MrSco
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Posts posted by MrSco
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I figured out my own issue with nircmd screensavertimeout and autohotkey
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15 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:
Okay. Are you on Windows 7 or Windows 10? Are you all up to date with your drivers and Windows Updates?
Windows 10 fully updated.
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13 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:
Hi @MrSco, that is possible. Sorry if you've already answered this, but are you using the VLC or the Windows Media Player video playback engine?
VLC
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@Jason Carr any updates or incite? Could it be a funky video file (Or some other game library related file?) that attract mode is randomly switching to to play and crashes?
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Anyway to have bigbox attract mode disable the windows screensaver while it’s running? I tried doing this manually with nircmd but it doesn’t seem to work.
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@Jason Carr My main theme is Unified Redux 1.8 (latest version), but i've tested with the Default theme and the same crashes happen.
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@Jason Carr I've done some more testing on the latest version 10.14, on different machines and with the default theme enabled, and BigBox.exe always crashes after a random amount of time (the quickest being around 2 hours and the longest around 23 hours).
Here are the errors from the event log...
First error
Event 1026, .NET Runtime Application: BigBox.exe Framework Version: v4.0.30319 Description: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception. Exception Info: exception code c0000005, exception address 00007FFA7C4BC474 Stack:Error immediately after:
Event 1000, Application Error Faulting application name: BigBox.exe, version: 10.14.0.0, time stamp: 0x5ea063fe Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 10.0.18362.778, time stamp: 0x0c1bb301 Exception code: 0xc0000005 Fault offset: 0x000000000003c474 Faulting process id: 0x48cc Faulting application start time: 0x01d61917464827dc Faulting application path: H:\Arcade\LaunchBox\BigBox.exe Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll Report Id: dbed4157-aaba-414d-95a6-e42f416c6d41 Faulting package full name: Faulting package-relative application ID: -
@Jason Carr well I think I jinxed it... BigBox finally crashed to the desktop after about 23 hours of running in attract mode. ☹️
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14 hours ago, Jason Carr said:
@MrSco Are you still seeing this issue with 10.11-beta-2?
I just installed and fired up the 10.11-beta-2 last night and so far about 12 hours and counting and no crashes... looking pretty solid but I don’t wanna jinx it lol.
Good work! what did you change?!
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On 11/26/2019 at 12:11 PM, MrSco said:
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?
@Jason Carr this is all thats in the error log when bigbox crashes...
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5 hours ago, Jason Carr said:
Interestingly, there's a similar ticket here that just came to my attention:
https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/5148/bigbox-crashes-when-shortcut-is-added-to
I have no idea why scripting would cause crashes for Big Box. Unfortunately I'm inclined to suspect that it might be an MS bug, but we should at least figure out exactly what the error is that is causing the crash. Per the ticket above, it appears to be caused by controller code somehow. What do you have in your Windows application event log when it crashes?
that is interesting... I did some more testing and I think it might be related to controllers for me as well...
One of the scripts I launch along with bigbox on startup is an autohotkey script that polls for xbox 360 controller connects/disconnects. I use bigbox on my bartop arcade and it has built-in xinmo 2 arcade sticks/buttons. the autohotkey script disables the xinmo usb device via devcon.exe when it detects an xbox 360 controller is connected. this is done so the 360 controller is player 1 instead of player 3, since controllers get assigned priority based on when they are connected/plugged in. since the xinmo is always hardwired into the bartop, the only option is to programmatically disable it so the xbox controller can be player 1 and reenable it when xbox controller disconnects so xinmo is player 1 and 2.
my guess is the autohotkey code that loops and polls for 360 controller connects/disconnects is maybe conflicting with bigbox's controller polling?
also if someone has a better idea to handle always connected arcade sticks and connecting/disconnecting wireless 360 controllers I'm all ears and would love suggestions. the only other idea i had was to do a physical hardware switch that somehow "unplugs" the xinmo usb wire from the computer.
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@Jason Carr I think I narrowed down the instability to using autohotkey script to launch bigbox. I use an autohotkey script at Windows logon using task scheduler (regular user non-elevated) to launch bigbox and that seems to be causing the crashes after 2-4 hours... any suggestions?
a nice feature suggestion for LaunchBox/bigbox would the ability to set external scripts/exe’s to launch along with and close when LaunchBox/bigbox is closed.
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2 minutes ago, JaysArcade said:
I think so but I haven't bothered trying to set it up.
Yea. I haven’t had a chance to tweak that yet. I’ve been too stuck on getting my setup to transition from game to bigbox and back to game with proper controller mappings etc while not losing focus and control so user needs to grab a keyboard or mouse. It’s been a challenge to say the least. I finally caved and set a hot key for alt+tab using xpadder as a fallback in case focus from bigbox gets lost.
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Ah indeed. Definitely a task keeping things simple for the guests.
I haven’t messed with it yet but I think LaunchBox supports the Xbox guide button now for single press pause menu invocation no? -
39 minutes ago, JaysArcade said:
My experience with the pause screens and RetroArch is they work 100% of the time in Launchbox. In Bigbox however, I can pause 7, 8, or 9 times (Maybe more or less than that, but definitely more than just once) and then Pause will no longer work. Opening and closing a retroarch game has no effect and trying a platform that uses a different core but same retroarch exe has no effect. The only way I've gotten Pause to work again is to close and re-open BigBox where Pause will only work a few times again. Alt Tabbing has no effect.
If there is a game I am spamming save and load states through Pause, I can only do it within Launchbox. But now, I'm kind of over it and just use a key combo through RetroArch to save or load states and skip Pause altogether. Probably should have been doing that to begin with, but yeah. Something not entirely right with Pause in BigBox for me. But I have no issues with this in Launchbox.
This is very similar to the behavior I experience with retroarch and bigbox. And ya it is a bummer cause I’d like to use the LB pause screen but I may have to disable and use retroarch hotkeys.
im using a Intel NUC NUC6i7KYK. 8Gb ram and 120GB ssd. Running LaunchBox on external 2tb mechanical hard drive.
what rig are you running on?
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On 7/2/2019 at 5:43 PM, neil9000 said:
Well in that case, the pause isnt working at all, normally if its not showing for people its a focus issue, and the screen will be there if you alt tab, its just not up front, if you dont see that then all you are doing is pausing the emulator, which is what you show in your image, just the emulator paused. So im a little confused at this point.
Do the startup/shutdown screens work for you with retroarch?
i have this focus issue with RetroArch. Alt+tab won't bring the pause screen to the foreground though. The pause screen shows on top in focus the first time its triggered but then after that, it shows up in the background and can't be pulled into focus. but its still able to be interacted with. This only occurs with BigBox... LaunchBox doesn't seem to have the issue and the pause screen always shows on top in focus. RetroArch is the only emulator that seems to have this issue as well.
Is there a solution to this? @Jason Carr
I really don't want to have to disable pause screens for retroarch as thats the emulator i use for the majority of my platforms and i really like the save/load state and pause functionality when it works... Mame handles it like a dream and its awesome to pause arcade games that can't normally be paused, save state and load back up again later.
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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:
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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).
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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
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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?
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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...
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On 11/27/2019 at 12:35 PM, Jason Carr said:
I'll do some testing to confirm, but unfortunately I'm guessing it's related to driver updates or Windows updates. Do see if you have any driver updates available.
I got latest windows updates and it even had an intel graphics driver update And did that too but it’s still crashing the same way.
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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.
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5 hours ago, DOS76 said:
no its WMP that is known to have the memory leak so if you are using VLC and seeing the same thing there may be a new issue. I'd say hang tight and wait for @Jason Carrto get back with you about it
Roger that.
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17 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:
Are you running Windows Media Player or VLC for your video playback engine? I have recently seen Microsoft introduce stability issues with Windows Media Player in recent updates.
I think it’s set to VLC... should I try swapping ?
BigBox crash while sitting idle doing attract mode
in Troubleshooting
Posted
I’m running the new 11 update and I setup a webcam to watch attract mode and catch the crash happening. It happened after about 3 hours of attract mode running. After restarting bigbox I tried browsing the section of games it died on (satellaview) but they all displayed fine (some video snaps and some image snaps) and no crash.
the only other thing I can Think of that could be causing it is a program I use in the background to control the volume and default audio devices via hotness... Volume2... https://github.com/irzyxa/Volume2
could you maybe try running that program in the background to see if you experience issues with it? Maybe the volume control hooks in bigbox are fighting against volume2 randomly?
it does indeed seem to be something with my Windows environment though...I’d like to figure it out and not just format the computer and it starts working without knowing the cause.
Great updates lately! thanks for the help!