JoeViking245

Reported issues of games disappearing is almost always caused by one of two things: You enabled an auto-hide setting and the game is now being hid (most of the time it's for games missing a certain media type) You have extra files in your \\LaunchBox\Data\Platforms folder that don't belong. Backup files in this folder cause issues and need to be kept somewhere else. You should only have one file per platform in that folder.

MAME saves to the hi file at the end of each gameplay (after your last player dies and it's ready for you to press player 1 start). vs. saving only when exiting the game. If you're good, you create a Lua script plugin for MAME that would delete/move/whatever the hi file after saving. Alternately, you could create an AutoHotkey script that loads when you start a game [that uses the MAME emulator]. The script could... when you press the assigned hotkey, it would delete/move/whatever the hi file for the current game. You'd just need to place the script in the emulators Running Script section. The problem with that is, you can't pass any parameters to a Running Script (like the emulators path or the ROM name). So you'd need to get very creative. Maybe something like this. Note: This WILL DELETE the games hi file when you press Alt+A while a game is loaded! sleep 2000 queryEnum := ComObjGet("winmgmts:").ExecQuery("" . "Select * from Win32_Process where caption='mame.exe'") ._NewEnum()[p] CommandLine = % p.commandline StringSplit, rom, CommandLine, "%A_Space%- StringSplit, mame, CommandLine,"," StringReplace, path, mame2, mame.exe hi = % path "hiscore\" rom%rom0% ".hi" ; Press Alt+A to delete the current games .hi file !a::FileDelete, % hi This assumes You're using standalone MAME (vs RA MAME [ugh]) You're using regular MAME (mame.exe vs mameui.exe) Your high scores are being saved to the emulators 'hiscore' subfolder D:\Emulators\MAME\mame.exe D:\Emulators\MAME\hiscore\1942.hi You can press Alt+A

You'd have better luck getting a USB hub to work than finding a way to get that to work like you're thinking. Windows is notorious for reading and putting the USB ports in any ol' order when starting up. Just recalled someone mentioning a hub in which you can turn each of its ports on/off individually. Giving you the ability to have all 4 off, then after booting up, turn on P1, then P2, then P3 and then P4. In that order.

Sounds like you have enough [USB] ports (8) on your PC (didn't catch that in the original post). My o l d PC is not that fortunate. 😊 Probably not waste your time trying a hub because I hear that's worse.

It boils down to, it's a Windows thing. If you're able to plug them in directly to the PC, that sometimes helps. Provided of course you have enough ports. Otherwise, you're stuck using a USB hub of sorts. The quick fix is to... when you turn the PC on, plug in the encoders, one-by-one, starting with player 1. Then 2. etc. Obviously, that's not reasonable. I've never used it myself, but have heard many have had great success using devreorder.

Your I-PAC in keyboard mode should be: press and hold Player-1 Start (the 'hold button') and press Player-1 Coin, to "press Enter". By default. Also, P1-Start + Pause would "press Escape".

Can you share a screenshot of the message MAME is showing you?

The issue will be taken care of in the Hi-Score plugins next update. (I'll tag you on the other thread when it's available)

Love it! Was automatically locked on fresh startup. vs. (via right-click option)

Honestly, you'd be better off using the power of MAME to do that for you, 'the right way'. Make a copy of mame.ini and rename the copy vertical.ini. Edit vertical.ini, and "manually edit the display settings". MAME should recognize vertical games and load via vertical.ini automagically.

Then bezel is supposed to be on top of the games' window. If the bezel is covering too much of the game window, go into BezelLauncher Setup and resize the window as described in Testing. If the bezel is completely hiding the game window, make sure it has a transparent center. If I misunderstood what you're saying, can you share a screenshot of what you're seeing? Also share your logs file (located in the plugins' folder under /Logs/). Just drag and drop the file onto this message vs copying and pasting the contents of the file.

This section (Game Pause) is for keyboard mapping. The section at the bottom (Game Controllers < Mappings) is for controller mapping. I don't own a Sinden LightGun, so not sure it maps keyboard input or controller input. But I imagine it'd be controller input.

If the additional app's Application Path is pointing to just the AHK script (myScript.ahk), it will use your installed version of AutoHotkey. If you don't have AHK installed on your system, the script won't do anything. A non-executable file (i.e. something other than .exe, .com, .cmd) will use whatever program the file extension is associated to, on that system. A .txt file is not an executable file, but (by default in Windows) is associated to notepad.exe. Example: setting the Application Path for an Additional App to D:/joesFile.txt will open the text file (assuming it exists) in Notepad.

Ya. Pretty much. I always gear my scripts towards AutoHotkey v1 because that's what LaunchBox has in /ThirdParty/. That way if I steer someone towards an Additional App that uses a script and they don't have AHK installed, the app path can be "D:\LaunchBox\ThirdParty\AutoHotkey\autohotkey.exe" and the parameter would be "path\to\the\script.ahk". This way also, they're not 'forced' to install AHK. In fact, I've never installed or looked at v2.

It doesn't have one built-in. Probably just run the one that's with LB already. Run, "D:\LaunchBox\ThirdParty\7-Zip\7z.exe" a "<path/to/Mysaves.7z>" "<path\to\files\to\add>"

Are you testing directly in MAME? Or only attempting to run them via LaunchBox, through MAME? (tip: get them working in standalone MAME 1st.) These are 2 separate troubleshooting processes.

I replied to your other post. (not sure if it'll work though)

Ya, probably a good idea. One way to go about this: Create a folder to store the backups (/backup saves/) zip all the Save files (folders?). Add a date timestamp to the zip's filename. (similar to how LB saves its Backup files) This creates unique filenames. "Backup 2023-08-26 13-17-43.7z" Save the zip to your above folder TO KEEP THINGS FROM GETTING OUT OF CONTROL... Count the number of files in the [above] saves folder if 'count' is greater than 5 delete the oldest file aka keep only the 5 most recent files

In LaunchBox - Tools < Options < Startup Applications, you set up apps to load when LaunchBox, BigBox or both start. Not sure if this works when starting BB from shell. Maybe you can add an application for WinIPAC.exe and whatever parameter(s) needed to load the config file (that sets the modifiers). 'Shooting from the hip' and 'grasping at straws'. 😊

I have an o l d I-PAC-2 that doesn't have the option to switch x-input. Which for me is fine because games that use only a controller should be played with on a controller. For those I use an Xbox controller. That said, from what I've read, switch it to x-input, (re-)configure your emulators and call it a day, and don't look back. While playing games, of course. 😎 The only downside is oddball emulators for oddball systems that can only use keyboard and mouse. For those, you can add a Running Script to the emulator that will pass a command to tell the I-PAC to switch into keyboard mode. Then when exiting, have it switch back to x-input mode. Conversely, keep everything as-is and for systems/games/emulators needing x-input, add the script accordingly to switch to that and then back.

TeknoParrot is a game 'loader' similar to Steam. If it's of any consequence, these are the only 2 'emulators' that I'm aware of that create this issue. No. The Startup Screen will remain showing as long as the launched executable is running, or the set delay time has elapsed. aka, the Startup Screen will terminate early if the launched executable has terminated. What's happening is, when you launch a Steam (or TeknoParrot) game, you start the 'main' executable (steam.exe). This executable then spawns another executable which is the actual game.exe. Once the game is spawned (executed), the originating .exe (steam.exe) terminates itself (and the [actual] game continues to run). As you're discovering, TeknoParrot takes a few (maybe 5) seconds to 'get the game rolling' before terminating itself. At the end of these few-to-5 seconds, LaunchBox sees that the "game" it launched (which again, is your main executable) has exited and doesn't need to show the Startup Screen for the full duration (45 seconds or however long you set it for). So 'makes it go away'. This is by design. i.e. If you set the Startup Screen delay duration to 45 seconds and launched a regular game, say... something using RetroArch, and something errored causing the game (or RA) to not start properly or crash, you wouldn't know it until after the full 45 seconds has elapsed. That's close to 45 seconds (each time you attempted to launch it) that could be used to figure out why the game crashed.