LaunchBox 2019 New Feature Poll

[Jason Carr]

2 hours ago, ninja2bceen said:

Ability to transition media from hyperspin to launchbox without space usage. This should be totally doable. Hyperspin has a specific file structure. I would like the ability to use the same media but in launchbox without remapping the world. 

 

Ability to use hyperspin themes. Seriously this is the single reason why hyperspin is still being used by me. (It’s understood that there was a mame video recording of themes) it’s a nice work around but literally I have 1000’s of themes across all systems. 

As cool as it would be to support Hyperspin themes, it's just not feasible. With Hyperspin theme support comes all of the well-known current problems along with it, not to mention it would require integrating a completely separate theming engine, which I don't believe would be time well spent at this point.

I'm not an expert on Hyperspin's file structure, but I believe all you have to do is modify the platform folder location settings in LaunchBox if you want to use Hyperspin's media folder structure.

[alnyden]

Thanks for the opportunity to vote on new features.  Great stuff. 

[Copper]

When you favorite a game...its added the the Star in bigbox...but it doesn't get removed from when you are searching through the game list.

[Chris Kant]

Is there a chance to speed up LaunchBox? It takes seconds every time I edit a game and save it with Pressing ok.

[Jason Carr]

2 minutes ago, Chris Kant said:

Is there a chance to speed up LaunchBox? It takes seconds every time I edit a game and save it with Pressing ok.

There's almost always still ways to speed things up, yes. I'll add that to my list to see if I can speed the process when pressing OK on a game edit.

10 minutes ago, Copper said:

When you favorite a game...its added the the Star in bigbox...but it doesn't get removed from when you are searching through the game list.

Can you explain? I'm not fully following.

[NoFace22]

Bezel management would've been awesome.

[Copper]

7 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

When you favorite a game...its added the the Star in bigbox...but it doesn't get removed from when you are searching through the game list.

Can you explain? I'm not fully following.

I would love if when you star a favorite game in big box, that this game would be in two locations instead of just moved to the star location at the beginning of your list. I would like it to also remain in the original place. Metal Slug, if a favorite, is in star at the beginning of the list and also in M. When going through the non-favorite list, it seems weird to have the best games removed and also, seeing games that are not so great, then seeing one of your favorites next to not as good games makes you want to play it. This has been a long time wish of mine. Thought I'd share. 

[Jason Carr]

Just now, Copper said:

I would love if when you star a favorite game in big box, that this game would be in two locations instead of just moved to the star location at the beginning of your list. I would like it to also remain in the original place. Metal Slug, if a favorite, is in star at the beginning of the list and also in M. When going through the non-favorite list, it seems weird to have the best games removed and also, seeing games that are not so great, then seeing one of your favorites next to not as good games makes you want to play it. This has been a long time wish of mine. Thought I'd share. 

Ah, that makes sense. I've actually never heard that request before, but I can see how that would be nice. Noted.

2 minutes ago, NoFace22 said:

Bezel management would've been awesome.

I'm surprised that didn't come up in the live stream, but maybe it's my fault for saying that bezels are better handled by the emulators themselves. It's definitely a possibility for the future that we could manage bezels for MAME and/or Retroarch. It just would have to rely on the emulators to actually show them.

[NoFace22]

1 minute ago, Jason Carr said:

I'm surprised that didn't come up in the live stream, but maybe it's my fault for saying that bezels are better handled by the emulators themselves. It's definitely a possibility for the future that we could manage bezels for MAME and/or Retroarch. It just would have to rely on the emulators to actually show them.

Yep, I'm surprised that I'm the only one asking lol
One can only dream, thank you for all the time and effort you put into this Jason!

[Jason Carr]

4 minutes ago, Yt4nu4 said:

If Android version go live i will not spect any relevant update on the pc version, for like, forever

What do you mean?

[ckp]

On 7/12/2019 at 5:13 PM, ReaperZer0 said:

* Also a thing that's been bugging me since I first got Launchbox is I've wanted to drag and drop images I've found online into the box to add them. However I have to save them to my drive then navigate to the folder and add them. It can get annoying. Any way to fix that minor annoyance? 

Would be great. Hope to see it on future polls.

[TastyBalloon]

I would like to have the function to hide games on the platform but still show it on the playlists, i would not like to see bootlegs Mario games on the NES platform, but i would like to have it on the Mario playlist, is that possible?

[ninja2bceen]

1 hour ago, Jason Carr said:

As cool as it would be to support Hyperspin themes, it's just not feasible. With Hyperspin theme support comes all of the well-known current problems along with it, not to mention it would require integrating a completely separate theming engine, which I don't believe would be time well spent at this point.

I'm not an expert on Hyperspin's file structure, but I believe all you have to do is modify the platform folder location settings in LaunchBox if you want to use Hyperspin's media folder structure.

Thanks for replying. The structure is the following for art, themes, videos, letters and genre art. Imagine doing this for 100+ systems to convert over....

One comment on the themes bit. I’d like to challenge you to understand the theme system as a whole in hyperspin. It’s just a flash reader basically and I think it would be worth your time considering there are literally 1000s of themes already made. Remember hyperspin has been around for more than a decade. It’s ignorant to think they wouldn’t be used and I’m sure if I had to mess with the settings to carry it over, I would literally have to do it 100 plus times since hyperspin has a folder for each system. Imo I think the only reason this hasn’t happened yet is either you are t sure how to make it happen or it is too incompatible with the current architecture that you don’t want to break anything. I’m not sure what problems there are with themes you are referring to though. I’ll be honest, losing the theming in my set up is the single reason why I’ve not jumped. Mind you I’m a full member and I could use launchbox prem features at any time. I want you to succeed, I just can’t make a rational decision to make the cut over without the themes and leveraging the assets I have. Maybe I’m the only one in the room that can say this but launchbox does a real good job to try and replicate all of hyperspins features. There are a few additional features that hyperspin doesn’t have like achievements, ratings and game text. Imo opinion that would be the main additional draw for those that have a working hyperspin. My suggestions are to maintain status quote in order to get the additional features. Hope this helps, I’ll continue to watch on the sidelines until then though ?

Keep doing your thing, good work

hyperspin/media/*system name*/Images

this has Artwork 1-4 folders which almost always Artwork 3 is box art and Artwork 4 is cart art

in the wheel folder it holds game logos

 

hyperspin/media/*system name*/Themes

this is where the themes are. They are zip files and in it are png files and an xml file that’s it.

 

hyperspin/media/*system name*/Images/Letters

houses the letter png files

 

hyperspin/media/*system name*/Images/Genre

has a background folder and wheel folder for png art

 

hyperspin/media/*system name*/Video

stores the video snaps which play during the themes.

Edited July 16, 2019 by ninja2bceen

[CHRYSLER]

Exelente

[DaveC1964]

2 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

More features do not equate to more "processes", nor does it necessarily affect startup time. Most people here can attest to the fact that LaunchBox these days starts up faster than it used to, not slower. There's nothing to worry about here, just as there has never been in the past.

If you're worried about SSD writes, do you put Windows on an SSD? Because Windows is worse than LaunchBox will ever be...

It depends on which drive the LB setup is on.  Still I don't know why LB needs to write stuff to the drive when I am just loading a game.  I can see at first when it is generating the image cache etc.    It would be nice to be able to disable the silly writes that don't mean anything or aren't needed like the date I played a game or how many times, I mean who cares?  I would rather have my drive last longer and/or minimize the chance of getting corrupted.

[X2gamer78]

Make desktop games assessable on launchbox 

[Lordmonkus]

4 minutes ago, X2gamer78 said:

Make desktop games assessable on launchbox 

Explain ?

You can already import PC games into Launchbox quite easily.

[DaveC1964]

2 hours ago, Lordmonkus said:

By that argument maybe some people are using 10 year old mechanical drives on the verge of failure.

All drives even mechanical can have catastrophic failures. Moving parts are just as prone (or more so) than non moving parts.

Failures yes, corruption or write cycles no.  If you have an issue on a mechanical drive while writing the head is just in that one spot so that file is corrupted.  You can usually then just run some kind of disk check thing to repair.  SSDs the way they work is different and when writing they scatter to different cells all over (write leveling) .  If something goes wrong it can corrupt more or all of the drive.  It is just the way they work.

[Lordmonkus]

8 minutes ago, DaveC1964 said:

If you have an issue on a mechanical drive while writing the head is just in that one spot so that file is corrupted.  You can usually then just run some kind of disk check thing to repair.

Mechanical drives fail every day to the point of not being read and having to be sent off for data recovery. There are different levels of failure.

[Arusuko]

2 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

Ah, that makes sense. I've actually never heard that request before, but I can see how that would be nice. Noted.

I'm surprised that didn't come up in the live stream, but maybe it's my fault for saying that bezels are better handled by the emulators themselves. It's definitely a possibility for the future that we could manage bezels for MAME and/or Retroarch. It just would have to rely on the emulators to actually show them.

How difficult would it be to go the RocketLauncher route and have the emulator window captured inside the predefined bezel?

2 hours ago, NoFace22 said:

Yep, I'm surprised that I'm the only one asking lol
One can only dream, thank you for all the time and effort you put into this Jason!

You aren't the only one, it's the only launchbox feature I've wanted for two years so I can finally kick rocketlauncher to the curb.