Alex F.

I reset everything in BB and now it's gone! Still don't know what was going on here but anyway, case closed (I hope!). Thanks again and take care!

Not that I knew! It started to show this behavior only today.....

When I start Bigbox (using the Retrotastic Theme) the screen is black, and only when I move the mouse the picture comes up, like a screensaver. I really don't want that and have no idea why BB suddenly behaves that way. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

And this problem is persisting: All games (M2, DEMUL, MAME) can be terminated with a mapped Big Box button which takes me back to the game selection menu. Only M3 games don't accept my "Back" button (Lost World, Ocean Hunter, Star Wars Arcade). When I push the ESC button on my keyboard it works! 😕 Any help is greatly appreciated!

Strangely enough, now it's back to normal again. I'm sure there IS some kind of gremlin in my machine, though. Let's hope it doesn't return...Thanks a lot!

This is really the strangest problem yet: While in Launchbox all games start up in the correct orientation, when I launch them via Big Box all M3 games (Lost World, Ocean Hunter, Star Wars Arcade) are upside down!!! Any solution is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

I did the following: First I took Demulshooter out of my bat.file to start a game. I found that one to be the culprit, apparently!! Now the bat file just starts the emulator and the game in it. I opened up the emulator.ini and changed the resolution to 1280:960 (=4:3 screen for all classic shooter games) I applied Reshade to the emulator with the usual two fx. collections already ticked in the selection menu. With a simple graphics editor software I created a white rectangle with a 4:3 ratio, made the inside area transparent and saved it as a .png file (there are free websites that make any picture you upload transparent; I use https://www12.lunapic.com/editor/). I started the game, pushed "Pos 1" to access the Reshade menu, and with the Layer.fx I applied the border around the game frame (with the adjust buttons in the Layer.fx menu you can do that almost to the pixel). Voilá! The only downside to this approach is that you don't have fancy bezels for the left and right side of the 16:9 screen but I really couldn't care less as long as I have dead-on accuracy for my crosshairs. When I play a game I don't notice the bezels anyway. I also realized that the main reason for my jittering crosshairs in many games were actually the often much too bright bezels! In other games like "The Lost World" I made them much darker than the original, which in turn made my crosshairs much steadier, so as far as I'm concerned a black area left and right is best anyway (but that's just me). If others can get the Sinden gun to accept 16:9 and 4:3 screen areas with one initial 16:9 calibration in the Sinden menu (as everybody is telling me) they are probably very happy (or lucky). My approach works, at least for me. If I can help anybody who is reading this with the same problem I'd be more than happy as well. NB: Definitely try out the Reshade Technicolor2.fx or the Vibrance.fx, it makes every game much more colorful and, yes, vibrant! (And in case you wonder: I play lightgun games on the backglass monitor of a custom-made full size Williams Widebody pinball cabinet, which also serves as a virtual pinball setup (then of course with all three monitors active) but I found the backglass monitor ideal for lightgun games as far as size, height and distance when shooting are concerned. So of course the HOTD game images you see cover the whole monitor height (the photo is a bit dark, I know).)

Forgive my ignorance and probably this has been asked a thousand times before but for the life of me I can't find a simple good answer for that in any forum or on any website so cut me some slack here: Almost all of the classic light gun games are 4:3 but played on a 16:9 screen. They either work with Sinden bezel packs or other means (e,g, Reshade) to present them in a 4:3 format with some side art left and right to fill out the 16:9 screen. When moving the gun to the left or right side and the crosshairs are on the left or right edge of the 4:3 area the gun already points to the very left or right edge of the 16:9 screen. (the upper and lower screen edges are of course no problem) When bringing up a Sinden 4:3 border, everything is as it should be, the crosshairs and the pointing gun are perfectly aligned at the left or right side of the 4:3 border. How can this be achieved when the white border is not produced by the Sinden software itself but as a bezel graphics? In the Sinden config menu I tried everything, clicked on the "16:9 to 4:3" button, tried calibration in any direction but it doesn't have any effect, whether in MAME's Point Blank or in M3's Lost World. So please, what am I missing or doing wrong? Thanks so much in advance.

WIll try that, thanks a lot!!!

I'm encountering strange calibration problems in EXTREME HUNTING 1 and 2. While other games like House of the Dead 1/2 or Virtua Cop 2 play quite nicely with largely accurate calibration I can't calibrate Extreme Hunting 1 and 2. In other games you have to shoot diagonal points in the upper left and lower right corners but in these two games you can only shoot in the center of the screen to calibrate and this has the effect that the aim of my Sinden gun is still a good portion off, and it increases the more you move the gun to the outer parts of the screen. In a video on YouTube somebody played the game with an Amtrak gun and he said he also had those problems and he had to lower the resolution in order to solve it. Of course I tried that in the emulator but it seems to have no effect, the picture appears to stay the same, I can't see any difference. I've attached a little video (sorry for the shaky quality) that shows, especially in the second part, that as long as you shoot in the vertical center line of the screen (i.e. also up and down) it is more or less accurate but the more you to the left and right sides it is way off (which is not present in the other games I mentioned). Dear community, any ideas maybe? Thanks a lot in advance as always. NB: Somehow my video is not showing a picture, here sorry, I don't know why. 😞 Produce_3.mp4

Thanks so much again for your patience and your kind replies. Your input definitely helped me. In the end I had to play around with the syntax a bit and try out things and actually found out that I didn't even need the DEMULshooter line in the .bat file of each separate game because that was what actually caused an unnecessary CMD window to pop up, and leaving out the /wait command also helped! Once you've set up the DEMULshooter (in the GUI file of it) it seems to be running and working. Some lightgun games are running quite smoothly now (SS USA, HOTD, HOTD2, VC2) but now I have encountered another problem having to do with calibration in EXTREME HUNTING 1 and 2 but this I will ask in another thread. Thank you again for this great community!

Yes, this worked, file explorer doesn't open anymore, thanks a lot! Now only the CMD window opens... but also a new error message: ----------- Windows cannot find 'target=demul07a'. ----------- But when I close the message with "OK" the game starts up fine! Am I still using the wrong syntax somewhere? (And while we're at it, is there a way to have this CMD window open only minimized?)

I play games like HOTD2 and Sports Shooting USA with a Sinden lightgun and launch them from a .bat file because I also use Titchgamer's DEMUL bezel pack and DEMULshooter and they work fine. But when I play them via Big Box and push the return button to get back to the Big Box menu a file explorer window is in front of The Big Box screen! When you double-click the .bat file directly on your desktop, a cmd window and, strangely enough for me, a file explorer window pop up before the game starts, and it's exactly this file explorer window that sets itself in front of Big Box upon exit. How can I make this file explorer window disappear, please? (I've attached three pictures to illustrate it: Apart from the "Big Box exit situation" the other picture shows the desktop before the actual game starts and here you can see the three windows (game window before going fullscreen, cmd window and the strange and totally unnecessary file explorer); for anyone who's interested I also included the bat file itself.) Any help is greatly appreciated, as always!

Hi everybody, I use a Sinden lightgun and have a couple of questions regarding DEMUL and MAME: 1. Can I use DEMULshooter with MAME in any way (most probably not, I assume...)? I'm asking because DEMULshooter solved my aiming and calibration problems with House of the Dead 2 and Sports Shooting USA - now they work fine. A game like MAME's Police Trainer on the other hand has a very accurate calibration but only in the test menu - as soon as I exit the test menu and start up a game the aiming is way off diagonally...!? (Area 51 and Point Blank work fine.) 2. MAME's Terminator 2 shows a very strange behavior and still gives me a headache: First, all the game did was to just shoot in the upper left corner, it didn't recognize the Sinden at all apparently. In the calibration menu I used the keyboard cursor keys to somehow move the crosshairs around in order to get to the upper left and lower right corner (otherwise I couldn't have calibrated at all), and the left/ right movement worked fine but strangely enough, as soon as I moved the crosshairs up or down it automatically reverted to the middle position like there was a stuck button or something! But no other game shows this behavior. ... Now at least I can play the game but there's always a ghost-like appearance of a second crosshairs in the upper left corner. Setting this whole lightgun thing up for all games and emulators is really a pain in the a** but at least I've made some progress in the last couple days. Any help for these two things would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance as always!

Thanks once more, I'll definitely try it! You're a great guy, take care and see (or rather read) you in 2022, who knows..? Alex

I finally found the time to do this and it worked! There are different versions of that file floating around and you just have to find the correct one. I attached the one that worked for me. Hope this will help others as well...

Yes! After some difficulties I finally managed to get the .bat file parameters correct. My personal folder and file locations are: F:\PinballX C:\LaunchBox/Core/BigBox.exe The .bat file is as follows: -------------------------- start /w "" BigBox.exe f: cd "F:\PinballX" start "" PinballX.exe -------------------------- Here's what I did: *I put the "BigBox2PinballX.bat" file above in the "LaunchBox/Core" folder *In the PinballX "Settings" utility under "Exit Program" I put in this .bat file to get launched upon exiting PinballX *Now PinballX upon exiting starts BigBox *Then BigBox upon exiting starts PinballX again! The only thing I find a little tricky now is to get out of this loop. OK, normally if everything's working you don't have to do that but using the keyboard and starting the task manager you can break the loop and get back to your Windows desktop. Thank you so very much again, the people in this community are just fabulous. Maybe this helps other people who want to use their VP cab also for MAME lightgun or other games because the backglass monitor is really excellent for this: Sufficient size, perfect distance for the player, ideal height - and you don't need a separate PC. I have a Sinden lightgun and attached it to the back of my cabinet using the holster. My VP cab is a nice machine now, I may say! 🙂 Take care and happy holidays!

First, thank you so much for your reply! But to fully understand this: The batch file you posted here, is this the one you used (so would I have to modify it?) or the one I should use? Batch files are among the things I'm a complete noob at (I've never needed them so far) so please guide me through here, if you will: *Where exactly do I put this batch file to be executed? *Would this batch file take me from Big Box (back) to PinballX? Thank you so much again in advance for your kind help. Alex

OK, I guess I have solved problem number one (which may be helpful to others who read this, I hope): In MAME.ini under OSD INPUT OPTIONS I changed "joystickprovider" from "auto" to "winhybrid" and now MAME recognizes my Virtuapin controlled cabinet buttons! The question remains if there's a "launch program on exit" option for BigBox - so far I haven't found any...

Hi everybody, besides playing pinball on my VP cabinet using PinballX I want to use the backglass monitor for lightgun games under MAME such as Point Blank or Area 51. My setup is as follows: Powering on the cab starts up PinballX for pinball games. Exiting PinballX starts up Big Box from where I can play my lightgun games using MAME. Now my problem is: Big Box recognizes my cabinet buttons (I'm using a Virtuapin controller) so I can navigate through Big Box with them. Unfortunately, MAME doesn't recognize the cabinet buttons so I can neither start a game nor exit back to the Big Box emulator. I have to use a keyboard for that. Two questions here: 1) How do I get MAME to recognize the cabinet buttons? 2) Is there a way to get from Big Box back to PinballX? That would make my game experience complete since I then could play some pinball, switch to lightgun games, switch back to playing some more pinball and then shutting it down (from either Big Box or PinballX). Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks so much in advance. Alex

As soon as I find the time I'll try that, thanks so much in advance!!

Well, after trying virtually everything, setting every "hiscore" or "plugin" setting to 1 in every .ini file with no effect whatsoever, after activating the hiscore plugin in MAME and creating a "hi" folder etc. (NOTHING - maybe MAME just doesn't like me), I finally found a workaround solution by setting the "Automatic save / restore" feature to 1 for every game that doesn't save the scores! The only thing left and my last question here for you would be: Is there any way to not display the MAME notifications, especially the "Autostate successfully loaded" box directly after launching a game? Somehow I don't think so and it's really a very minor thing for two seconds but I'm asking anyway. Thank you very much again in advance.

Thank you so much for your kind answers so far. I really appreciate it. I tried everything you wrote about nvram or cfg. files but no luck. I also tried some other games, like 1944:TLM, Tiger Heli or Xevious and all of them don't save any high scores. Other games, like Klax, save high scores! I'm at a total loss here. Do I need special versions of files like plugin.ini, mame.ini or hiscore.dat? Where do you have them? Are they there from the beginning or can they be downloaded from somewhere or do they have to be modified? I assume you don't have any high score problems, do you? Man, MAME can be a real b****!

I do! There are a number of versions available, but I have "Revision B" running (1942.zip). I just tried other versions in Launchbox but as soon as I exited the game back to Launchbox and launched it again it was back to virgin zero, no matter what version I tried. What could I do? Any help is appreciated!

That's basically my question. I use MAME .228 and BigBox. Other games like Marble Madness, TriSports or Megatouch 7 apparently have no problem saving, remembering and displaying high scores. So what's the deal with (e.g.?) 1942? Are there others as well maybe? I tried to mess around with the mame.ini and some hiscore plugin.ini which I had read about on this board, and then 1942 indeed saved and displayed high scores, but this had the strange effect of making 1942 stutter and totally unplayable. As soon as I removed it it was back to normal. Does anybody have an idea? Thanks in advance!