martijnsx

I agree too

Thanks! This also does the trick. Not sure which option is better.....

I miss one important improvement.... Bulk importing of systems.... Now when i do a new install i have to make the same choices for every rom set again and again. While this is normal for the rom location and the emulator setup. But for all other it can be standarized. For example. You have 1 screen where you set rom locations and choose emulators. For every system 1 line. Then all the other settings pages can be the same for every system. This way you can import all systems at once in bulk.

I just tested this... It happens with MAME only. I am on one of the latest versions (0.239). I also replaced the mame.exe with the mame no nag version exe. This makes no difference. I tried to increase the MINIMUM STARTUP SCREEN TIME to the maximum seconds (5) from within bigbox and this had no effect. Then i found out that under MANAGE EMULATORS and then under MAME there is a tab called STARTUP SCREEN where you can set different options. I messed around with all options and found that if you set the STARTUP LOAD DELAY to a high value (10 seconds or 20 seconds). The problem is gone. I notice however that the load time for emulators is very long from within bigbox (7 seconds or so). I just upgraded to an SSD for launchbox and media. Only the games are from a mechanical drive. However, if you load street fighter it is not a big file. I also notice that if i edit MAME under MANAGE EMULATOR and click the EDIT button it takes 10+ seconds to load the settings for MAME. Only the first time when i edit does it take this very long time. If i go back and try edit another time it is instantanious. If i close launchbox and start it again then the first time takes very long. Seems a lilttle buggy. For now i hope it works (will test a little more).

Does anyone have any clue? This is a real problem for me because in the moment (1-2s) the bigbox screen is show the controls also work so if i push a button i can start a second game or the games that was initially started looses focus and all gets messed up!

Hi, Can someone (with the skills) please make (or convert) a Hyperspin theme for Launchbox. I always use the Unified Redux (which i read somewhere long time ago that it comes closest to hyperspin). However, there is something missing. I always loved the Hyperspin look. Full screen attraction with Free Play/Press Start and a Joystick in the bottom of the screen and the hyperspin sounds. Or is there already a theme that has the hyperspin look, sounds and feel? Someone made one for Attract mode. See the example (start at 5:30):

I am also looking for the best easy method for shelling windows 10. Found this example for hyperspin. Don't know if this helps?

I just installed a new SSD (500GB) and additional 4GB ram. Will report after the caching if and how things improve.

Hi, I am currently updating 2 cabinets. I have gone the setup proces a couple of times for various reasons. The problem i have is with one cabinet and i encountered it on all new setups. When i start a game in Bigbox the game loading screen shows up. Then after some time it returns to the Bigbox menu for 1-2 seconds (as if the game did not start) and then it starts the game. I have an I7 2600 CPU, Radeon HD 7750, 8GB Ram (just added 4) and a 500GB SSD (MX500) for Launchbox/Media and a 1TB mechanical hard drive for all the ROMs. On my old installation (1 year ago) i did not have this problem. On both cabinets i followed the same procedure: Install windows 10 on the new 500GB SSD Partition the disk (70GB for Windows and the rest for Launchbox). Install "allruntimes" Update all drivers with Driver Booster (only on the last installs) Then install Launchbox. Does someone know why i might have this problem after every new install? And why only on 1 cabinet while the procedure is the same on the other? The other cabinet has a newer processor (same speed) and a better video card (GTX 950). Thnx!

I think i understand the script. I was not familiar with the operators like ++ but i looked it up on the AHK website. PS, why do we need the sleep 750?

Hi Joe, Thank you very much! Works like a charm!

I have cached all images and i think it is actually the caching itself when you first go around all systems that is causing the very unresponsive experience.... This is somewhat counter intuitive since you expect a very fast and clean system after you install launchbox for the first time. It gets a lot better when all images are cached. However, it still do not find it very snappy after all is cached. I took a better look on my system specs and the arcade cabinet on the second floor has only 4 GB of ram. So combined with a mechanical drive that may not be the best setup. I looked for additinonal RAM but since it is an old setup and the mainboard manual states it is almost a requirement to place identical RAM modules it becomes more expensive than i want to upgrade the RAM. Maybe a SSD 1TB for launchbox and the media is an option in the future when prices do drop a little. Thank you all for your help!

Hi to all Retro Gamers, Since a couple of years i have been looking for some script/program in which you can limit the amount of coins you can spend in MAME. Games are no challenge if you have unlimited coins. I have not found a solution so i began trying to write my own AHK script. And that is not as easy as i thought it would be. I hope we can all contribute to making a script that can do this (or hint to a program that does this already). What i want is very simple. Suppose your coin key is the Q key. If Q is pressed for example 5 times AHK must disable that key. The script must be active only when MAME is running. For this last requirement we have 2 options. 1. start the script when MAME is started / kill the script when MAME is closed. 2. write a script that checks if MAME is running or not. Starting and killing a script may be possible from within Launchbox (with launching/closing emulator). Killing a script might be also possible if we define the exit emulator key in the script. There is one more requirement. There may be more coin keys. If you have a 2 or 4 player system then there are 2 or 4 coin keys. I am not sure but i think arcade games have coins adressed differently. You have cabinets that add coins to a global counter and cabinets that have coins dedicated for player 1, 2, 3, and 4. In the first version it does not matter where you input a coin, in the last it does. I think most cabinets have a global counter (all coins add up and you can start all players). TMNT however does have dedicated coin inputs for 4 players (example). So who will join me in making this AHK script work? Step 1. Find AHK code that will block the input of a key if it is pressed more than X times Step 2. Make it work only when MAME is active Step 3. Make it work with multiple coin keys. Who has the solution or part of the solution and wants to share the first line of code? Let's do this together!

Well, definitely some very good suggestion to do the image cache thing. I do not remember but is this instruction given during a fresh install of LB? Maybe i clicked it away and did not read it.... if not shown maybe a good instruction upon installing why you should do it and how will help a lot of users. Will give it a try now! Thanx!!

Hi Fry, Thank you for your reply. I use the Unified Redux theme. I want to be as close to the hyperspin feel as possible. I loved hyperspin but the bugs, the complexity and the non existing development drove me away. I have not looked at the image cache options. What are the options? I assumed that Launchbox came with the best performance options enabeled with a new install. I used to have all the media on an SSD but since they are 256GB SSDs and windows is also on the SDDs and the disk space on it became to small i had to put the media on a mechanical drive. I know, not the best option. Performance on the SSD was better but i remember that wheel art did not load instandly.

As a long time licensed Launchbox / Bigbox user i want to give you my thougths.... Maybe i am to critical but i think it is beneficial for developers and all users to have this discussion. I love Lauchbox / Bigbox however.... There are some serious performance and stability issues. Last week i have been doing fresh installs on my 2 cabinets with a lot of problems. One was with a fresh windows 10 install and one was with a half year old windows 10 install. First the performance. It is really really bad right now (12.6). As mentioned in other posts sometimes the menu's react very slow. Seems the longer you run launchbox the worse it gets. As i read in another post there is a 12.7 beta that sort of improves the problem. The word "improve" in the post triggered my attention. Sometimes the menu hangs for 10 seconds. This is not an improvement but a bug. I have also seen for years now that graphics load very slow in big box when you enter a large system like mame. If you scroll to the letter S for example the wheel art loads very slow. Sometimes it takes a couple of seconds to load the wheel art and sometimes it takes 10 seconds or more. I have never seen this poor performance on other front ends. It is not that i have seen this once. Have seen it over the years on many installs. Second the stability. I have seen different stability issues over the years. Now with my 2 installs i encountered: A couple of system freezes. On both cabinets. I have also seen that when launchbox is downloading media and you close launchbox it should resume downloading after you restart it. Most of the times this works. Not always however. I also notice that after importing games downloading media is a hit or miss now. Some other problems that i have forgotten My PCs should be more enough to run a graphical front end: CPU >> Benchmark score of around 5000 on passmark GPU >> GTX 950 RAM >> 8 GB My thoughts. It feels to me like the development of Launchbox is heavily skewed towards developing extra features instead of focus on performance and stability. It feels like we are building the fifth roof on top of a house where the foundation is crackling. Maybe the developers can send out a poll to all users and check if more people experience this. They can ask where the focus should be on the coming year, on Features or Performance/Stability? I am not a coder but the performance of other front ends suggests that better performance should be possible. A raspberry pi can run a decent front end like ES. Maybe the coding is done in a language/environment that asks for too many system resources? Maybe Launchbox itself is too complex? I do not know. Maybe it is a good time to make a fresh start? Maybe not. When you do I would choose the most efficient coding environment and i would start with basic features everyone needs. What is the most important? Add that and make the core stable with high performance. Evaluate what is not important and can be left away. I can think of a few important basic core things to focus on like: Importing systems/rom sets Automatic downloading of media/videos Settings up the emulators Sorry again for the critical message...... I love LB/BB for the easy of use and active development. I hope we can add performance and stability in the near future!

Hi, The last 4 days i have been working on updating my 2 arcade cabinets. One is on the 2e floor and one is in the living room. I wanted fresh installements for both cabinets updating all emulator and roms. However, i run into some problems. The arcade cabinet on the second floor did freeze on me while downloading media. After restarting the PC it did not continu downloading media. So i choose DOWNLOAD and UPDATE metadata and media. I hope this will fill the missing media? I am not sure. The arcade cabinet in the living room did finish much faster because it has wired ethernet connection. However, the are no videos when starting big box. I looked in the videos folder and there are no videos there. I did the importing on both cabinets at the same time. With the same launchbox license and the same EmuMovies account. Might this be a problem?

Bezel Rom Extractor V1.0 Well, i made an application in Excel VBA that extracts the correct ROM files so that the bezels and rom file names match (see attachement). Why: The Bezel Project uses the No Intro Rom Sets. The Bezel Project has bezels with mixed regions (per game i.e. USA or Europe). The bezels are sometimes USA and sometimes Europe, etc. The No Intro Rom Sets from Arcadepunks have all the regions for that game (usually a game is present in 2 or 3 regions like USA, Europe and other). You cannot simply select the usa roms because the bezels sometimes are europe. For the same reason you cannot simpy use the Europe roms. You have to filter manually all bezel and roms so that they match. This program makes it easy to line up the roms to the bezels. It assumes: You are using the Bezel Project for windows You are using the No Intro Rom Sets ROMs have a 3 digit extension (.xxx) The No Intro ROM Set has per game: multiple regions (Usa AND Europe, and maybe some other) The Bezel Project has per game: one region (Usa OR Europe) (The region varies per game, it is not all Usa or all Europe, THIS IS THE MAIN PROBLEM) How it works: It looks at BEZEL files in the bezel file directory (.CFG). It looks if the exact same ROM file name exists in rom directory. If BEZEL and ROM match it will copy/extract the ROM to a choosen directory. How to use: Select the BEZEL directory Select the No Intro ROM Set directory Select the OUTPUT directory Click button to Extract The ROMS...... Bezel Rom Extractor v1.0.xlsm

Well, i made an application in Excel VBA that extracts the correct ROM files so that the bezels and rom file names match (see attachement).

Hi, I tried the bezel project for windows. For MAME it works without problems. Each rom has a standard name. For the consoles it is a hit and miss. I read that you have to use the NO INTRO rom sets. The problem is that these rom sets have multiple versions of the rom in a set. For example super mario bros exists in a USA and a EUROPE version. And sometimes there are 3 or even 4 versions (like JAPAN, etc) The downloaded files from the bezel project seem not to be limited to only USA or only EUROPE. For one game it uses the USA version and for another game it uses the EUROPE version. How can i ever match all the rom files to the bezel files? What do i do wrong? Another question, if the rom and bezel files names do not match i get nothing (black bars) and not the generic Nintendo or Sega bezel. Where can i change that if no bezel is found that the generic bezig for the system is used? Thanks!

Hi, I tried the bezel project for windows. For MAME it works without problems. Each rom has a standard name. For the consoles it is a hit and miss. I read that you have to use the NO INTRO rom sets. The problem is that these rom sets have multiple versions of the rom in a set. For example super mario bros exists in a USA and a EUROPE version. And sometimes there are 3 or even 4 versions (like JAPAN, etc) The downloaded files from the bezel project seem not to be limited to only USA or only EUROPE. For one game it uses the USA version and for another game it uses the EUROPE version. How can i ever match all the rom files to the bezel files? What do i do wrong? Another question, if the rom and bezel files names do not match i get nothing (black bars) and not the generic Nintendo or Sega bezel. Where can i change that if no bezel is found that the generic bezig for the system is used? Thanks!