Required internet connection?

[artician]

Hi, I'm trying to enable some custom themes for my BigBox install, and BigBox keeps insisting on trying to contact the launchbox servers.  How do I manage themes without this?  When I tried to set up the custom themes via Options/View submenu, nothing changed even though it correctly detected and displayed them as an option in the menu.

 

Edited November 29, 2021 by artician

[Retro808]

Themes have to be downloaded. If you are trying to enable them from in the BigBox UI you would have wither already had downloaded a theme from the forum and placed it in your \LaunchBox\Themes folder or there are some available for download directly in the BIgBox UI. The only reason BB would need internet connection is if you are downloading a theme in the BB UI. 

[artician]

Thank you for your reply.
I download themes manually and transfer them to an offline machine.  When I select "Manage Themes" on the offline machine, it shows an error that suggests it requires an internet connection.
Can you tell me how to set up Big Box themes on an offline machine? 

Thank you again.

[neil9000]

8 hours ago, artician said:

Thank you for your reply.
I download themes manually and transfer them to an offline machine.  When I select "Manage Themes" on the offline machine, it shows an error that suggests it requires an internet connection.
Can you tell me how to set up Big Box themes on an offline machine? 

Thank you again.

No theme needs a internet connection, so I'm not sure what you are seeing there, you also don't need to touch the manage themes section as that is for downloading themes, and yours are already on your box (assumedly unzipped and in the correct location of Launchbox/Themes) so just go to options/views in Bigbox and switch to the theme you want. Launchbox/Bigbox itself never requires a internet connection, but will of course need one if trying to scrape games or download themes/images etc.

[artician]

Thank you for explaining it.
If I go to the Options in BigBox and select one of the themes I've installed, nothing changes.  This is why I thought I needed to use "Manage Themes". 
Is there another step that's required to get the theme to change?  My specific steps were:
- Install Windows
- Install necessary updates
- Install Emulators, ROMs, Launchbox
- Initial setup, confirm everything runs
- Download theme zip files from the site
- Unzip into the Launchbox themes directory
- Open BigBox
- Go to Options
- Go to Views
- Select Theme
- Back out of menu

-???

Nothing changes in my view.  This is what caused me to think I had to use Manage Themes.  Any advice?  Thank you in advance.

 

 

Edited December 20, 2021 by artician

[neil9000]

13 minutes ago, artician said:

Thank you for explaining it.
If I go to the Options in BigBox and select one of the themes I've installed, nothing changes.  This is why I thought I needed to use "Manage Themes". 
Is there another step that's required to get the theme to change?  My specific steps were:
- Install Windows
- Install necessary updates
- Install Emulators, ROMs, Launchbox
- Initial setup, confirm everything runs
- Download theme zip files from the site
- Unzip into the Launchbox themes directory
- Open BigBox
- Go to Options
- Go to Views
- Select Theme
- Back out of menu

-???

Nothing changes in my view.  This is what caused me to think I had to use Manage Themes.  Any advice?  Thank you in advance.

 

 

Are you sure you extracted the theme correctly? It should be a folder with the theme name and some files and folders inside that. Sometimes people extract archives to a folder with the same name as the archive, so in that case your folder structure would be "Name Of Theme/Name Of Theme/files and folders" and that wouldn't work as the needed files and folders are not in the parent folder. Also its worth noting that all themes have to support the text list view as it is required, a lot of the time theme makers leave that view as is and don't theme it at all. So if you are already on the text list view, switching to a new theme you would still be on that view, and that may look the same if not themed by the theme maker, you would just need to "Switch View" to find the one you want. I would recommend going to controller mappings and mapping two buttons to your controller, "Change Theme" and "Change View" those can then be used from anywhere in the UI to quickly pick themes and specific views for them.

[artician]

Mapping controller buttons to Change Theme/View was a great tip!  Made it so much easier.

However, this is definitely an issue with this installation.  As an experiment, I installed the same version of emulator, launchbox, and themes on my laptop, and it works right away.  It's only the machine I'm actually working on that has this issue.

I have 8-10 themes on the system and BigBox can see the the files, and it displays them in the Options|View section, so it appears they're in their correctly locations on disk.  When I change the theme, the UI appears to reload, but it remains the same no matter how many I do, and no matter which theme I select in the options.

Do you know where BigBox stores these properties?  Is there a file or property not be getting updated? 

This is occurring on a fresh installation of Win7 sp1, up to date, etc.

Thank you for the help!