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MrSco

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Posts posted by MrSco

    BigBox crash while sitting idle doing attract mode

    in Troubleshooting

    Posted

    On 12/12/2019 at 12:48 PM, Jason Carr said:

    Wanted to let you guys know that I've been doing some stability testing for the last week or so. Nothing is really new, but a few points:

    • I've been testing on 5 different machines with different hardware and letting them run for extended periods of time (up to 48 hours straight), and haven't experienced any crashes outside of known issues (described below).
       
    • Unfortunately it is known that there are some themes that do introduce stability issues. For the most part, the themes that are in the themes manager are stable, but there are a couple still that may have minor/rare issues, so it's always best to try a different theme. Unified and Unified Redux are both known to be completely stable themes, as is the Default theme, so those are good themes to test with.
       
    • In the odd situation where a sound card was disabled, removed, or disconnected, there were crashes happening, but I'm hoping I have those fixed in the latest beta.
       
    • Microsoft introduced a bug in either Windows or the .NET Framework some time in the past year or so that started causing some unfortunate issues with Windows Media Player. So if you are using WMP as your video playback engine, I strongly suggest switching to VLC if you're concerned with long-term stability.
       
    • Unfortunately drivers (especially video drivers) can still cause issues with WPF (the theming engine). It is rare but it does happen, so sometimes either upgrading or even downgrading video drivers can be the fix.
       
    • I still find this ridiculous, but some poorly written software (MSI Afterburner is a common problem, for example) can significantly interfere with WPF .NET apps (it's not just Big Box or LaunchBox), and cause performance or stability issues, or sometimes the apps won't even run. If you're having issues, I strongly suggest trying to kill off any and all background apps via Task Manager to see if it makes any difference.
       
    • Believe it or not, on very rare occasions we find that unplugging a particular USB device can fix issues as well. The last time this occurred, it was because a particular device on the system was not being powered properly with the hub that it was attached to, for example. So it's also worth trying unplugging all USB devices sans for the keyboard and mouse, to see if that happens to fix whatever issue you're running into.

    Hopefully that helps folks who are running into stability issues. It pretty much sums up all of the potential issues and solutions that we've found in the past few years. Unfortunately most of the above are not things that we can really tackle or fix, or we would have been on them already.

    I tried switching to Unified Redux, but still crashes after some hours of running attract mode.

     

    @Jason Carr when you ran your 48 hour tests were your running attract mode with videos for 13000+ games?

    me thinks there’s a memory leak after it plays so many video files... all my games have video snaps... 13,000+ of em

    BigBox crash while sitting idle doing attract mode

    in Troubleshooting

    Posted

    On 12/3/2019 at 2:50 PM, MrSco said:

    well i've been running BigBox now for about 4+ hours and no crashes yet. Usually it would have crashed multiple times (after restarts) by now. The change? I had some autohotkey scripts and xpadder.exe running in the background on boot... i disabled those and just ran BigBox.exe only.  one of the autohotkey scripts is used to launch xpadder and bigbox at boot... the other is for some custom controller monitoring to be able to use either the wireless xbox controller or the built-in bartop joystick controls as the first player (toggles the bartop xinmo joysticks enabled/disabled using devcon.exe). 

     

    i'm not sure which autohotkey script is the issue, or if bigbox doesn't like xpadder running in background?

     

    what are you guys using to launch bigbox and other exe's at computer bootup in a silent, clean, hidden manner?

    Well scratch autohotkey and xpadder off the list of causes... I let BigBox.exe run solo in attract mode for a bit longer than 6 hours and eventually it crashes with the error from my original post. But I’ve tested a couple more times and it’s crashed in 2-4 hours also. So the time it takes seems to be random  

    BigBox crash while sitting idle doing attract mode

    in Troubleshooting

    Posted

    well i've been running BigBox now for about 4+ hours and no crashes yet. Usually it would have crashed multiple times (after restarts) by now. The change? I had some autohotkey scripts and xpadder.exe running in the background on boot... i disabled those and just ran BigBox.exe only.  one of the autohotkey scripts is used to launch xpadder and bigbox at boot... the other is for some custom controller monitoring to be able to use either the wireless xbox controller or the built-in bartop joystick controls as the first player (toggles the bartop xinmo joysticks enabled/disabled using devcon.exe). 

     

    i'm not sure which autohotkey script is the issue, or if bigbox doesn't like xpadder running in background?

     

    what are you guys using to launch bigbox and other exe's at computer bootup in a silent, clean, hidden manner?

    BigBox crash while sitting idle doing attract mode

    in Troubleshooting

    Posted

    1 minute ago, Jason Carr said:

    @wallmachine Looks like you might be dealing with issues caused by an audio device getting removed or disabled, or something of that nature. I'm going to see if I can make that code more robust in that situation, but if I had to guess based on your logs, that'd be my guess (at least for that one situation and log file).

    In that case, unfortunately you're dealing with a compromised system, so there's not much we can do to help in that regard unless you can reinstall Windows and get everything working properly. I'm sorry for the bad news on that one.

    The particular error you're running into is a heap corruption error with the .NET Framework, which is unfortunately a nightmare because it could be caused by anything, and it's probably a bug with a driver, Windows, or the .NET Framework. So bad news there as well, because without a lead, there's not a whole lot I can do. What I would recommend there, is to make sure that you close down any and all apps that could be running in the background (use Task Manager), and unplug any extra USB devices you have plugged into the machine, just to be safe (other than keyboard and mouse). From there, we can figure out if it's still happening or not, and try to pinpoint what might be causing it. Sadly, this one's not going to be easy, but we can probably get it figured out eventually if you're willing to do a little sleuthing.

    thanks, I'll try sleuthing this week and post back...

    • Like 1

    BigBox crash while sitting idle doing attract mode

    in Troubleshooting

    Posted

    14 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

    Yeah, if you're already on VLC, then you probably won't want to switch to WMP. Do you have the same issue with other themes?

    haven't tried other themes. i've been using this viking colorful theme for a while now (and letting it sit idle on attract mode for many hours) and its worked great up until LaunchBox 10.7 ... now crashes after extended periods of idle.

    BigBox crash while sitting idle doing attract mode

    in Troubleshooting

    Posted

    I just had BigBox.exe crash on me while it was running for a couple hours just sitting idle going through its random attract mode switching through games and having the videos play. I've had it I've had it do this much longer without issues before. I'm on the latest version of launchbox 10.7...

    Here is the event log error... 

    Faulting application name: BigBox.exe, version: 10.7.0.0, time stamp: 0x5dd429b2
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 10.0.18362.418, time stamp: 0x99ca0526
Exception code: 0xc0000374
Fault offset: 0x00000000000f9269
Faulting process id: 0x1c08
Faulting application start time: 0x01d5a46e85993ab6
Faulting application path: H:\Arcade\LaunchBox\BigBox.exe
Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll
Report Id: a61fdc1c-b95d-4916-bb93-a9f2f74567bf
Faulting package full name: 
Faulting package-relative application ID:

    any ideas?

    MAME cfg controls don't save if launched with launchbox

    in Troubleshooting

    Posted

    14 hours ago, DOS76 said:

    If you are using the built in MAME UI cancel you can remove the script from that section completely but since you have it working I guess that isn't an issue.

    yea, i am using built-in mame ui cancel, but i also have some xpadder stuff going on during launch/exit... i just didn't include in my examples for simplicity.

     

    thanks for the help!

    MAME cfg controls don't save if launched with launchbox

    in Troubleshooting

    Posted

    I figured out what it was... me being dumb...

    In my mame emulator setup in LB for autohotkey running script, I had... 

    $Esc::
{
     Process, Close, {{{StartupEXE}}}
}

    I switched it to ...  

    $Esc::
{
     WinClose, ahk_class MAME
}

    and now the settings save when exiting mame via launchbox/bigbox.... the Process, Close method must not exit mame gracefully and therefor doesn't save anything. hope this saves someone else some time.

     

    thanks everyone for the tips!

    • Like 3

    MAME cfg controls don't save if launched with launchbox

    in Troubleshooting

    Posted

    i'm using tab key while in mame to set the controls and after exiting mame, it doesn't save the mame/cfg/*.cfg file if the mame64.exe was launched with LaunchBox (either by launching game or using right click menu and choosing "open mame"). If i launch mame64.exe manually the cfg's save just fine. I've tried running launchbox as admin (and also tried mame64.exe as admin too) but it doesn't make a difference. I've tested with both mame 0.160 and mame 0.212 ... same results. Launchbox is locking the cfg files down somehow when launched via launchbox... any ideas?

     

    thanks

    Can't get MAME to work in LaunchBox

    in Troubleshooting

    Posted

    On 11/18/2019 at 8:59 AM, Retro808 said:

    That would be the issue than. Since you are using a rather old version of Mame there was a LB update that added a new command line that is needed for Pause them options to work. In your Mame emulator settings in Launchbox edit it an delete the portion that shows -keyboardprovider dinput. 

    Mame should work now, but you cannot use the new Pause features until you update to a more current version of Mame. 

    I’m using mame 0.160 and also had to remove the -keyboardprovider dinput but my pause screen feature seems to work ok still...? 
     

    I do have the issue of big box not being in focus when exiting a mame game though sometimes.

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