9.4-beta-1 Released

[Jason Carr]

Beta 3 is out now with one thing: VLC upgraded to the latest version. The VLC 3.x series was majorly restructured, so there was some major work needed to get the new version integrated. In addition, testing is appreciated, because it is possible that the new version could cause stability issues. I've run Big Box in attract mode all night long though, and haven't run into any problems, so hopefully we'll be good to go.

The first launch of this beta will take a lot longer than usual, as the VLC folder will get removed and replaced with the new versions.

[runsamok]

1 hour ago, Jason Carr said:

Are you certain that you have Auto-Play Music in LaunchBox disabled? The only other thing I can think of with this is that maybe the system just can't pause the music quick enough. I've never seen it do this before, and it's strange because your specs don't look like they're slow enough to cause those kinds of issues.

Per your external hard drive, is it USB 3.0? The only performance issue I can think of with your specs is that maybe the hard drive is just slow.

110% sure it's off. My LaunchBox is silent running, no autoplaying music or movies (in contrast to my BigBox settings which are ear & eye candy to the max). 

My drive is a 5TB USB3.0 Seagate Expansion Desktop Drive & has been fine holding my Steam library for years.

[Jason Carr]

25 minutes ago, runsamok said:

110% sure it's off. My LaunchBox is silent running, no autoplaying music or movies (in contrast to my BigBox settings which are ear & eye candy to the max). 

My drive is a 5TB USB3.0 Seagate Expansion Desktop Drive & has been fine holding my Steam library for years.

I'm lost on a lot of stuff then with your system, unfortunately. It's really difficult for me to figure out what might be going on without access to the system, of course, but it seems like for some reason you're running into a bunch of issues that I haven't seen elsewhere. I know you've already talked about background processes, but I would try exiting literally everything to see if something might be causing it. Usually weird stuff like this is caused by anti-virus software or similar, but not always. Sorry I haven't been more helpful; I just don't have a whole lot to go on and haven't had any ideas as to what might be happening thus far.

[JPGIII]

Update to beta3 from beta2 caused Launchbox to fail to start for me, no listed errors. It would get to the end of initializing then just quit out like it was closing without ever loading the interface. I reinstalled beta3 manually but still no joy there.  I went back and reverted to 9.3 and was back in action. Didn't attempt to move to any of the betas again as of yet. I know just saying this isn't super helpful but I can grab any particular logs you may want.

 

Edit: For the beta3 I did wait about 5 minutes after it closed out to see if it was updating anything unseen in the background. Pulled up the task manager but didn't see any VLC or Launchbox related processes running after it closed out. If it helps, I install directly into Dropbox.

Edited January 24, 2019 by JPGIII

[runsamok]

1 hour ago, Jason Carr said:

 I know you've already talked about background processes, but I would try exiting literally everything to see if something might be causing it. Usually weird stuff like this is caused by anti-virus software or similar, but not always. 

The weird sound issue seems resolved with the latest beta, so that's something. No change with regards to the startup screen stuff, either with my system as normally configured or after I've gone through the process & services list & shut off everything I could identify as being non-system. As far as antivirus goes, I'm running nothing but whatever's bundled in Windows 10 at the default, out-of-box configuration. 

[Jason Carr]

1 hour ago, JPGIII said:

Update to beta3 from beta2 caused Launchbox to fail to start for me, no listed errors. It would get to the end of initializing then just quit out like it was closing without ever loading the interface. I reinstalled beta3 manually but still no joy there.  I went back and reverted to 9.3 and was back in action. Didn't attempt to move to any of the betas again as of yet. I know just saying this isn't super helpful but I can grab any particular logs you may want.

 

Edit: For the beta3 I did wait about 5 minutes after it closed out to see if it was updating anything unseen in the background. Pulled up the task manager but didn't see any VLC or Launchbox related processes running after it closed out. If it helps, I install directly into Dropbox.

Okay; it may be something with the VLC upgrade. Try deleting the LaunchBox\VLC folder and then upgrading to the beta again. It's also possible that the new VLC code has caused some kind of different issue. Are you running it from a network drive, by chance?

43 minutes ago, runsamok said:

The weird sound issue seems resolved with the latest beta, so that's something. No change with regards to the startup screen stuff, either with my system as normally configured or after I've gone through the process & services list & shut off everything I could identify as being non-system. As far as antivirus goes, I'm running nothing but whatever's bundled in Windows 10 at the default, out-of-box configuration. 

I'm glad to hear that the sound issue is fixed; at least that makes me think that we're not going crazy. I didn't do anything to fix it other than upgrading VLC, but VLC is used for the music playback, so I suppose it's possible that there was some kind of weird glitch with the previous version of VLC. Per the startup screen stuff, I'm more inclined to believe there's something going on with emulator settings or even video drivers or something of that nature. Since there were several reported issues with the startup screens, we'd have to take it one at a time. I guess I would start with trying to get Retroarch to work with something simple like NES. I never asked though, are you using Rocket Launcher?

 

[kmoney]

@Jason Carr I am not sure if LaunchBox VLC is reading the vlc.cfg file or not. For instance I changed Video output inside of VLC Tools/Preferences from Automatic to OpenGL and saved and I can see that it changed the setting when I open up the vlc.cfg file with notepad++. VLC wrote the change in the file but then I go back into tools/preferences and it is showing automatic again for video output instead of opengl even though the vlc.cfg reads opengl.

[Jason Carr]

1 minute ago, kmoney said:

@Jason Carr I am not sure if LaunchBox VLC is reading the vlc.cfg file or not. For instance I changed Video output inside of VLC Tools/Preferences from Automatic to OpenGL and I can see that it changed the setting when I opened up the vlc.cfg file with notepad++. It wrote the change in the file but then I go back into tools/preferences and it is showing automatic again for video output instead of opengl even though the vlc.cfg reads opengl.

Hmm, that is possible. I verified that it was writing the file, and not writing the one in AppData, but admittedly I did not verify that it was actually using those settings. But would they really make it so that it would write the settings but not read them? I mean, really? Lol. I'll take a look. ?‍♂️

[Jason Carr]

4 minutes ago, kmoney said:

@Jason Carr I am not sure if LaunchBox VLC is reading the vlc.cfg file or not. For instance I changed Video output inside of VLC Tools/Preferences from Automatic to OpenGL and I can see that it changed the setting when I opened up the vlc.cfg file with notepad++. It wrote the change in the file but then I go back into tools/preferences and it is showing automatic again for video output instead of opengl even though the vlc.cfg reads opengl.

I'm not sure about using OpenGL with WPF though; that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, since LaunchBox and Big Box are on the Microsoft/DirectX stack.

[kmoney]

4 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

I'm not sure about using OpenGL with WPF though; that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, since LaunchBox and Big Box are on the Microsoft/DirectX stack.

I wasn't really planning on using opengl, I was just using as an example in doing some testing...lol

[runsamok]

9 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

Per the startup screen stuff, I'm more inclined to believe there's something going on with emulator settings or even video drivers or something of that nature. Since there were several reported issues with the startup screens, we'd have to take it one at a time. I guess I would start with trying to get Retroarch to work with something simple like NES. I never asked though, are you using Rocket Launcher?

My emulators work fine, the only weird startup/shutdown issue I have with anything other than DOS games is that unless I disable the start/stop screens or close out/minimise all the other windows on my system that LaunchBox doesn't regain focus, as it'll be behind everything else, one app up from the desktop. DOS games kick out of fullscreen at the start & require some manipulation to get them showing fullscreen again, on top of the same issue with the focus of LaunchBox when they're done.

[Jason Carr]

2 minutes ago, runsamok said:

My emulators work fine, the only weird startup/shutdown issue I have with anything other than DOS games is that unless I disable the start/stop screens or close out/minimise all the other windows on my system that LaunchBox doesn't regain focus, as it'll be behind everything else, one app up from the desktop. DOS games kick out of fullscreen at the start & require some manipulation to get them showing fullscreen again, on top of the same issue with the focus of LaunchBox when they're done.

Yes, and that not regaining focus issue is one that I've tested back and forth and cannot replicate, regardless of how many or what other windows are open in the background. So that's not a normal issue, and I'm trying to figure out what might be causing it. Are you running Rocket Launcher?

[runsamok]

Nope. Just LaunchBox. And it only happens with LaunchBox. BigBox drops in & outta games like a champ with the screens enabled. (DOS game issue previously described aside.)

Edited January 24, 2019 by runsamok

[Jason Carr]

1 minute ago, runsamok said:

Nope. Just LaunchBox. And it only happens with LaunchBox. BigBox drops in & outta games like a champ with the screens enabled. 

Hmm, okay. Can you PM me your LaunchBox\Data\Settings.xml file? I'm wondering if there's a setting in there somewhere that could be causing it. The fact that Big Box works but LaunchBox doesn't is a good clue.

[Retrofrogg]

In the game details pane, can we have the game title screenshot appear above any other screenshots? Currently the order seems to be random, as each time I click on the game the order is different.

[neil9000]

2 minutes ago, Retrofrogg said:

In the game details pane, can we have the game title screenshot appear above any other screenshots? Currently the order seems to be random, as each time I click on the game the order is different.

But what about people like myself that dont want the game title screenshot first? If it was added it would need to be a option that the user could specify in the options. So not as easy as just changing the priorities in the code for Jason.

[Retrofrogg]

Yes, I suppose allowing the user the option would be ideal - but more work, as you say.

Edited January 24, 2019 by Retrofrogg

[Belgarath]

18 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

Beta 3 is out now with one thing: VLC upgraded to the latest version. The VLC 3.x series was majorly restructured, so there was some major work needed to get the new version integrated. In addition, testing is appreciated, because it is possible that the new version could cause stability issues. I've run Big Box in attract mode all night long though, and haven't run into any problems, so hopefully we'll be good to go.

The first launch of this beta will take a lot longer than usual, as the VLC folder will get removed and replaced with the new versions.

I'm not at home at the moment but I had a strange problem with the new beta at first, the startup movies weren't playing properly, I could hear them but it was just a black screen, this happened twice but after that it seemed to start working again.

Also my favourite theme retrotastic seems to have major issues with this new beta, long error messages were popping up in most of the views and the transition video (video static) when you scroll through the games wasn't displaying at all, it just showed some text which said something about out of player instances.

 

@Jason Carr @faeran

 

edit: ok..no idea what's going on now, all I did was update to the new beta and Retrotastic stopped working..but to be sure I downloaded a new copy of the theme and it's working fine....very puzzled.

Edited January 24, 2019 by Belgarath

[GreenGriffon]

8 hours ago, neil9000 said:

But what about people like myself that dont want the game title screenshot first? If it was added it would need to be a option that the user could specify in the options. So not as easy as just changing the priorities in the code for Jason.

Not that I think this is a priority, but I wouldn't want the title screenshot appearing first either.

[Jason Carr]

8 hours ago, Retrofrogg said:

In the game details pane, can we have the game title screenshot appear above any other screenshots? Currently the order seems to be random, as each time I click on the game the order is different.

 

8 hours ago, neil9000 said:

But what about people like myself that dont want the game title screenshot first? If it was added it would need to be a option that the user could specify in the options. So not as easy as just changing the priorities in the code for Jason.

 

8 hours ago, Retrofrogg said:

Yes, I suppose allowing the user the option would be ideal - but more work, as you say.

 

1 minute ago, GreenGriffon said:

Not that I think this is a priority, but I wouldn't want the title screenshot appearing first either.

Honestly I would never have expected people to have that many preferences regarding the order of the screenshots in the sidebar, but I'll add it to the list of features to add to the next community poll.