11.9 Beta Testing

[Jason Carr]

4 minutes ago, Gamyr said:

joke/Hmm, can't you test yourself whenever you want?/joke In all honesty though, I can't download the beta, because it says that something is still using LaunchBox, and to either try agia, or download it here, but, is there a way for owners to download without using their eMail? For the sake of time, I'll download it the regular way, but there must be an easier solution.

You probably just need to reboot your computer if something is still using LaunchBox. There currently is not a way to manually download LaunchBox without entering your email. Regardless, the automatic updater should work fine in the vast majority of circumstances.

[Gamyr]

Thanks, I thought it was something like that. Just now I have to keep my computer on for a meeting, will try reinstalling later.

[mcfilmmakers]

1 hour ago, Jason Carr said:

Beta 3 is out now with the following:

• New Feature: The MAME full-set importer is now MAME-version agnostic and will work much better with older or bleeding-edge MAME releases (manual MAME updates on the LaunchBox server are no longer required)

Let us know if you run into any other bugs with this release. Also, some details on the new MAME import features. The MAME import process uses the following five resources in order to compile and combine all the data necessary for the importer:

• MAME.xml (generated by MAME itself)
• catver.ini (from ProgrettoSnaps and manually updated by them every MAME release) - http://www.progettosnaps.net/catver/
• languages.ini (from ProgrettoSnaps and manually updated by them every MAME release) - http://www.progettosnaps.net/languages/
• series.ini (from ProgrettoSnaps and manually updated by them every MAME release) - http://www.progettosnaps.net/series/
• nplayers.ini (from ArcadeBelgium and manually updated by them every MAME release) - https://nplayers.arcadebelgium.be/

The four ini files above are all included by the LaunchBox setup process and are installed to LaunchBox\ThirdParty\MAME. These four files can be manually updated with newer or older versions as needed. The current versions are for the latest version of MAME (0.227). In the future, we may try to implement automatic upgrades for these files, but for the most part they should work fine with different versions of MAME. The worst case is that newer games for the latest versions of MAME may be missing some metadata (such as genres, number of players, etc.) unless the files are manually updated.

I am crying with joy. Thank you!

[djdaveoc22]

Got the prompt to update today and did so.  Now launchbox won't load on my Windows 10 PC.  I can set Big Box to auto start and upon rebooting it will work.  And I can play games etc.  But if I close Big Box and just try to open Launchbox nothing happens.  I even tried running it as administrator and that doesn't work either.

 

UPDATE:

It was my Norton 360 AV.  It quarantined the launchbox.dll.  It really hates this software and throws up flags or deletes files all the time.

Edited January 21, 2021 by djdaveoc22

[neil9000]

7 minutes ago, djdaveoc22 said:

It really hates this software and throws up flags or deletes files all the time.

Sounds like a waste of money if its deleting perfectly safe files if you ask me.

[TheNewClassics]

Great update LB team. One small thing I noticed; on the MAME set importer, the option "Skip Mechanical Games" is listed twice.

[neil9000]

2 minutes ago, TheNewClassics said:

Great update LB team. One small thing I noticed; on the MAME set importer, the option "Skip Mechanical Games" is listed twice.

Yup, good spot.

 

[neil9000]

18 hours ago, neil9000 said:

Yup, good spot.

 

Maybe that whole list should be "Skip" then alphabetical order???

[GreenGriffon]

While we're on the subject, I think it would be a good move from a user experience perspective to leave the boxes for creating all of those playlists unchecked by default for the user.

I once forgot to uncheck those during an import, and it wreaked havoc with my existing playlists. I spent a great deal of time creating and tweaking those lists, some of which were named the same. It took quite awhile to clean up the mess.

IMO it should be left up to the user to affirmatively opt into making such a drastic addition to their collection.

[Jason Carr]

Beta 4 is out now with a fix for the MAME import text issue above.

1 hour ago, neil9000 said:

Maybe that whole list should be "Skip" then alphabetical order???

I don't see much of a benefit to alphabetizing them, so I think we'll just leave them as-is (now that they're fixed).

41 minutes ago, GreenGriffon said:

While we're on the subject, I think it would be a good move from a user experience perspective to leave the boxes for creating all of those playlists unchecked by default for the user.

I once forgot to uncheck those during an import, and it wreaked havoc with my existing playlists. I spent a great deal of time creating and tweaking those lists, some of which were named the same. It took quite awhile to clean up the mess.

IMO it should be left up to the user to affirmatively opt into making such a drastic addition to their collection.

The thought is that generally, users who don't pay attention just want the recommended settings to be the defaults. Since we definitely recommend those boxes to be checked (especially for users who don't want to deal with it all), we'll leave those as the defaults.

[GreenGriffon]

1 minute ago, Jason Carr said:

The thought is that generally, users who don't pay attention just want the recommended settings to be the defaults. Since we definitely recommend those boxes to be checked (especially for users who don't want to deal with it all), we'll leave those as the defaults.

I understand that logic. However, users often don't pay attention.

My argument was based on UI best practices. If the user has the ability to royally screw up their project at the touch of a button, it should be made more difficult to accomplish that, not easier.

I'll take that as a hard no and move on. Thanks.

[Jason Carr]

1 minute ago, GreenGriffon said:

I understand that logic. However, users often don't pay attention.

My argument was based on UI best practices. If the user has the ability to royally screw up their project at the touch of a button, it should be made more difficult to accomplish that, not easier.

I'll take that as a hard no and move on. Thanks.

Yeah, I understand where you're coming from, but I'm thinking it's a probably a pretty rare occurrence/situation. I assume you're referring to manually-populated playlists? Keep in mind that you can always restore from a backup in that case.

[Stovies]

Not sure if this is a beta request or not, but 'download platform/playlist theme videos...' is incomplete.  For example, Viking's Colourful theme for 'Favourites' isn't appearing.

[JoeViking245]

29 minutes ago, Stovies said:

For example, Viking's Colourful theme for 'Favourites' isn't appearing.

Could it be the 2 right above "Viking's Nostalgia.."?

(I am not affiliated with the creation of these themes. We [the actual creator and I] both just happen to have cool names. )

[Stovies]

1 hour ago, JoeViking245 said:

Could it be the 2 right above "Viking's Nostalgia.."?

(I am not affiliated with the creation of these themes. We [the actual creator and I] both just happen to have cool names. )

@JoeViking245 Yes, except not all the themes which @viking has made are populated.  For example 'favourites', which is available in downloads here but not in launchbox itself.

[mcfilmmakers]

On 1/21/2021 at 8:29 PM, neil9000 said:

Yup, good spot.

 

While the topic is fresh, a deselect all button would be SUPER appreciated on this screen.

[RULLUR]

Not sure if this is already in as a feature or it's something I overlooked, but is there a way to update and replace media only to certain Platforms or games in sort of a Bulk Edit way instead of doing the entire Library of Games for every Platform? I had my ThinkCentre on for over a week as it replaced media to what it thought was the best sizing and all where it gave me nearly 100,000+ Errors in the lower right until it crashed towards the end while testing some Homebrews with Redream. This of course was before I updated to the latest Beta a few minutes ago before typing this up.

As a result, I now have games with incomplete media, or stuff that looks messed up from not downloading correctly or have media with the wrong Regions put with them. Hopefully next time I try to update my media I don't have to wait forever to have at most the games being named correctly while things that I even Uploaded and made to the Games DB didn't come through for some odd reason. Seems like it didn't matter what Region a title belonged to, the Import process felt that Game Cover or whatever media it is was the better quality and size to where you may get a Japanese Front Cover with a European Clear Logo with your American game, which also I know complicates matter that we have many entries in our Database that kinda agree what is "United States" and what is "North America". I hope somehow we can better sort the Database so things can be more accurate and less time consuming with frustration to go over again and again in hopes to not get errors while importing or updating media for the tons of games one may have in their collection.

Edited January 24, 2021 by RULLUR

[mcfilmmakers]

8 hours ago, RULLUR said:

Not sure if this is already in as a feature or it's something I overlooked, but is there a way to update and replace media only to certain Platforms or games in sort of a Bulk Edit way instead of doing the entire Library of Games for every Platform? I had my ThinkCentre on for over a week as it replaced media to what it thought was the best sizing and all where it gave me nearly 100,000+ Errors in the lower right until it crashed towards the end while testing some Homebrews with Redream. This of course was before I updated to the latest Beta a few minutes ago before typing this up.

As a result, I now have games with incomplete media, or stuff that looks messed up from not downloading correctly or have media with the wrong Regions put with them. Hopefully next time I try to update my media I don't have to wait forever to have at most the games being named correctly while things that I even Uploaded and made to the Games DB didn't come through for some odd reason. Seems like it didn't matter what Region a title belonged to, the Import process felt that Game Cover or whatever media it is was the better quality and size to where you may get a Japanese Front Cover with a European Clear Logo with your American game, which also I know complicates matter that we have many entries in our Database that kinda agree what is "United States" and what is "North America". I hope somehow we can better sort the Database so things can be more accurate and less time consuming with frustration to go over again and again in hopes to not get errors while importing or updating media for the tons of games one may have in their collection.

Yeah, just select the specific games and tools->download media

[CriticalCid]

On 1/19/2021 at 12:24 AM, Jason Carr said:

Improvement: Instead of only being able to type the first letter of a game to jump to that game in LaunchBox, you can now type the beginning of a game's title (multiple characters) and LaunchBox will jump to that game, assuming that the games list is selected

I was waiting for this quality-of-life feature for so long. Thanks for finally adding it! I only noticed that LB ignores everything you type in after you hit the spacebar. For example, when I type in “super mario” it only jumps to the first game that starts with super.

[CriticalCid]

Also here's a little tip for anybody using HBMAME. You can use the overhauled MAME full-set importer for HBMAME sets now as well. I just tried it out and it worked like a charm.

It even merges nicely with your already imported MAME games. Just add HBMAME as an emulator and select it in the full-set importer and you're good to go. But be aware that some games have A LOT of hacks which will clutter up the additional apps entries of a single game very quickly. So it might be a better idea to import your HBMAME set as a separate platform. For example, here's a screenshot of King of Fighters '98 to show you what I mean (notice how you can only see the hacks up to the letter C? You have to scroll down the list for quite a while until you reach the end of it and see the other options of the context menu):