Johnny T

Hi all, After a blistering effort on Fighting Hawk (Mame) at the weekend (148,000) I noticed that my high score hadn't recorded on the Weekly / Monthly / Global high score table. I've just been Googling it to try and find the issue and someone posted on Reddit that you needed to be using mame64.exe for high scores to work? I'm only using mame.exe as I found that when I download the latest version of mame there isn't a "mame64.exe" that comes with it?? The last update I have to mame64.exe was 26th Jan 2021. Is this correct? Or am I missing something here? Is there a way of downloading the latest mame64.exe? Or am I just supposed to rename mame to mame64 to get the high scores to work in Big Box? Or am I completely on the wrong tracks here?? Any help greatly appreciated... it won't get my Fighting Hawk high score back but it will help for next time 🙂

This is a great idea though! An extra 'tab' on the High Score board for "Friends" that just shows you and the usernames that you add in to LB (basically it would just filter the boards for your chosen usernames i.e. friends). That would be a very basic 'quick fix' implementation. Alternatively, if you wanted to go the full monty then it would be a "friend request" system with people accepting your friend request and having a management list of 'friends' etc.... I think even the first implementation would be a great addition. @Mock if you do request it as a feature please post the link in here and then I can vote on it please. 🙂

Thanks for that Retro... I didn't realise I could just drop in other Theme's "views" and they would be honoured by the host theme. That's great info. In answer to your question, I've got a cabinet that has a stretched LCD as a marquee... It's a strange ratio and 'standard' marquee's are only half on the screen (the bottom half is clipped). I really want to get some videos on the marquee if possible (since the update in v12) but I also really love the Pulse theme so would like to keep that if I can. Here's an older photo of the cab but you get the idea... I'll try and drop in the "views" I edited in the last theme and see if that works. Thanks again for all your help matey. 🙂

Hi all, I was using the CriticalZone theme for ages and had managed to set up the marquee image sizes by altering the PlatformMarqueeView.xml and GameMarqueeView.xml in the Theme/Views folder. I'm using a stretched LCD display so need them to be quite squished. I've now transitioned to the excellent Pulse theme. And would like to use 'video' marquees. However, there isn't those PlatformMarqueeView.xml and GameMarqueeView.xml files in this theme. The creator kindly shared the BB Theme Creator original files with me so I've loaded BB Theme Creator tonight and I've been to the Game Marquee screen but it's blank with no elements on it. So I wondered if there was a way (either through the software or via altering an xml or whatever) to adjust the height/width of the marquee video/image in a theme? I couldn't see anything for that in the Big Box menus but maybe I'm missing something? Or maybe I can just drop an xml in a certain folder and any theme will read that? Many thanks for all your help 🙂

Okay, thanks for that. I'm planning on spending a bit of time to learn CTC anyway so will look through them and see if I can work it all out. I have a Fruit Machine cab and want a vertical theme so was going to use CTC for that. Seems like an amazing piece of software. Thanks for all your help and, of course, the superb theme. It's brilliant. 🙂

I installed Pulse last night. Wow! It's an awesome theme!! My one issue is that my stretched LCD display has an unusual resolution. In the past I've overcome this by changing the GameMarqueeView.xaml and PlatformMarqueeView.xaml in the Theme/Views/ folder but I noticed that Pulse doesn't have one? Does anyone know how I could alter the position/size of the marquees from Pulse? Many thanks for all your help 🙂

These are awesome!! And are now supported with the advent of v12 I think.... thanks for putting them together and sharing. You sir, are a god among men! 🙂

I've not got one. I only have fruities on my cab so only have the one platform. However, if you do find one then please post it as it would be good to have one 🙂

Hi Faeran, Apologies for the late reply. Unfortunately I've got a million and one RL things going on at the moment and I'm struggling to find any time to do anything else.... However, I *did* do a bit more investigation yesterday and found that on one particular game the monitor changes. However, when I go into the BB settings the monitors are still set correctly. At least now I can replicate the issue and know what game (at least one game - there may be a few others in the "Quiz Machine" playlist) is causing the issue. I know that some of these quiz machines are only Win XP compatible so I'm assuming it's something to do with that. I'll experiment (hopefully this weekend all being well) with running in different compatibility modes etc and just see if I can get any further.... Just wanted to give you an update. Thanks ?

Hi Faeran (congrats on your recent appointment - well deserved mate ) Thanks for getting back to me. It's only the Quiz Machines and it's only certain ones. The "I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here" is a definite culprit and there's a couple of others. I *think* it's repeatable but won't know until I fire up the cabinet again which should be this weekend but I'll definitely check the Primary Screen setting hasn't changed. I might be able to get up to my cabinet tomorrow evening and, if I do, I'll post back my findings then. Thanks again for your suggestions. Cheers ?

Hi all, I've just started setting up SWP (Skill With Prizes) Quiz Machines as a platform in my Launchbox/BigBox build. These are quiz games like Who Wants to be Millionaire and 100 vs 1 etc. They are exe files and just run directly (without an emulator). However they quite often open at a different resolution to my monitor - for instance 800 x 600 - due to their age. On my cabinet I have two monitors - a marquee and a main monitor. I'm running the latest Win 10 and the latest BigBox. All the quiz machine games launch fine but I've noticed on quite a few of them, when I exit the game and go back to the main monitor, Big Box has moved on to my marquee monitor? Anyone know why this would happen and how to prevent it? These quiz games are just like running old DOS games so I'm assuming it's maybe a problem that others have come across before?

Did you get an answer to this? I was looking into the same thing? Thanks ** EDIT ** it's okay, I've sussed it. Cheers

I have used Skraper briefly a loooong time ago so it *could* be that. I'll just set up a quick file check for *backup* files in my tool and alert me if they come back. Thanks again

I don't know unfortunately? I've been doing a lot of work on making a script that easily shows me which games I'm missing (and various other things ...) maybe it was a file I created many moons ago?? Can't say for sure

Removing the Atari 2600 backup.xml seems to have sorted it I think!! A big thanks to Faeran and C-Beats for your help guys!! Very much appreciated. Hopefully that will be it sorted now. I've deleted a couple of other *backup files I found in the Data/Platforms/ folder too... Thanks again

I have just found an Atari 2600 backup.xml in there and deleted it.... just trying it again now. Thanks

Hi Faeran Yes, my roms are zip files and I just imported the folder. It's happening all the time with Atari 2600 roms - I'm just working on curating that system so I've not tried it with other systems yet. I'm busy experimenting with it at the moment to try and make a pattern out of the behaviour. I'll post back if I come up with something. Thanks ?

Hi all, I'm trying to curate my list of Atari 2600 ROMs. I've been through and deleted some of the ROMs. I "Scan for Removed ROMs" and it finds a list that I've deleted and I tell it to remove them. I then scan for removed ROMs again and it doesn't find anything... so far so good.... However, if I power LB off and then go back the next day and "scan for removed roms" again, it finds a load more ( nearly 100 of them!!). Do I need to somehow 'refresh' the cache or something after it has 'removed roms' ?? Thanks PS... Not sure if it's relevant but I have "Allow deleting ROMs when deleting games" ticked - although I'm not sure that's relevant if it's just removing 'removed ROMs' as, presumably, it should just be updating the xml file for that system??

Ha!!! Neil, you're a genius!!! That link actually goes to another URL which does redirect to the correct place in the database! (even though the IDs aren't the same!!). That's excellent. I just need to link to gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/games/dbid/..... Great stuff. Thanks for the nudge in the right direction matey

I've been making some software that checks the LB DB and checks it against all the games in your library for the chosen system. It tells you what games you're missing and what extraneous games you've got. It's just to feed my OCD to collect every game for each system (which I know isn't everyone's cup of tea but it's something I'd like to do). In the table I display the LB database ID and I'd like to make it an URL to link to the LB DB. The other solution would be to embed the URL into the metadata.xml and I could just read it out of there? Quite a selfish reason - I know But I'm sure it would come in handy for other applications too....