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megashub

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Everything posted by megashub

  1. Best thing to do is reach out to the Sinden lightgun community via their Discord: https://discord.gg/qMhejnNf -- Lots of lovely humans over there happy to help.
  2. Assuming you're using the Sinden bezel pack: In Mame, go to Video Options, and select a version of the bezel that either has a wider border, or a dimmer brightness level, or both. Step down until you find the right combination to suit your play space. You're having that problem because the gun is having trouble distinguishing the edges of the game's screen (the white border). This is usually because the bezel is too bright or the border is too thin. Super easy and fast to fix using the Sinden bezel pack, once you understand how.
  3. Right, but a normal, unprivileged user is still able to install software.
  4. Is the user running Launchbox still authorized to install software? Seems pretty risky to not require authentication unless it's put into some kind of isolated kiosk mode.
  5. LB Tools Menu > Options > Integrations Section > MAME If you check "Upload Your MAME High Scores to the LB Games DB Community Leaderboards" it appears to forcibly block the Cheat menu within MAME from populating with cheat options when MAME is run with -cheat. If you uncheck it and run MAME again, the Cheat menu options are visible as expected. This is odd, because the description of this setting in the Options menu reads, "If you have cheats enabled in your MAME configuration, the scores will not upload, and you will not see them in the community leaderboards." But nowhere in that description does it state that it blocks the use of Cheats when enabled. My use case is a lightgun game called Invasion (invasnab.zip). The way that game was made, there isn't a clean way to get reloading to work (usably) with lightguns, so the only viable option to get it playable is to enable cheats and flip on Infinite Ammo. My expectation was that by enabling cheats in my invasnab.ini file but not in my core mame.ini, my highscores for this one game only would be suppressed by the leaderboard integration. This is a trade-off I'm willing to put up with in order to make the game playable. But unfortunately, it appears I have to globally disable the integration for everything if I want to use cheats on a single game. And that really sucks. I'm hoping this is just an unintended side effect of trying to block cheaters from spoiling the leaderboard, which I totally understand and respect. If that's the case, is there any chance this can be treated as a bug so that selective use of cheats for cases like invasnab can be possible for select games and just those games can have their scores ignored?
  6. I really like where this is headed. Is it able to parse your default controls mapping file from MAME? So I go through and map all my buttons on all my controllers to various functions in MAME and those get used by default on every MAME game unless I customize some of then for a specific game. If this tool can be made aware of those existing relationships, then adding them in a new layout could be simplified. Further, could you automate the adding of a button by listening to the devices and waiting for a button or key press? If I clicked 'add button' and selected 'listen' from a submenu, then hit a button, the app could just auto-create a button with the name included. And if the device source of that event mapped to something known to MAME, it could even offer to use the same mapping, especially if I'm creating a new layout for a system associated with MAME as the emulator. Example: I hit the button already configured in MAME as my start button, and since I'm in a layout associated with MAME emulator and it knows where to find my MAME config files, it looks and sees that the button I pressed is mapped to Start, so it simply adds the button labelled Start. Rinse and repeat for all remaining buttons/sticks/mice/analog inputs. Then, when the layout is used in practice, when I've selected a specific game, the app looks for a rom-specific controls config file, and if found, uses those mappings instead. There's a lot going on in this video, so I'd almost need to get my hands on it and try to make it work before I could provide much more useful feedback.
  7. Thank you so much for the awesome bezels and themes! Your work is unparalleled. Late to the party on requests, but avsp.zip (Alien vs. Predator) perhaps?
  8. I don't know though that the LB/BB devs have the cycles to spare to partner with you on the pre-planning and futureproofing assurance work you're asking for. Historically, they've taken a very crowd-sourced approach to features/functionality prioritization but otherwise seem to keep to themselves. So while the user and plugin dev community is given a voice ~once a year, it's still pretty opaque what's coming, when and why, most of the time (from my perspective anyhow). Regardless, I'm very excited to hear you're willing to put in time and effort toward solving this problem. Consider me a willing beta tester and QA guy.
  9. yeah no, the only thing I really care about is which inputs are in use for a given game, not necessarily what each one does. That's a problem for future me that I don't know if I care enough to ever solve. So, for example, if my 2-player 8-button with spinners CP is being used to play a game with 3 of the 8 buttons active and it uses the spinner and not the joystick, then I want to be able to show a controls image with all but those specific enabled controls inactive and the those specific controls show their active image instead.
  10. Do you happen to remember where you found this? I've been trying to conceptualize writing one myself... but I have no knowledge or experience with pulling the button mapping data from MAME on a per-game basis, so I've been trying to figure out where to begin on that front. I have my CP's image assets created, so now it's really just a matter of writing up the Gui commands to dynamically position and display them when/where I want them. I've already written code to display/hide instruction cards for virtual pinball tables when I press and hold a button (gui destroys when you let go of the button). So I was planning on reusing that for MAME to simply listen for a specific button combo and send a pause button command to MAME, then pop the dynamic controls on the screen while the button is held, and then destroy the gui and unpause the game when the button (or button combo) is released. If the script you're referring to handles the pulling of MAME's game-specific controls configs into variables I can reference, that would cut out a lot of the work.
  11. Can PICO-8 please be added as a Platform in Games DB? I would like to contribute metadata and media for PICO-8 games to the DB for others to be able to import and can't do so without it being included as a Platform.
  12. Thank you for these! They're fantastic! Here's one I made, inspired by your approach, for Virtual Pinball, if anyone is looking for an option.
    I'm biased, of course, because I partnered with @JoeViking245 to create this, but it has already saved me so much time. It's very reliable and stable, and the resulting marquee images are high quality, so long as you're feeding it good source images of course. If you own a Pixelcade LED marquee, this plugin makes it so easy to use it as a dynamic cabinet marquee in LB/BB.
  13. First and foremost, a huge Thank You to @JoeViking245 for helping me turn the idea into reality. It has already saved me a lot of time, and rapidly iterating on it together was a lot of fun. Just a quick note re: the above quoted section -- if the plugin does have the proper write permissions to the various marquee destination folders, it will create them and automatically store them in their proper places, without you needing to manually copy them anywhere. That's only needed if the plugin encounters a permissions issue. Under normal circumstances, all you will need to do is right click on a game (or group of games), click Create Marquee, adjust settings if needed, and you're done. From there just click off the game you currently have selected and click back over to it, and your marquee will display the newly-generated image. Done. Pro tip: Given the 128x32 dimensions of the marquee, The closer to that 4:1 aspect ratio the logo image is, the better it will look on the marquee after converted. So square or round logos won't look very good. You may need to find horizontal logo options or, if all else fails, and you're handy in photoshop or other image editors, you can often cobble something together to look nicer on the marquee. Just add your custom image as a Clear Logo in LB and remove any other Clear Logos that may be present, to ensure your image is the one the plugin finds and converts. Then run the plugin. Let us know if you run into any bugs or strange behaviors, as always. Enjoy!
  14. Fixed link: https://github.com/mooock/Launchbox/blob/main/Autohotkey/Startup Emulator Variable Passing.ahk This is awesome. Thank you! This is going to come in handy in several ways, I believe.
  15. I just got my Pixelcade LED marquee installed and I'm beginning to work on missing marquee images too. I figured out a quick solution to homebrewing your own really quickly (once you get the process down): Using gimp or photoshop or whatever your graphics editor of choice may be, create a new image that is 128x32, with a pixels per inch of 5 (at least that's the number that works for my P6 Pixelcade panels). Set the background to black. Then, add a new layer. On your LB/BB machine, navigate to the LaunchBox install dir, and open the Images/[console]/Clear Logo folder. Open these clear logo files in your graphics editor. First, use Trim to crop the image by transparent pixels (removing all dead space on the outer edges of the image). Then, resize the image down to 128x32, 5 pixels per inch (or whatever your panel's PPI is). It's common that clear logos will be larger than 128 or 32, so just try to get it as close to 128x32 as you can without going over (commonly it'll be something like 113x32 or whatever). Copy the resized image and paste it into the new image you created above as a new layer. You may need to play around with your chosen editor's resampling options. In Photoshop CS 2021, I've found that Bicubic Sharpener (reduction) produces reliably clear results. Just remember that logos need good contrasting color schemes for them to scale down that far and still be legible, but I've had good luck with it so far. Edit to add: If you have a different size panel or you're not sure what your pixels per inch should be, take a tape measure and count the number of dots on the panel that fit inside 1 inch and use that number. If it's close, and you're not sure, opt for the lower number. It's a quick process once you get the steps down, and I was cranking out new marquee images rapidly last night. Here's a couple of examples produced with the above process: Hope that helps teach you how to fish, as it were. Let me know if I can help clarify anything.
  16. Question: Do votes from premium license holders get weighted more heavily? Something like "Free tier: 1 votes, Regular license: 2 votes, Forever license: 4 votes" So those that financially support LB/BB the most have the most influence? If the answer is currently no, please accept this idea as a suggestion for future polls. Take it or leave it, obviously. Maybe even an initial poll just for forever license holders that help you shape the content of it first? Just some thoughts to help engage your customers more in this process.
  17. Hi All, I've spent a lot of time refining and troubleshooting my AHK start script for Visual Pinball. I don't profess to be an AHK expert, and I'm sure there are fancier tricks you could use, but this is a decidedly uncomplicated approach that results in what I feel is a pretty clean experience, both in transitioning to Visual Pinball, and back to LaunchBox/Big Box. It accounts for the use of Pin Up Player (PUP Packs) if your chosen table uses them, while also working cleanly for typical directb2S, Freezy DMDext and UltraDMD tables. A prerequisite is that you have already hidden your Windows desktop, as it relies on a totally blank desktop background. You'll notice I repeat a few actions here. This is because Visual Pinball is dumb and moves the mouse around on you, which keeps the taskbar active when it shouldn't. So I move the mouse and hide (and re-hide) the taskbar to ensure Windows stays out of the way during the transitions from frontend to emulator and back again. You'll want to adjust the screen dimensions to fit your display because I didn't bother using the screen width and height variables. You'll also need to change the button definition to match the exit key you've defined in Visual Pinball. Hope this helps. ; Minimize all open windows and move mouse off screen WinMinimizeAll MouseMove, 1920, 0 ; Hide Frontend Launcher WinHide, LaunchBox Big Box WinHide, LaunchBox SetKeyDelay, -1, 110 ; Hide taskbar WinHide, ahk_class Shell_TrayWnd WinHide, ahk_class Shell_SecondaryTrayWnd WinHide, Start ahk_class Button ; Wait for Visual Pinball to finish loading WinWaitActive, Visual Pinball Player ; Hide taskbar a second time WinHide, ahk_class Shell_TrayWnd WinHide, ahk_class Shell_SecondaryTrayWnd WinHide, Start ahk_class Button ; Move Mouse off screen MouseMove, 1920, 0 ; Startup Complete ; NORMAL GAMEPLAY HAPPENS HERE ; VPX Exit Button Pressed 2Joy3:: { ; If PUPPacks are in use, wait for PuP Player to fully exit Process, WaitClose, Pinupdisplay ; Wait for VPX to exit WinWaitNotActive, Visual Pinball Player ; Restore Taskbar WinShow, ahk_class Shell_TrayWnd WinShow, ahk_class Shell_SecondaryTrayWnd WinShow, Start ahk_class Button ; Restore Frontend Launcher WinShow, LaunchBox Big Box WinShow, LaunchBox }
  18. Ahh... my brain works slightly differently, I guess. But this way certainly works too. Thanks!
  19. Hmm... I checked to make sure the DLL was unblocked, but I still can't seem to get it to appear. I'm running LB v11.12: Didn't see anything of note in the logs, but here ya go: Debug 2021-07-05 06-01-07 PM.log EDIT: I'm an idiot and didn't read the instructions. When I right-click on a game, I do see it listed (I was looking for it at the bottom of the Options menu). While it does appear when I right click on a game, it is greyed out for me, however. Any idea how to fix that?
  20. Ugh. I'm a dumbass. Move along, nothing to see here. Comparing the videos themselves outside of Big Box, it's clear that my machine's sound config is the reason why my OBS-recorded videos are quiet compared to the ones I downloaded. I fixed the audio gain on one of them and everything sounded the same in BigBox again. So I adjusted my audio config and it's fixed now. Thanks for the assist.
  21. Here's an odd one... I'm using the OBS integration to record gameplay videos for use in BigBox. For the most part it works great. It detects when I've recorded one and asks if I want to associate it with the game when I return to BB, etc. My only problem is, whenever BB plays the video when browsing the catalog, the volume is very low compared to videos I download for, say, MAME games, from LaunchboxDB or EmuMovies. The video I'm recording sounds nice and loud when I play it from within Launchbox's Edit menu or via Windows Media Player from File Explorer. It's only playing quiet in BB itself. Any idea how to fix that since it's not all volume, just those OBS-recorded videos? Here's a comparison from within BigBox, recorded using the same OBS hotkey as I use when recording in-game video: https://streamable.com/pnmp7z And here's the game video itself that is playing quiet only within BigBox: https://streamable.com/wt7v5p
  22. Quick note that I'm seeing something similar in 11.11 too:
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