[Mame 2 Player with two controllers]

Did some more testing based on what @Headrush69 said.  Setting the DIP switch to cocktail, then restarting/resetting the game does make P2 controls work as assigned.  But if you're on a single upright monitor, the screen does go upside down for player 2.

[Mame 2 Player with two controllers]

At least for keyboard inputs...

Even though (for some reason) MAME shows P1 and P2 in the Input Assignments, it's still an alternating controller game.  Whereas Gauntlet can actually be played with 2-4 concurrent players.

Your DK work around is to double up the P1 input assignments.  The problem with that is, while P1 is playing, P2 [controller] can mess with P1.  

At least that's what my testing came up with... couldn't get P2 to have its own key assignments.

I don't know if it's different using actual controllers (like Xbox controllers).  Didn't test it.

[AHK script for trilogy/game-within-game games?]

9 hours ago, Garosath said:

it seems more like a band-aid than a solution here

Never said it was elegant. Just simple. And it is a solution.  

 

What you're needing to do is wait for a new instance of rpcs3.exe to open and then move that window.  I don't have that game to test with, so now really sure what all it's doing. Window-wise.   You may need to tweak it a little depending on what rpcs3 is actually doing with its windows for your game.

WinWaitActive, ahk_exe rpcs3.exe
WinGet, var, PID, A
Send #+{Left}
WinMaximize

Loop
{
   IfWinActive ahk_exe rpcs3.exe
   WinGet, var2, PID, A
   if var = var2
      Sleep 500
   Else
   {	
      Sleep, 2000      ;give it a sec or two to actually appear (may not be necessary?)
      Send #+{Left}
      WinMaximize, ahk_exe rpcs3.exe
      Break
   }
}

$Esc::Send !{F4}

Depending on how many instances it opens to finally get to the actual game, you may need to add one or more loops to get and compare PID's.

If the "exclusive features" opens yet another instance of rpcs3 windows (as does the game), that'll really screw things up (using the above example script).  But if you go straight to one of the games, you should be OK.  I don't know what the exclusive features actually are, but for me, if I'm putting a game on "the Big Screen", I'm just wanting to play the game. 

 

If you plan to pop in and out of exclusive features before actually starting a game, that could get messy.  Each instance of rpcs3 you start, you'll need to win+shift+left and maximize.  Between new windows opening up, you need to capture which window instances you've moved/maximized or nest more loops.

 

I think the most straight forward solution might be to set the TV as the primary monitor before starting LaunchBox/BigBox when you want play games on it.  I use a program called Monitor Profile Switcher and created 2 different profiles. One where the arcade cabinet is the Primary monitor and another where the TV is the Primary monitor.  I then created a batch file that will: load the profile for the TV as primary, start BigBox, then when BB exits, loads the cab as primary profile.  No fuss. No muss. No Win+Shift+Left. Ever.

[AHK script for trilogy/game-within-game games?]

If I'm reading this correctly, the simplest fix might be to set up a new ("2nd") RPCS3 emulator in LaunchBox, pointing to your same rpcs3.exe but with a different Running Script.  In the new script, add a Sleep timer right after the WinMaximize line.  Set it to however long you think it takes to select one of the 3 games have it start running. Then add another Send and WinMaximize lines after the sleep.  Then set "The Sky Collection to use this new emulator.

WinWaitActive, ahk_exe rpcs3.exe
Send #+{Left}    ;Send Win+Shift+Left
WinMaximize, ahk_exe rpcs3.exe
Sleep, 10000	 ;10 seconds
Send #+{Left}    ;Send Win+Shift+Left
WinMaximize, ahk_exe rpcs3.exe

$Esc::
{
   ;Process, Close, {{{StartupEXE}}}
   WinClose, {{{StartupEXE}}}    ;better method to exit a program
   ;WinClose, ahk_exe rpcs3.exe  ;alternate, direct method to exit a program
}

Adjust the Sleep timer accordingly.

[How to get LaunchBox to close an .EXE it didn't launch?]

1 hour ago, Indrid_Cold said:

I was just bemoaning the fact that I was going to have to do this 100 times.

That was going to be my next suggestion if indeed the above worked.  

[Trying to add Kodi]

Not sure what you mean by Kodi integration, but what you did to start (launch) Kodi will work.  I might suggest turning off Startup screens.

[How to get LaunchBox to close an .EXE it didn't launch?]

Try this:

• Create a text file that contains the following, save it, and rename it to a .ahk file extension.  Something like "ClosePhoenixEmu.ahk"  Be sure it doesn't get saved with a .txt on the end. Like "ClosePhoenixEmu.ahk.txt"

$Esc::
WinClose, ahk_exe PhoenixEmuProject.exe
ExitApp

• Edit one of your games, go to Additional Apps and click Add Application
• For the Application Path, Browse to ..LaunchBox\ThirdParty\AutoHotkey\ and select AutoHotkey.exe
• In the Application Command-Line Parameters field, enter the full path to where you saved the file you created, in "quotes".
• Check the box Automatically Run Before Main Application.
• Click OK
• Play the game and see if it works.

 

[Pulling MAME Roms out of a non-merged set]

8 minutes ago, maxforwardspeed said:

I actually did not use the MAME.xml, only the dat download option and used that exclusively to rebuild the set in Clrnamepro. By creating the mame.xml would I just create a profile from that instead of using the dat? Or am I going about this all wrong and need to use both?

Sorry. I don't clrmamepro that often.  Yes, you're right.  Use the dat file.  You can open and search it the same way with a text editor to verify against your ROM.

[Pulling MAME Roms out of a non-merged set]

A shot in the dark, when you downloaded the MAME xml, did you set the version there?  Or just in the search?

 

Next I'd say, open the xml, look for "puckman" and compare the ROMs it lists with what's in your zip file and make sure those match up.

Above is the 0.78 set.

[send Alt F4]

3 hours ago, musarezeq said:

But the strange thing the command that I use, actually work on other games but that one is not , although it can still be closed by pressing the Alt+F4 on keyboard!!

Since it's a Windows game and you're not using an emulator, how exactly are you setting up the command?  I assume an AutoHotkey script launched via an Additional App.  What does your script look like?  Are you trying to set it to a key on the keyboard (i.e. ESC)?  Or a button on a controller?  Both?

[send Alt F4]

5 hours ago, musarezeq said:

Hi,

I tried most of these scripts to close most of the games. They were working flawlessly with the most but with some are not.

let me more specific, Most of "Outright Games" like, PawPatrol Adventure City Calls.

when I press physically Alt+F4 on my keyboard, the game close with no problem but not with the script !!

any help is really appreciated.

If you have the Steam version and are using the Steam ID# to launch the game, it's not going to work this way.  If you use the Steam game.exe to launch it, it may work.  But either way, you really should be exiting it through the games' menu (for Steam games).

If you have a console version, which emulator are you using for your game?

[BannerBox Mega Drive game box art/banner]

There are Mega Drive versions available.

What you might try doing is in your Sega Mega Drive platform, select all the games then click Edit (or press Ctrl+E) to open the Bulk Edit Wizard.  Then when it asks which Field you want to change, select Region. For the Value, select Europe.  

Once that's completed, when you download/update metadata and media for those games, I believe it should grab the "(Europe)" versions of the images.

[Merge platforms?]

6 hours ago, maxforwardspeed said:

Well, I tried starting from scratch and named my platform "Sega Naomi" and imported all of the games from the individual categories into one but I still didn't get the platform media and data to load. No big deal I suppose. I'll just have to look for the Naomi platform info manually.

To be honest, I'm not sure how I got the System metadata in there for Sega Naomi 2.  (It was done quite a while ago) 

I tried to reproduce it and the only way I could get it to work was to import the ROMs directly in LaunchBox into a new platform and setting the Scrape As value there.

The plugin was set to assign the Scrape As value to Arcade for all 9 systems.  I have updated the plugin (v1.01) so it will now set the Scrape As value according to the system.  I figured this way it'll get the appropriate System metadata in there.  Then if later, anyone wanted to change to Arcade it'd be a lot easier as Arcade doesn't really have any metadata.   It goes something like this:

System                     Scrape As
---------------------       -----------------
Atomiswave            Sammy Atomiswave
Cave3rd                   Arcade
Gaelco PVR2           Arcade
Hikaru                     Sega Hikaru
Naomi Cart             Sega Naomi
Naomi GDROM      Sega Naomi
System SP               Sega Naomi
Naomi Cart 2          Sega Naomi 2
Naomi GDROM 2   Sega Naomi 2

[thunderhoop_gal16v8.f2 not found eror rom mame]

55 minutes ago, catalaman said:

SHOULD YOU KNOW THAT ROM WORKS FINE ON MAME 0.222 , and dont work on mame 0.236 .

in general normally the update facilitates and corrects the errors, why the update of the mame becomes more and more complicated with the old roms .

 

As MAME (mame.exe version 0.xxx) updates, they've updated ROM dumps as well.   Not every ROM gets updated with every MAME update.  This is why if you update MAME and not the ROMs, most of the games will still work. In your case, Thunder Hoop is not one of them.

The rule of thumb is you always want to have a ROM set (version) that matches you MAME version.  

The reason your Thunder Hoop works in v0.222 is because you ROM (zip file) is from version 0.225 or earlier (i.e., 0.222).  If you look inside thook.zip, you will see that it only has 7 files.

c09
c10
c11
c12
sound
th18dea1.040
th161eb4.020

 

When the ROM was updated along with MAME version 0.226, it now has 11 files.  Those previous 7, plus

thunderhoop_gal16v8.f2
thunderhoop_gal16v8.j16
thunderhoop_gal20v8.d21
thunderhoop_gal20v8.h11

(see the resemblance of the 4 yours says is missing?)  So, MAME versions 0.226 and later (i.e., 0.236) are looking for all 11 files.

 

Sometimes you will get "lucky" when you update MAME but not the ROMs, and the ROMs will still work.  But it is NOT advisable to it that way "hoping for the best".

[Box Back displayed instead of Box Front.....]

If you select the ".38" game, and then press F5, does that fix it?

Of the 8 images you have, are they all unique?  "Box - Front", "Box - Back", "Clear Logo"... etc..

[Auto Hotkey Scripts]

9 minutes ago, skizzosjt said:

I didn't see the problem with keeping them blank right away because the test script I made was just a test, it had no other code in it to run....but as I looked it over again it dawned on me this approach is problematic. 

When you place subsequent "blank" hotkeys, they'll all get assigned to command(s) that follow.  Hotkey assignments should also be 'terminated' with a Return. 

j::
K::
l::
Soundbeep
return

b::
n::
m::
send joe was here
return

Here, j, k and l are all assigned to "Soundbeep".  b, n and m will all type out "joe was here".

 

j::
K::
l::Return
Soundbeep
return

Here, j, k and l are all assigned to Return.  Soundbeep and the last return will never do anything.

 

SetTitleMatchMode, 2
#IfWinExist Notepad
{
  j::Return
  K::
  l::
  Soundbeep
  Send joe was here
  return
}

Here, ONLY if Notepad is running, j does nothing. k and l will both sound a beep and also type out "joe was here.  

 

Hopefully that helps makes the mud more clear.  

[Merge platforms?]

1 hour ago, maxforwardspeed said:

I'm not getting anything (clear logo, videos, etc) for Naomi. Do I need to rename the category for launchbox to see it correctly? Right now the platform is titled "Naomi Cartridge"

I didn't test with EmuMovies setup for videos, but setting the platform (not to be confused with the term 'category') to Scrape-As Sega Naomi (aka, Naomi cartridges) I was able to get metadata (which you didn't have issues with) and (I only checked) Arcade Cabinet, Clear Logo and Advertisement Front.  For my test, I selected the 1st 6 games, then Tools, Download, Update Metadata and Media for selected games, went through the prompts checking the 3 mentioned images and all was good.

 

10 hours ago, maxforwardspeed said:

"Naomi GDRom"

Same as above except setting the Scrape-As to Sega Naomi 2.

The Title of the Platform doesn't matter. As long as Scrape As is set.

 

[Auto Hotkey Scripts]

37 minutes ago, Sbaby said:

I found a solution by entering script  "BlockInput, On" while loading, and "BlockInput, Off"  as soon as the game starts

You might be able to, in between those "blocks", assign some do-nothing hotkeys for the joy buttons.  I don't know how you set the 'blocks', probably something along the lines of  while game_not_started_yet, BlockInput, On..... then add your joy buttons...  Joy1::Return   Joy2::Return.... etc.

Then [hopefully] those hotkey assignments only do-nothing 'while loading'.

[Windows 11 (September 20, 2022) Update - BigBox significant improvements]

(1) PC, (1) laptop and (1) cab [PC].  All say the same thing. lol

[EmuMovies Not showing Videos for Metadata]

35 minutes ago, brett190 said:

Yes, I do have the window showing up and no videos show up in the menu

It could be the platform you're in.?.  To test, go to Arcade and select one/several/all games and click Tools>Download>Update Meta Data... and see if they show up then.  (the game 1942 is always a good, all-around test game.)  You can click Cancel afterwards so as to not download what you [may] already have.  Also try [what you did before] and edit an individual game ("1942") and look in the EmuMovies tab.

If they do show up there, then chances are what you were trying to download the videos for simply doesn't have any (some other platform?).

If they don't show up there, then it sounds like an in-house issue with either LB, EmuMovies or both.

[EmuMovies Not showing Videos for Metadata]

14 hours ago, brett190 said:

Videos are not showing up as an option in Tools>Download>Update Meta Data

In the Download Metadata and Media Wizard, when you get to the "Would you loke to download media from EmuMovies?" page (next page after "Would you like to download images for your games?"), are any options (check boxes for images or otherwise) showing up?  

Right now, mines not looking too good. But I'm on my test PC and I may have something screwed up.

[Auto Hotkey Scripts]

2 hours ago, Sbaby said:

At the moment it didn't work but I added these two lines and it works fine now . It is also perfect with Windows 11. Thank you very much

Good to know it works on Windows 11.  Thanks.

If you wanted, you could replace those 3 BigBox lines with just 1 like I showed.  Start ("RunWait") BigBox.exe (or LaunchBox.exe) from within the "Core" subfolder.

[Auto Hotkey Scripts]

10 minutes ago, Sbaby said:

I didn't understand what I should do ...

Right now if I run 1.ahk everything works fine and everything goes black

Then if I run 2.ahk it restores everything except original wallpaper

how should i correct them?

 

OHhhhh..... you removed the semicolon to uncomment the line(s).  Gotch'ya.

21 hours ago, JoeViking245 said:

You will still need to have the script running, or save to fore mentioned variables externally to be recalled when restoring.

The file I attached was a library that you are to make reference from in your original script.  You can reference it by using the #Include statement.  

 

I suppose you could try to use it the way you did.  But use just one script file.  Uncomment the 2 lines and somewhere in between them, add

RunWait, "D:\LaunchBox\Core\LaunchBox.exe"

[Auto Hotkey Scripts]

1 hour ago, Sbaby said:

Wow, that looks great and very interesting 😮
I did a test on a virtual machine with windows 10. I used your script ToggleAllLibrary.ahk
I changed it by removing the semicolons from ToggleEverything: = HideDesktop () and magically it's all black ( This is great  )

Then I used a second identical script but removing the semicolons from RestoreDesktop (ToggleEverything [1], ToggleEverything [2])

This brought me everything back to normal...icons, bar, etc except for the desktop background which remained black, instead it should have brought me back the original wallpaper, where did I go wrong? 🧐

The call to RestoreDesktop doesn't (shouldn't?) have any semicolons.  Removing the semicolon from ToggleEverything changes it from an expression method to a legacy method in which both are different in how they set the array ToggleEverything. So that may have something to do with it.

Removing the colon from ToggleEverything := HideDesktop() shouldn't have made a difference in "hiding" everything.  But it may make a difference in setting its array (originalWallpaper, origBackground) that are returned from HideDesktop().  If those aren't stored properly (or at all), attempting to run

RestoreDesktop (ToggleEverything [1], ToggleEverything [2])

Would be just the same as running

RestoreDesktop ("", "")

..then RestoreDesktop won't know what the originalWallpaper was to restore it.

[Auto Hotkey Scripts]

2 hours ago, Sbaby said:

I would like to set a Windows desktop wallpaper when launchbox starts.

This is for those milliseconds when I occasionally can't cover the desktop for some game loads (They are few but it happens to me).

But then I would like the Windows 11 wallpaper to return when launchbox / bigbox is closed.

Is it possible to do this with ahk script?

This works on Windows 10.  Not sure about Windows 11.  Also, not sure about dual monitors.

To RESTORE the original wallpaper, you would need to keep the script running until you close LB/BB, or store the originalWallpaper variable to a txt file (or something).

; Store original desktop wallpaper (probably has issues with multiple monitors)

RegRead, originalWallpaper, HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop, WallPaper

; Set desktop wallpaper to null (not saved to registry.  Changes will revert after rebooting PC)

DllCall("SystemParametersInfo", UInt, 0x14, UInt, 0, Str, , UInt, 2)

 

Unless you want a 'special' wallpaper while LB/BB is running, it might be easier to have no wallpaper ("null") and set the background color to black. If your default is something other than black, you'll want to save the origBackground variable as well

; Store original background color

RegRead, backgroundRGB, HKCU\Control Panel\Colors, Background

StringSplit split, backgroundRGB, " "

origBackground := % RGB( split1, split2, split3)

; Set the background Color to black

DllCall("SetSysColors", "Int", 1, "Int*", 1, "UInt*", 0)

And if you're saving (storing) origBackgound,  you'll need this subroutine also.

;this subroutine is a part of desktopBackground

RGB(r, g, b) {

   SetFormat, Integer, Hex

   Return, (r << 16) | (g << 8) | b

}

 

Then to restore things after LB/BB closes (again, uses the variables originalWallpaper and origBackground that were saved from before.)

; Restore original desktop wallpaper (image)

DllCall("SystemParametersInfo", UInt, 0x14, UInt, 0, Str, originalWallpaper, UInt, 2)

 

; Restore the original background color

DllCall("SetSysColors", "Int", 1, "Int*", 1, "UInt*", origBackground)

 

If you'd prefer to have all that in a library and just call a function to hide and another to restore, you can call the attached library using #Include.  Instructions are in the file.  You will still need to have the script running, or save to fore mentioned variables externally to be recalled when restoring.

The library I made actually also hides/restores the desktop icons, taskbar, minimizes all windows as well as the wallpaper/background thing above.  Basically it gives you a black canvas.  So you'll want to comment or delete those portions you don't want out.

Have fun.      ToggleAllLibrary.ahk.txt  (be sure to remove ".txt" if/when you go to use it.)