8.4-beta-1 Released

[Jason Carr]

Beta 9 is out now with the following:

• Fixing LaunchBox.Next volume control zero by default for upgraders (will override everyone's volume control to 75% on first launch)
• Reduced the LaunchBox.Next background caching thread count so it doesn't get in the way as much when navigating the interface
• Fixed LaunchBox.Next recursive welcome and add games windows opening and refusing to close on Windows 7
• Fixed the LaunchBox.Next top menu drop down arrows on Windows 7
• Improved the LaunchBox.Next volume control usability by adding mouse wheel as well as arrow key support
• Added additional music playback formats for music and background music
• Removing a game from a playlist in LaunchBox.Next no longer resets to the All view
• Removed the System node from the Options window in LaunchBox.Next, because it is no longer relevant

[Jason Carr]

@MadK9 Are you on Windows 7 by chance?

[MadK9]

nope, WIndows 10. 

But it does seem to be intermittent for some reason.

Doing a reinstall tonight, so will get back to you see if it was something my end. Just found it weird that in the old LB was fine, yet next it acted different;y.

 

Will post back and let you know the outcome.

[kmoney]

Kinda having the same issue as @MadK9 I added some games manually a few days ago and I had to scroll to the new game added as LB Next did not automatically show the new game as regular LaunchBox does. I thought I remember a few betas ago that you put in some fixes for that but it appears to still be happening. On Windows 10 as well.

[Retro808]

So just noticed an odd issue. Occurs in Next (beta 9 - I even tested on beta 8 ) and only with Mame (no other emulator). When exiting a game or even if I right click a game and choose open Mame than exit Mame LBNext will either close completely or be stuck and I have to minimize it from the task bar to get it to be functional. Did not notice until now as mainly I have been playing other systems in the last couple betas. Updated Mame from 198 to 199 and still does the same. OG Launchbox and BigBox do not suffer this issue. 

Run as admin is not being used. 

[DOS76]

I'm on Beta 9 and MAME 0.199 but can't replicate the issue.

[Retro808]

51 minutes ago, DOS76 said:

I'm on Beta 9 and MAME 0.199 but can't replicate the issue.

Thanks Dos. I have not tested on my main cabinet yet. Using command line Mame and nothing has moved folder or drive wise. This is the first I have seen it happen. Everything else functions as it should. 

Edit: Test pc and main cabinet same issue. The pc builds are pretty similar. Just different RAM and Graphics card. Even tried a fresh install of Mame in case there was some old bug in the prior versions I updated. Odd that it is only Mame that causes the issue. 

[Charco]

What OS are you running?

[Retro808]

@Charco Win 10 on both. Laptop with Win 10 is fine. No issue. Only the 2 pc's. Even tried clean install of both LB and Mame in a different drive. Same issue.

[Retro808]

Figured it out. If I have mame video setting on anything other than openGL on these two machines Next does not like it. If I set it to auto, d3d or bgfx I get the issue mentioned. I must have changed something testing. Dang 8 year old Intel celeron laptop does not have this issue and I leave it set on auto in the video settings. 

[Jason Carr]

Beta 10 is out now with game controller support for LaunchBox.Next (finally). I took a slightly different approach than OG LaunchBox, but I believe this provides much better accessibility throughout. Basically, the controller just acts as the standard Windows mouse cursor. The buttons can still be assigned to do the same various tasks, sans for two of them: full screen (which doesn't exist and isn't planned to since .Next is already full screen when you turn off the sidebars) and top menu, which is pretty much irrelevant.

@MadK9 Any update on that issue you were having?

@kmoney I'm not sure if your issue is the same as @MadK9's. It sounds like it's not showing in the list at all for him, though I could be wrong. I haven't been able to replicate .Next not scrolling to the new game though. Does it happen every time for you?

@Retro808 That's an odd one. The only thing I can figure is some kind of darn video driver bug, but if it's freezing .Next, there may still be something I can do to get around it. The problem is figuring out where it's happening in the code. I'll at least see if I can replicate it by changing MAME.

[Jason Carr]

@Retro808 Of course, I can't replicate it. My setting was set to auto, and tried all the other options and none of them caused issues. So, hmm.

[Retro808]

Thanks @Jason Carr for trying to replicate. Definitely odd it only affects Next. I tested a bunch of setting changes, clean installs, only thing I have not done is an video driver update check. Both pc’s I know are on the same driver release. Just do not remember if it is the latest. Will have to test that when I get home from this business trip. For now at least with it set to opengl no issues. 

[Suhrvivor]

I had the same issue of @Retro808 a couple of times, the LaunchBox.next's window becomes unresponsive and when you try to click in something it passes through to whatever it's behind, be the desktop or another application. It's solved by minimizing and restoring the LaunchBox window. I didn't figured out as much as Retro about it. I'll try tomorrow when I'm home to see if I can replicate the issue with MAME.

[kmoney]

2 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

 

@kmoney I'm not sure if your issue is the same as @MadK9's. It sounds like it's not showing in the list at all for him, though I could be wrong. I haven't been able to replicate .Next not scrolling to the new game though. Does it happen every time for you?

 

@Jason CarrI did a little bit more testing and it appears that if you are in game platform and you are at the very top of the games list in that platform and you add a game manually, LB Next does indeed automatically scroll and highlight the game you just added. But if you are somewhere else in the games list such as in the middle for instance, LB Next does not automatically scroll up or down and hightlight the new game added as regular LaunchBox did.

[MadK9]

Sorry for the lateness getting back here, i wanted to check things out more fully.

Im noticing in Beta 9 the unresponsiveness of LB Next at times, where it doesn't crash, but just fails to do anything which results in ending the task, tried to do the same things i did in Next on the original LB and had no issues.

With the what felt like caching/refresh problems i referenced, its still affecting me, but i will say it doesn't see quite so bad, but that maybe a placebo effect.

I tried a bunch more stuff, i closed all non needed tasks. programs, did a fresh install of LB all was fine for awhile,then on a larger system i started to notice the issues more and more.

I did have something that i noticed though. I was adding 3DBoxes/Clear Logos to Wii games i had added, now i could add the images select the correct type, and click ok, now nothing happened no refresh, just left the default grey box, yet i added another logo combo to another game right next to that one, and click ok, the screen did a quick refresh and both games showed the correct images. As i said in my first post, it feels like the refresh doesn't always happen, in Original LB you see a small flicker as the image gets updated, in Next i don't always see this and when that happens then no image appears, yet when i get the small flicker the images always show. 

 

Not much more to add other than this was a fresh install of Win10, and very few applications installed, wanted to try and keep the machine as fresh as possible.

Small additions.

Forgot to mention this time i changed my nvidia drivers and went back one revision (i did this on the fresh install of windows, i didn't roll back), as Surround doesn't work properly for x3 screens on the latest drivers, only allows 2 monitors when your 1x3. But i got the issue still with the older driver.

I've just allowed Beta 10 to update, and i will do some more checking and see if anything has changed or is still the same.

If you need to chat to me, i'm pretty much always on Discord in LB and my own (im UK based but i keep US hours), or just poke @Lordmonkus to poke me with a stick.

Edited July 17, 2018 by MadK9

[MadK9]

I had a thought, i had not been using my triple screen setup for quite sometime, but i didn't play about much in Next until Beta 8, and as it happens i got hold of a triple tree for my monitors so went back to using triple screen and i transitioned over to x3 screens at the same time using LB Next. Maybe there could be a correlation there some where. When i get a chance tomorrow i will go down to two screens again and try that.

Beta10 still does the same with the images, this time i deleted an image i didn't want, and Next was set to show that image type, and once i hit ok nothing happened, i had to scroll the game off screen again.

[TheMadMan007]

I've avoided using LB.Next until the weird different colored boxes around the games got removed.  Looks like that finally got resolved and also Controller support too. The one final thing that seems to be weird is that the box art images do not resize. When I move the slider down at the bottom, it just gives more spacing, it doesn't resize the image like original LB does. I'm running my PC on a projector and sitting at least 18 feet back on a 100" screen, my display scaling is 150%, I was thinking that might have been an issue, but it looks like that isn't the case. Does anyone else have this, is it a known issue? Am I just missing something? 

 

I also did try going into the settings and mess around with the spacing options, but that didn't seem to make a difference at all. 

[Lordmonkus]

13 minutes ago, TheMadMan007 said:

I also did try going into the settings and mess around with the spacing options, but that didn't seem to make a difference at all. 

As of beta 10, which just came out, we now have game controller features in .Next. There's only two items left, which should go fairly quickly:

Custom spacing options (with # of text lines too)
Mouse cursor popup options
I should be able to implement these this week, and then we'll look to put out the next official release. Assuming all goes as expected, the 8.4 release will be the last official release to contain OG LaunchBox.

 

[Tromzy]

With latest beta, if I launch Launchbox-Next, my mouse pointer keeps getting pushed to the right of the screen.

 

Edit : fixed by unplugging one of my controllers.

Edited July 17, 2018 by Tromzy