LaunchBox is slow

[ricebow]

Hello All, i just completed setting up launchbox and added all of my SNES games. i have added about 1000+ worth. as i was navigating through the games - its seem to be very laggy and slow. When i push play - it works fine. could the slowness be due to too many games inside of launchbox? i have a pretty good laptop with corei7 and 16gb of ram. its not a gaming laptop but for the most part works pretty darn good for everything else even for some steam games. just trying to understand what went wrong. I like the idea of launchbox and throwing all of my games there - although i may not play off of them, its just nice to have it stored somewhere central.

[DeadVoivod]

I have no lags or whatsoever navigating through 1000 of SNES games. Your laptop specs are fine. 

[C-Beats]

Hey @ricebow, sounds like you decided to take the plunge and try out LaunchBox after all, glad to have ya.

Typically performance issues for new users can be tied to 2 things.

The first is the image cache. Until that is built you WILL notice delays and slowness while the cache builds. Typically when the cache is building you will see a small green bar at the top of LaunchBox. Once the cache has been built you won't see that issue. One thing to note is resizing boxes reset cache (as well as a few other actions) so when doing so expect the performance to be affected for a small while after doing so.

The second are auto-generated playlists. Because of how they work we poll your games library every time a change is made which can cause a lot of delays. It is usually best for performance to create those once done importing all your games. If they still cause significant performance degridation you can set them up as auto-gen, let them get the games they should have, then shut off the auto-gen. They will no longer automatically update with library changes but they do perform much faster.  Once done importing and making changes (when your library is "complete") it is generally better performance to just turn them into manual playlists.

[ricebow]

On 3/25/2020 at 7:46 AM, C-Beats said:

Hey @ricebow, sounds like you decided to take the plunge and try out LaunchBox after all, glad to have ya.

Typically performance issues for new users can be tied to 2 things.

The first is the image cache. Until that is built you WILL notice delays and slowness while the cache builds. Typically when the cache is building you will see a small green bar at the top of LaunchBox. Once the cache has been built you won't see that issue. One thing to note is resizing boxes reset cache (as well as a few other actions) so when doing so expect the performance to be affected for a small while after doing so.

The second are auto-generated playlists. Because of how they work we poll your games library every time a change is made which can cause a lot of delays. It is usually best for performance to create those once done importing all your games. If they still cause significant performance degridation you can set them up as auto-gen, let them get the games they should have, then shut off the auto-gen. They will no longer automatically update with library changes but they do perform much faster.  Once done importing and making changes (when your library is "complete") it is generally better performance to just turn them into manual playlists.

Hello thanks so much for the response.  So your saying it takes a bit of time for all the stuff to complete. I still notice a bit of lag and I have about 1000+ snes games. I plan to add sega games but fear the slow trend may continue.  Not sure if om doing the setup wrong as the videos I'm watching are the old outdated ones from years ago. 

 

Do you know of any current YouTube video that is the right way to add games into launchbox? If I update to big box will this help at all?

Still a newbie in all of this. I see some really nice setup vs mine - kind of blah. Is there a template or theme that I can change or update? 

I used to use kodi and adding games to it. Not sure of that a more preferred way or not.

Thanks! 

[ricebow]

On 3/25/2020 at 3:35 AM, DeadVoivod said:

I have no lags or whatsoever navigating through 1000 of SNES games. Your laptop specs are fine. 

Hello how did u added ur games to the launchbox I feel that I might've selected an option that cause my setup to not function correctly.  The video on youtube that I found seem to be very old and outdated.  

[neil9000]

3 minutes ago, ricebow said:

Hello how did u added ur games to the launchbox I feel that I might've selected an option that cause my setup to not function correctly.  The video on youtube that I found seem to be very old and outdated.  

The import process hasnt changed for a long time, there is no real way to do it wrong.

[C-Beats]

What are you calling lag? What specific issues are you seeing and when do you see them? I have a collection of around 28k games and the only time I notice any significant slow downs is when I am rebuilding the cache.

[ricebow]

8 minutes ago, C-Beats said:

What are you calling lag? What specific issues are you seeing and when do you see them? I have a collection of around 28k games and the only time I notice any significant slow downs is when I am rebuilding the cache.

so by lag -  i mean when i am scrolling up and down in launchbox, it doesnt move or flow instantly (maybe thats normal with the amount of games?). when i push play to play the game, a new window open (snes emulator) and then it plays the game like normal but that process seem to take a bit of time. i just remember it being much faster (i set this up before few months back and now just getting back into it). Do i need to do something with the Cache that you mentioned earlier in your message above?

 

also, i notice a few game images are missing - is there an automatic way for me to load images on all games that is missing images / front cover?

[Hank7_98]

I’ve noticed this same thing with box art etc taking a while to load. 

[C-Beats]

Try the Old Default theme, do you still see it there? You may be having issues with the Dynamic Box Sizing the new theme uses.

[ricebow]

@c-Beats ( sorry i dont know how to tag). so i just made the jump and purchaed BIG BOX and wow - that seem to have fix the lags and scrolling. Everythign seem  faster. But now i have a different issue.. not really an issue but more of --- needing to understand how things works.

 

like when i originally installed my snes games - i selected the snes emulator to play the roms. is this what ppl normally do or do they choose RETROARCH ( i read it somewhere that this was the more popular chose?) As i am scrolling through my games, i push enter and play - the snes emulator window comes up seperately. is that normal? shouldnt it play within the big box interface? Sorry for all teh newb questions. im setting this up all on my laptop , once all is smooth and i understand the flow of things, i will push this to the living room for my kids (gotta teach myself how to use this first).

 

is there a video on Big Box flow and such. im messing around with themes and wow so much to do but dont want to keep wasting time vs just simplying playing the game.

[neil9000]

3 minutes ago, ricebow said:

i push enter and play - the snes emulator window comes up seperately. is that normal? shouldnt it play within the big box interface?

That is correct, the game is played in the emulator not in Launchbox/Bigbox.

[C-Beats]

You had the right right idea, just type at symbol and the username, pick it from the list that comes up.

No, Big Box does not play/draw the emulator in it's screen. It opens the emulator. Most people use Retroarch because it easier to keep up to date and does 10ft interface well. Also defaults to most of the settings you would want anyway. If not using retroarch I'd pick an emulator that can either be told to launch fullscreen (exclusive if you can) via the command line, or in the settings.

[ricebow]

When I play a game , the snes emulator opens but not in big screen, I have to beat the crap out of my mouse / mouse pad for cursor to become available or seen to manually make it big screen. Is there an automatic way to set it up so it appear to be big screen when I push play? Or should I switch to reteoarch ? 

 

Another question- if I install the reteoarch emulator system app, does that work on all console? In which I dont need to separately download sega, dream cast, nintendo and etc emulators?.

[OrderedEntropy]

@ricebow *notice inb4 made a lot of typo's. I have been unwell a few days and have not been all clearheaded. Makes focusing and typing difficult, I address this since I will not fix the mistakes, got no energy but as someone who writes felt like I needed to adress it. (even if it is just for my own peace of mind) on to the essay. Hope the info helps, pic added for clarification on the last addressed issue.

 

New myself, but allow me to try and clarify, the lag is slowdown not lag, it is the same as when using file explorer where the file has 1000s of files. It slows down exactly to not lag out using cache. So far I have over 6000 games in now, and the slowdown stays the same as when it was around 1000s. Just the software limit is my assumption. Unlike file explorer (where as said slowdown happens too) launchbox itself takes ram and uses processes as well. So the slowdown seems more prominent. (I am not tech savvy by nature, but I always go through all kinds of documentation and forums). These are the conclusions I took after a week of setting up launchbox.

Next issue;

retroarch has next to everything, (via cores, also have found out some cores that can not be found within retroarch automatically exist out there, so potential to actually get next to everything proper, however some standalone emu's are preferred, (sometimes for accuracy, sometimes for speed, sometimes user specefied reasons) even on a game to game basis from time to time. 

 

This is exactly where launchbox comes into play, you can integrate retroarch as well as the standalone versions of emu's separately. (you can add mednafen and other multi platforms into launchbox as well) Use the official tutorials made by ETAprime on the official launchbox channel. He goes over setting up fullscreen for basically any and all emu's in launchbox. Just look for the tutorial matching the emu you are working on. Some have settings, some need command line parameters. Can't find a tutorial for it, find some documentation on github, or some of the popular rom site choices, forums are a safe choice, and if all else fails, there are proper obscure rom sites with documentation. Google is your friend in this, since I do not know the stance on linking things.

Last issue;

Missing media is from misspelling on the original rom uploaders part, as well as some teams putting the number id infront, or putting suffix at the end and forgetting to use bracket[] (which launchbox will ignore. If the name of the game is not the same as it is on the database (meaning the filename) then it won't find it. For roms that just have numbers in front or wacky stuff at the end you can us bulk rename utilities find a preferred one. Typo's you will have to deal with and manually edit the game within launchbox rename it to the correct name as it was officially released (it is cares about punctuation and grammar and everything) and look up in the database. (you can do it in file explorer but in the end both are manual. And doing it withing LB makes you able to immediatly get metadata and media after renaming. 

 

Edited February 8, 2021 by OrderedEntropy

[Polluxy]

The slowdown is extreme and is 100% a software (programming) issue. Even in list mode without images, there's a massive slowdown, like running at 3fps.