LaunchBox 13.26 Beta Thread

[faeran]

On 2/7/2026 at 9:52 AM, AbApp said:

LB unable to download retroarch. i found this issue in both beta 1 and 2

We haven't been able to recreate this, and RetroArch code hasn't been touched in a very long time, so my guess is that the issue is fairly internal to your location unfortunately, for whatever reason.

On 2/8/2026 at 7:01 AM, xokia said:

why am I getting 3d box fronts as the selected image for all my platforms? I do not appear to have an easy way to switch all the platforms to box front.
The only thing I can do is go to image group and select box front, but I have to do that individually for every platform

If you are referring to LaunchBox, the default is Box Fronts, so it would be strange for it to suddenly change randomly. I don't believe there's any code that allows the change globally like that (it's always possible a plugin could introduce that kind of functionality). This would be best to troubleshoot in another thread.

On 2/8/2026 at 12:35 PM, dbalcar said:

I tried to do the new FBNeo specific import in 13.26 beta 2 and the FBNeo specific import page did not appear.  I chose Arcade, added FBNeo emulator and picked the games folder and the FBNeo specific import page did not appear.  Also there is no FinalBurn NEO emulator in the emulator drop down box or should I just pick MAME?  Thanks

The way FinalBurn Neo import currently works is that you'd have to import a platform that has a name similar enough to FinalBurn Neo, then you'll see it. In the future, I could see a benefit to opening this up to take into consideration the emulator's exe, and core for people that use RetroArch, although that won't happen for this hotfix. Let us know if naming the platform properly works for you.

21 hours ago, Jabb3rJaw said:

Running the new beta and I noticed when I first start up Bigbox the wheel which is normally curved like hyperspin starts straight up and down then slowly go to a curve? Should mention I’m using Unified theme. Also I use to scroll to a letter and click on it but it would load a different letter like it didn’t catch up to where I was. This seems to be corrected now. 

Thanks. Looks like it's the "RotationAmount" property. We will look into this before the hotfix drops.

20 hours ago, Jabb3rJaw said:

Also still getting random crashing back to desktop. 

16 minutes ago, JaredN said:

Yes, me too.
I reinstalled Windows this weekend, so there are no old codecs or drivers lying around, but I'm still getting crashes without error messages that take me back to the desktop, very frequently when the video is set to FFmpeg, less often with WMP, but still present (Launchbox and Bigbox).

What we would need from anyone experiencing any kind of crash for either LaunchBox or Big Box for us to take a look:

• Any Crash Reports that LaunchBox or Big Box provides
• Any Crash Reports found in Event Viewer specific to the crash that also are .NET crashes (there may be multiple per crash)
• The Settings.xml and BigBoxSettings.xml files would also be super helpful, as long as they are in the exact state that makes you crash

Then, click on HELP & SUPPORT in the menu above, and choose REPORT A BUG, and send us a full report of exactly what is happening at the time of the crash, along with all the above.

13 hours ago, Nixx said:

I never used RetroAchievements for the moment but i do use 7z files packed with different rom version.
Is that really necessary to extract on temp folder, can roms bellow a certain size can just be extracted on memory ? Assuming than the crc32 info from the 7z file is not good enough to identify rom.

We utilize RA Hasher, the official hashing tool from RetroAchievements, which as far as I know, doesn't allow you to read bits flowing through RAM to gain the hash that it needs. If they ever get support for that, we can look into supporting it.

RA Hasher doesn't have support to read the contents of a 7zip file to obtain the hash (hence the need to extract), but it does have support for zip. So, from a user's perspective, the better format to store your small ROM files is either uncompressed entirely, or within a zip, if RetroAchievements is important to you.

[dbalcar]

On 2/8/2026 at 12:35 PM, dbalcar said:

I tried to do the new FBNeo specific import in 13.26 beta 2 and the FBNeo specific import page did not appear.  I chose Arcade, added FBNeo emulator and picked the games folder and the FBNeo specific import page did not appear.  Also there is no FinalBurn NEO emulator in the emulator drop down box or should I just pick MAME?  Thanks

@faeran I tried it with adding a platform named FinalBurn Neo but the FinalBurn Neo import page did not show up.  Thanks

Edited February 9 by dbalcar

[faeran]

33 minutes ago, dbalcar said:

@faeran I tried it with adding a platform named FinalBurn Neo but the FinalBurn Neo import page did not show up.  Thanks

Make sure you are also setting the Scrape As value to Arcade. Those are the two rules in order to see the fbneo import page at the end of the import wizard.

We'll have a write up once this goes live, and we will also look to expand this logic to include the emulators as well in future updates.

[dbalcar]

30 minutes ago, faeran said:

Make sure you are also setting the Scrape As value to Arcade. Those are the two rules in order to see the fbneo import page at the end of the import wizard.

We'll have a write up once this goes live, and we will also look to expand this logic to include the emulators as well in future updates.

Perfect  I will try again.   ty

[thoraiden]

Im currently having an issue with 13.26 beta 2 where my custom background music only plays a song or two then completely stops and all music playback function stops all together, even game music and everything other than navigation sounds goes dead silent. I have a controller binding and keyboard binding that skips to the next song but that doesnt work and I also have everything on shuffle, music prioritized over video volume and video volume down to 0. Aside from that I also had a random crash happen that froze my entire computer. After a hard reboot I got error messages upon trying to re-luanch BigBox that almost my entire Data folder aside from platform and playlist xmls was corrupt which I had to use a backup to restore. It seems like ever since the 13.25 main and beta versions theres been a lot of weird performance bugs and conflicts with my system that have never happened before and Ive had launchbox/bigbox since about 6 years ago or so. I was also having trouble even launching launchbox for about a week up until the other day when Windows 11 pushed a new update since im on their Dev channel which seemed to fix that problem but the ones I listed above are still happening. Hopefully some stability improvements and fixes with audio and crashes are coming around for the next beta or 13.26 stable.

Edited February 10 by thoraiden

[sebas001]

Did the release went out of beta just now? Got an update and now it says just 13.26. No more beta-2. Did anything change in between beta-2 and this release?

[Nixx]

On 2/9/2026 at 8:43 PM, faeran said:

 

We utilize RA Hasher, the official hashing tool from RetroAchievements, which as far as I know, doesn't allow you to read bits flowing through RAM to gain the hash that it needs. If they ever get support for that, we can look into supporting it.

RA Hasher doesn't have support to read the contents of a 7zip file to obtain the hash (hence the need to extract), but it does have support for zip. So, from a user's perspective, the better format to store your small ROM files is either uncompressed entirely, or within a zip, if RetroAchievements is important to you.

Ok, i understand better, i'm not used to RetroAchievements stuff, that's something i planned to setup for later.
But, do you mind add the 7z decompression as a checkbox, (checked by default so that don't change anything to your feature) in the RetroAchievements options ? Like i have some 7z that are like few gb in size, but can expend to hundreds of gigabytes once decompressed.
If i try to search for achievement for a whole plateform if i understand correctly, it will extract everything. I'm fine if it didn't found stuff for 7z and work on the rest.
Also, it would make thing easier if we want to drop in something to replace RAHasher in the future (or act as a middle man beetween lb and RAHasher)

Edited Tuesday at 08:16 PM by Nixx

[faeran]

1 hour ago, sebas001 said:

Did the release went out of beta just now? Got an update and now it says just 13.26. No more beta-2. Did anything change in between beta-2 and this release?

As we mentioned from the beginning of this cycle, this was a quick hotfix release cycle to address some of the major issues that showed up with 13.25. We'll have some communication shortly about the hotfix release in a number of places. For the most part, Beta 2 is what the hotfix turned into, and we've already started the next release cycle internally.

7 minutes ago, Nixx said:

Ok, i understand better, i'm not used to RetroAchievements stuff, that's something i planned to setup for later.
But, do you mind add the 7z decompression as a checkbox, (checked by default so that don't change anything to your feature) in the RetroAchievements options ? Like i have some 7z that are like few gb in size, but can expend to hundred of gigabytes once decompressed. If i try to search for achievement for a whole plateform if i understand correctly, it will extract everything. Also, it would make thing easier if we want to drop in something to replace RAHasher in the future (or act as a middle man beetween lb and RAHasher)

Yes, you will end up having issues if you are 7zipping games like that. Instead, I would look into compression alternatives. Ask someone on the forums for emulator specific compression alternatives that don't require decompression to run, there's most usually a solution. Also note that RetroAchievement scanning will not take place for Platforms that RetroAchievements does not support.

14 hours ago, thoraiden said:

Im currently having an issue with 13.26 beta 2 where my custom background music only plays a song or two then completely stops and all music playback function stops all together, even game music and everything other than navigation sounds goes dead silent. I have a controller binding and keyboard binding that skips to the next song but that doesnt work and I also have everything on shuffle, music prioritized over video volume and video volume down to 0. Aside from that I also had a random crash happen that froze my entire computer. After a hard reboot I got error messages upon trying to re-luanch BigBox that almost my entire Data folder aside from platform and playlist xmls was corrupt which I had to use a backup to restore. It seems like ever since the 13.25 main and beta versions theres been a lot of weird performance bugs and conflicts with my system that have never happened before and Ive had launchbox/bigbox since about 6 years ago or so. I was also having trouble even launching launchbox for about a week up until the other day when Windows 11 pushed a new update since im on their Dev channel which seemed to fix that problem but the ones I listed above are still happening. Hopefully some stability improvements and fixes with audio and crashes are coming around for the next beta or 13.26 stable.

Sounds like you've had a string of bad luck, which we apologize for.

We were unable to duplicate any of the music issues you are having. We've actually specifically addressed a number of them within this hotfix release.

For any other issues you may have, it's best to both ask on the forums if there are any simple solutions you may be missing, or report a bug using the above menu under HELP & SUPPORT > REPORT A BUG

Each report should have thing you deem a bug, and you'll want to provide as much information as you possibly can. For any crash related items make sure to include a crash report, along with exact reproduction steps, including plugins, themes, views you use, features you were using, those kinds of things. Include at least your Settings files, or your entire Data folder. The more information, the better we can see if there's something in our code base that we need to address, or if it's something else we can help you with.

 

[Fursphere]

48 minutes ago, faeran said:

As we mentioned from the beginning of this cycle, this was a quick hotfix release cycle to address some of the major issues that showed up with 13.25. We'll have some communication shortly about the hotfix release in a number of places. For the most part, Beta 2 is what the hotfix turned into, and we've already started the next release cycle internally.

 

Why do you release 'hotfixes' as new betas?   13.25.01 (.02, .03, etc..) would make a lot more sense than "13.25 release is broken, please update to 13.26 beta 1 or beta 2".   I've never understood why a more traditional development cycle isn't followed to better indicate the intention.  

Alpha Builds (usually internal only)--> Beta Builds (sometimes public) --> Release Candidate Builds (RC) (public) --> Release Builds --> Patches/Hotfixes
 

Just my $0.02... 

[rexryan]

Right a Hot Fix but added new features..

[faeran]

1 hour ago, Fursphere said:

 

Why do you release 'hotfixes' as new betas?   13.25.01 (.02, .03, etc..) would make a lot more sense than "13.25 release is broken, please update to 13.26 beta 1 or beta 2".   I've never understood why a more traditional development cycle isn't followed to better indicate the intention.  

Alpha Builds (usually internal only)--> Beta Builds (sometimes public) --> Release Candidate Builds (RC) (public) --> Release Builds --> Patches/Hotfixes
 

Just my $0.02... 

We've talked extensively internally about upgrading our internal tools and infrastructure, but always delay it due to time investment and the very real risk of breaking what we already have set up and working for the last decade. If we spin up another project, we most definitely will take advantage of a more modern approach, although it will be more to help us, and less about public perception.

1 hour ago, rexryan said:

Right a Hot Fix but added new features..

Not really sure it matters, but we needed to fix a problem with our import wizards locking only to find out we already fixed it internally in a branch that also contained the FB Neo import. It would have taken just as much, if not more time to decouple the two and test them separately than it would to just test what was already there and working, so hence, new feature

 

The next beta cycle will start soon enough as we already have branches in the code review / internal testing phases, so expect a new beta thread in the next week or so.

I'll close this one down for now until then.

Thanks everyone for the help with beta testing this release.