version numbers on them instead of random strings of letters and number. :P

I likely would have been able to point it out earlier but I have had some silly stuff going on around the house to the point where my last few weekends have been taken up installing security cameras around the property and I have had very little time to mess around with LB/BB since before then.

Never fear Jason, I think you know me well enough by now to know how determined I can be in tracking down this sort of thing and beta testing the snot out of it... I love breaking things. :D 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Jason Carr Was just thinking, maybe it's the late hour but I think I may have a suggestion for tracking things down. If you have ever used it, Dolphin actually has a bisecting tool. What it does is it has a database of all the versions of Dolphin and will download and install a separate copy of Dolphin into a folder. From here, a user would test this version to see if their issue exists and if it does, it will download an older version. If the issue does not exist it will split the difference between the version known to have the issue and those known not to have it and try again. So, essentially, the user does the testing but the tool does all of the tedious work of downloading and setting up each version till the exact revision the issue started to happen is found. This is then reported to the DEVs so they can inspect the changes made to find the bug or regression. This kind of tool could be invaluable in the right hands. Heck, maybe even make a small team of dedicated users and make them official testers for the new features before they roll out to the stable release. I, for one, would wholeheartedly volunteer for such a task. Just another one of my random thoughts... And now, I sleep! :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, cammelspit said:

Just wish they had the actual version numbers on them instead of random strings of letters and number

Hey @cammelspit

Before you get started, I'd like to give you a tip to rename those guid files in the update folder.

  1. Sort the update folder by "Date Modified" descending 
  2. Right-click on each guid file then select properties
  3. Go to the details tab and you should see the Product version of each file
  4. Rename your file to the Product version

You probably know all that but if that can help someone else, great! :)

 

589d83a7d9917_2017-02-1004_10_25-6effcf37-d3ec-4bdd-ad41-8436cb5f051b.exeProperties.thumb.png.be42d61909e5f23fcbd158cd7946096c.png

Edited by Pacman56
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ok I don't see a new post for beta 12 so I'll post here I reimported my Arcade platform and LB gave a version name to everything so games with short names are displaying the title and the rom name as a version in LB turning off show versions under views fixes it but I was using that on a few other platforms

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Jason Carr Alright, after testing 7.6 and 7.5 stable I observed the exact same behavior. I have however tracked down what the setting it is that is causing this slow startup. Voice Recognition. See, I have recently purchased an entry level condenser mic and audio interface and I had enabled voice recognition in LB. Strangely, it didn't work at all but I had forgotten to disable it thinking that I would troubleshoot why it wasn't working. Now on the latest 7.7-12 with voice off and it starts in exactly the same amount of time I expected it to. Sorry for raising the alarm here, this is not a regression. This will be something to look into for later versions but it works properly now. Next time anyone has any major performance issues we should try and remember that voice recognition might be a possible cause. Now I feel better.... Whew... :D 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Whew, good to know @cammelspit. Yes, voice recognition has always been cause for huge performance issues. One of these days we'll have to get back to it but I have a feeling it'll be a nightmare again when we do, unfortunately.

7 hours ago, DOS76 said:

Ok I don't see a new post for beta 12 so I'll post here I reimported my Arcade platform and LB gave a version name to everything so games with short names are displaying the title and the rom name as a version in LB turning off show versions under views fixes it but I was using that on a few other platforms

@DOS76 Yes, imports will now import into the version field, which is a big win for some people, especially folks who don't want to combine their games. So if you have LaunchBox showing versions, you will indeed see that information. If you don't want it, then it should be easy enough to batch edit the games and empty it out.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Beta 13 is out now guys. Unfortunately we did not, in fact, fix that music null reference bug, so I've added some more logging into the music code to see if we can figure it out further. Unfortunately at this point I'm wondering if it's a bug with VLC itself, much like we've run into in the past. I'm tempted to do something extreme like throw all the music code into a separate process so that it can't affect LaunchBox or Big Box if it goes haywire, but that's not exactly a good solution either.

To clarify for anyone who hasn't been following this issue, this happens both in LaunchBox and Big Box only when using music in one way or another. Sometimes it causes a random crash, sometimes it causes a NullReferenceException error with no stack trace, and sometimes both. I have been able to replicate it myself, but it happens so rarely that it's been really hard pin down. So anyways, this is the last thing to resolve before we're ready for a release, but I refuse to put it out until we finally lay this to rest. This bug is gonna die, one way or another.

  • Like 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Jason Carr Forgot to let you know that Platform Video downloads are working perfect except for 1 video, Bakerman has a theme video called Capcom Classics which should be linked to the Capcom Systems Capcom CPS1, Capcom CPS2 AND Capcom CPS3, also i have music (mp3's) in the Background folder inside the Music folder in LaunchBox, but LaunchBox itself says there is no music on the bottom music bar yet it works perfectly in BigBox.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Jason Carr

This morning I tested the Combine ROMs import process against my "Atari 7800" (No-Intro) romsets using LB 7.7-beta-14 and came across a problem in the prioritization.
First of all, I should mention that my Region Priorities are set to {"Canada", "United States", "North America", "World"} in that order.
After importing these roms, I noticed that 3 games had not been prioritized as configured. See below.
All other games having a USA and Europe versions were imported as expected.
Perhaps the problem with these roms is due to the fact that "Mario Bros." and "Ms. Pac-Man" have a dot character as part of the game title, while "Super Skateboardin'" has this single quote character at the end of the game title.
I hope this information will help making this Combine feature 100%. :)

I am including a 7zip file containing Fake roms like I did for the Apple II to make this easier for you to reproduce the problem. 
Note: This problem was reproducible with 7.7-beta-13 as well. 

  • Mario Bros. (Europe).rar <- was the default game. The USA version should have been the default game.
  • Mario Bros. (USA).rar
  • Ms. Pac-Man (Europe).rar <- was the default game. The USA version should have been the default game
  • Ms. Pac-Man (USA).rar
  • Super Skateboardin' (Europe).rar <- was not combined with the USA version
  • Super Skateboardin' (USA).rar <- was not combined with the Europe version

Atari 7800 - FakeRoms.7z

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Jason Carr

I should have mentioned in my previous post that a side effect of these problems is that I see "Play Mario Bros Version..." twice when you right click on the game title. In other words, you can't tell which version is which.

However, this side effect should presumably however go away once the parsing of these roms with special characters is addressed. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...