Fry

That’s cool. Did I understand correctly that the current version requires all control information to be entered manually by each user and the new version will move the controls database online so it can be shared among all the users? i have been considering writing my own little .NET application to generate these control panel images but getting the game control information seems like the tricky part. Not difficult, just very manual and I don’t see a good way to automate that for emulators other than MAME.

Am I thinking about this correctly, what CPWizBiz can do? I know it is a program that would display the images for you but does it allow you to create a model of your control panel kind of like xpadder where you can lay buttons out to match the design of your controls and then have it read the emulators configuration files to generate images that show the button mappings? I'd love to design the control panel base image and then point it to my emulator folders and have it read the configurations to know how the buttons are mapped and then read some kind of controls database to generate the images of which button does what.

That's cool. Is CPWizBiz version 1 no longer available? I went to your site and I think the download link is broken.

I love the idea CPWizBiz to show the controls on a 2nd screen for my arcade cabinet. My thought is to simplify it a bit and use a program like CPWizBiz to generate the images and integrate them into the marquee monitor in a custom theme with a customized GameMarqueeView.xaml. I'd like to take a 16x9 monitor and turn it sideways and then show the marquee across the top, box/flyer art in the middle, and the controls at the bottom. I know CPWizBiz does a lot more than just show the controls and you're looking for ways to integrate it seamlessly into LaunchBox but I'm thinking BigBox already has the marquee monitor functionality so if we can just generate all the button mapping images we can incorporate it into what we already have. I've been playing around with a custom theme for the marquee monitor and it looks good but I don't have any of the button mapping images yet so I'm thinking to use CPWizBiz to generate those.

Good luck! Don’t worry about messing anything up, just try one thing at a time and see if it works. I think the best way to go about this would first be to ensure your controllers are being seen correctly in windows. If you’re running windows 10 you can hit start and type joy and the joypad and controller settings and go into properties and hit buttons on your tankstick and ensure that they are being registered by windows. You’d want to eliminate the possiblity that your buttons are not working at all. Then assuming the button clicks are recognized in windows you can move on to testing out your buttons in a Mame game by starting a game, hitting tab, and remapping the controls for the game. You got this, it’s not as hard as it might sound. Just poke around and you’ll figure it out!

Oh got ya! My suggestion would be to launch a game in Mame and see if you can hit tab on your keyboard and go manually configure your buttons for one game and go from there. That would tell you if the stick is able to be recognized.

Glad you got it working! You might want to go make that file read only so it can’t get messed up (if that was the problem). It definitely takes a lot of reading and tinkering to get this stuff to work and becomes a bit more difficult when you get an automatic setup and then something goes wrong as opposed to configuring it yourself from the ground up. Hope it keeps working for you, good luck!

Are you able to go back into your game and remap your tankstick buttons and have everything work again? This issue has happened to me for two different reasons. First was that I didn’t have MAME setup for stable ids on my arcade controller. I wonder if you are having this problem with not having stable ids https://docs.mamedev.org/advanced/devicemap.htm What can happen is your usb device gets a new ID on boot up but your Mame button mappings were done against the prior device ID. In the video and the link below they show how you can fix this by mapping your controller ID to a device ID (or something like that, it’s been a while I don’t recall the correct terminology) A second thing that happened to me to cause the same problem was once I mapped a button on my arcade in launchbox to the exit emulator, every time I would lose my button mappings. I think whatever happened when Launchbox would kill the process would screw up my MAME config file where the mappings were stored. Once I turned that setting off and instead mapped my exit button on my cabinet to mame’s exit key then my mappings wouldn’t be lost. Im not sure if this is what’s happening to you. If it is, you can either do like I did and not let launchbox kill the process and instead map a button to mames escape key. I think another approach could be to figure out which file that is getting screwed up and set it to read only so MAME won’t replace it when launchbox kills the process. Im not 100% confident on either of those issues causing your problem but those both happened to me and I had to fix it twice as described above. Hopefully something in here will help.

I would love to test this out as well whenever you get the next version out. Please give me a holler if you need any more beta testers and I’ll be happy to help.

If you right click the playlists and edit, you can specify a sort title which I think drives how the playlists sort. I didn't pay attention to how it behaved previously but in 8.8, i can see my playlists sorting alphabetically and if I put something weird in the sort title field, those playlists sort based on what I've keyed in there. Like I put C as the sort title for shoot-em-ups and it sorts after Board & Card Games and before Fighting Games.

Hi Guys, With the release of 8.8, is it possible to nest playlists inside of other playlists or can the playlists only be nested inside of platforms and categories? What I'm trying to achieve is something like this: Fighting Games ----- Street Fighter Series ---------- Street Fighter II: The World Warrior ---------- Street Fighter II: Champion Edition ---------- Street Fighter IV ----- Samurai Shodown Series ---------- Samurai Shodown ---------- Samurai Shodown II Run-n-gun ----- Contra Series ---------- Contra ---------- Super Contra ----- Metal Slug Series ---------- Metal Slug ---------- Metal Slug 2 I wanted to keep these lists platform agnostic. Is it possible with the updates in 8.8? I was playing around with this but it looks to me like we need to use the Parents tab on the edit playlist screen to select where these playlists display and I am only able to select categories or platforms as parents and not other playlists. I just wanted to make sure I understood this new feature correctly. Thanks for anyone who can confirm. Side note, this being my first post, I wanted to say thanks to the launchbox team for this awesome software and thanks to all those people on the forums who post great info. I've been reading these and a few other forums for a long time, getting my system setup and building out my first arcade cabinet. The info that has been posted on these forums has been invaluable. Especially Lord Monkus for all the tutorials, NJDave for the no-nag MAME builds, and all of the theme creators for making my big box experience so fancy. I'm super grateful to all of you.