skizzosjt

let's not gloss over the comment you're not getting the proper cooling your system needs. I highly recommend to address that! poor cooling will not go away or should it give you any piece of mind by removing your disks out of your case. The heat is going to be coming from likely CPU, GPU or possibly PSU, but frankly never heard of anyone improving temps by removing a HDD or two out of their case. They don't produce enough heat to be the culprit. If I were you, I would explain this situation further so you can get some help on how to improve it. It's not always a just toss money at it and get more or better fans. Having them setup in a proper configuration is just as important. Certain PC cases are much better for allowing good airflow compared to others. Improper cooler mounting. Ambient temps...etc are some of the factors that could be lending to your cooling challenges about the dock. do you already run LB/BB on these HDDs? if so moving them to an external dock should not impact anything. A HDD cannot saturate USB 3.X and it cannot saturate SATA III which I'm sure is what you had it connected through when they are inside the case. In other words the bottleneck is the HDD itself, the connection protocol used doesn't come into play limiting performance in this scenario. it means you could get any dock that has the features you want and call it a day if that is the case. for what you provided so far I'd be looking for a dock that has two bays so you can have both HDD's installed simultaneously. Something like this should cost about $35 - $55 depending on the brand and specific model......don't fall for the bait about the marketing BS that says a specific model is rated for something like "up to 12TB drives".....there literally is no such thing as a limit like that....as if your dock and PC cannot communicate with the disk if it's beyond a certain size. (this isn't the days of FAT32 file system) If it's a dock with some extra features, maybe those extra bells and whistles features do not work on drives beyond their stated max, but for reading or writing data to disks in the dock, such as a LB build, there is no problem there. I use this guy specifically for not having any HDD's in my PC case to eliminate the noise as well as make room for other SSD's to use the bays they were once in. Now I can turn them on only when needed rather than they are on the whole time the PC is powered up. Not necessarily saying "get this model" but it sounds like it would cover your use case. To be clear though this works well for my use case, which is just data use, not booting from them, so similar enough to your use case (storing LB data). I would use this as a starting point, and you should shop around for a unit that's available in your region, I know prices and availability of items can change country to country. You certainly do not need USB 3.2 gen 1 or 2 if all you're going to use these for is HDDs. if you ever plan to put an SSD in the dock, USB 3.0 is still technically fast enough for any 2.5" SATA III SSD. Not until you get into SSDs that are NVMe would they be able to saturate USB 3.0 speeds. I do not run LB/BB from this. Personally I wouldn't run my OS or software from an HDD anymore, I appreciate the snappiness of a SSD. So I use these for mainly storing games I cannot fit on my SSDs in the PC case as well as backing up stuff. Note how silly this marketing BS is here....title shows "up to two 12TB disks"....read the description "up to two 18TB disks".....it's just the manufacturers way of saying they tested it with disks up to this size but USB doesn't care how big the disk is. Those were likely the biggest disks out on the market at the time when this model was released a few years ago. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07PX2HHD6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 I think they are saying they want to put two HDDs into a single dock, rather than combine the contents of two HDDs to a single HDD. @xevious1974 if I misunderstood, sorry, just ignore my post about the dock

You can add games manually after the fact like you would for other platforms. I normally right click and add a Steam game like that rather than drag and drop a file. Go into the platform, right click, then click add game. Then type in the game name and pick the right one if there are multiple to choose from. It will populate all the metadata accordingly based on that game name you just selected. Then go to the launching tab and add in the appropriate steam://rungameid/ launcher URL for that particular game's application path. I haven't tried it like this, but I bet you could make a desktop shortcut for the game from Steam (there is where you can get the steam://rungameid # from) and rather than type stuff in manually, drag and drop that shortcut into LB. Overall point is you can easily add your Steam games back into LB if you ever removed them

I've been setting up playlists and customizing the Colorful 4K theme and all has been good until I recently started making use of the individual platform named configurations for the GameWheel view. I've set things up so custom photos are being used based on the game's platform name. As in it will display photos related to the NES, or Sega Genesis, etc, depending which platform I am in. This works as expected when in platform category or platform views, so if I navigate to the NES or Sega Genesis platform they will display all the proper images and the video is sized and positioned properly in both. However, if I go into any of my playlists which have games from multiple platforms in them, all games seem to use the default configuration of GameWheel view and things do not look correct here. The same game can look right when viewed from the actual platform, but will look wrong when viewed from a playlist. This creates a problem where the videos are now all going to be the same size and position (not where I want them). It's the main reason I used the platform specific configurations in the CTC, so I could customize the video size and placement per platform. So my plan here has hit a wall and I'm at a crossroad. Some quick and dirty testing suggests I can get around this by making separate instances of the main video in the default configuration and put a visibility condition on each to only display if game's platform contains XYZ for example. So before I go down that route, I'm wondering if that is the only option I have or am I missing something to make this work? Is it even possible for playlists to use the SNES or Arcade config of GameWheel view for example? because right now to me it seems playlists can only use the default config. Thank you for reading, and I appreciate any advice that can be shared!

yea I noticed this stuff right away. Even stuff like shades being off slightly. Someone made a super detailed post about it as feedback to the author so I think they are mostly up to speed on what would need to be adjusted for future revisions. You will need to adjust the colors in the theme if you want this changed. Unless you are comfy diving into pure code the easiest way to adjust this is to get the CTC files and edit the theme in the CTC. Colors can have "conditions" allowing stuff like this area is color ABC when platform XYZ is displayed. So you will have to locate the ones you want to change in the color conditions list and adjust accordingly.

Yes, you can manually remove the images by editing the game in LB and going to the Images tab, delete the ones that don't match. You could also browse to the LaunchBox/Images folder and remove them that way. I noticed when I added DOOM (2016) it scrapped a bunch of DOOM (1993) images along with some of the 2016 game's images. Sometimes when names are similar they might make a mistake like this. Easy to fix though. After you get rid of the wrong ones make sure their LB Database ID# is linked up to the right game and it will download the proper images this time around.

Hi C-Beats, I think this is corrected now too. I couldn't make videos not play with the timed button press. Also once a video plays, if you change selection but return to the original selection it no longer messes up the video from playing properly. All good stuff there! I know you didn't specifically ask, but since I think they are related to a certain degree I want to mention it is still possible to make the currently selected video not play (black screen) if you select Text List With Details view through the user set hotkey to change views. I think it's what you would call the Change View Popup that says "Select new view for......". This impacts Category, Platform/Playlist videos, but not videos for the individual games. I also just put two and two together on this part, If I have Text List With Details as the view that Big Box will boot into the initial selection will have its video be a black screen

great point Joe! I didn't consider this part in my previous response. I was under the impression at that moment it was just a single game and was thinking why go through the extra setup when you can make a single script and call it day. Declaring the single game as the WinTitle for the WinWait line is no problem there. However now considering they did make the point the problem occurs for all Steam games, as expected, perhaps they need to use aux programs for multiple games and in that case, going down the path of setting up games being launched via a script to use a variable pulling in the ID# now makes sense to me. I think the script is hands down the most interesting way I've seen this tactic implemented! Call it whatever you want, I think it's cool in all its nerdy glory! I just didn't follow why you were leading them down the scenic route when I was thinking you went right past the shortcut route lol. But now I'm on the same page!

Hey @JoeViking245 so maybe I've forgotten how many hoops I've jumped through to get this or that working, but this kinda stuff (additional apps) I don't remember having to mess around with like this. I figured I was remembering wrong bc I too use script launching methods which would bypass the Steam launching problems mentioned but I edited a handful of games to remove emulation (turned it off) so it would return to the normal "steam://rungameid/[insertID#here]" method. When I attached a script as an additional app it works as intended. So if I can launch additional apps on Steam games without the extra setup I'm under the impression others can do so without the additional steps. I much like the script launching method and I've never seen the registry method you shared, that's a really neat way of implementing it! But it's what I would call the scenic route, it totally works, just takes a little longer to get there is all. If I'm having luck achieving this and yourself or others share none of what I'm detailing works, then I just don't know what setting or some special config I made that is allowing it to work for me (I'd have to investigate further), but I wanted to share it does in fact work for me in this setup. That being as long as the script is an additional app it should behave OK. If the script was put in the catch all "Tools > Manage > Scripts > Edit AHK scripts for Windows games" then it would behave as you described for me, always prematurely terminating within what seems like a fraction of second of at launch of Steam games. Additionally thanks for sharing JoyToKey needs a little extra kick in the pants to do what it's told with Process, Close

thanks for the explanation. good thing you're thinking of the worst case scenarios and preparing for them with such tactics because I obviously was not thinking that far ahead lol

Hi @BabyBillyFreeman I like the script name lol. I have joytokey, but beyond some initial testing and farting around with it, I never used it in a practical setup. So I'm not sure if there are any nuances to closing it via a script. When you say no effect, does this mean that JoyToKey is never closed, and is always still running when you exit DoorKickers? or is JoyToKey closing too soon and therefore your button remapping doesn't work while playing DoorKickers? I would go at it with some basic tests. Try something like this. WinWait, ahk_exe DoorKickers.exe SoundBeep WinWaitClose, ahk_exe DoorKickers.exe SoundBeep If you never hear any beeps, or if you hear both beeps right away upon starting the game rather than the 2nd one when you're done and exit the game, then the script isn't working as expected. You should hear one when the game starts, and one when you exit, that would mean the script is detecting your games process OK. After reading my previous advice, I should have suggested using WinWait also because what could be happening is the script runs before the game's process exists, so therefore the WinWaitClose line thinks "process is closed since it doesn't exist" and then would terminate JoyToKey much earlier, basically at boot of the game. If you never hear a beep, this suggests it's not detecting things right for the "WinTitle" used. If that is the case, I would ask you double check that the exe name is typed out correctly. It's not case sensitive when using the ahk_exe title but is important that the characters match exactly otherwise. Joe has good advice as usual too. Since you mentioned it's a Steam game and what he mentioned is games that have a launcher then launch the game, like most Steam games, tend to have the ability to mess up how a script behaves, usually terminating them prematurely. I'm also now maybe connecting the dots to your comment about this happens only with games that launch via an exe.....likely all Steam games or at least ones that have a launcher perhaps. So the stuff I suggested this time around should prove whether or not if this is happening to you. So take note of when you hear those beeps, and also take note of if/when the script gets closed if it's being terminated early.

Ahh OK so this method already uses an idea I'm familiar with via the UEFI power options but I never thought to use a remote control to turn the power on/off. I was thinking the same way with the power strip and flipping the toggle switch but the remote sure is handier I bet! Thanks for sharing!

nice! You have made me curious (not hard to do lol). What's up with this potentiometer or kinda looks like a dimmer dial? Does it do that, dim/brighten all the lights ? Or perhaps a main volume control? Also, please share more details about this guy! I've been investigating solutions to have an actual button work as power ON/OFF to the PC and there's a handful of ways I can utilize, but I could see something like this being just as good if not better. So I'd like to know whatever device this is that you're using!

Is it normal for the updates to make you update to the non-beta version first or something? I was on 12.15 beta 6 and when I did check for updates and it started downloading, it ended up downloading and installing 12.15 "vanilla" ? So I then had to do the check for updates again and now I got the 12.16 beta, but I wanted to download this version from the get go. Photo showing the funny sequence of download versions. I would have expected it to go from 12.15 beta 6 directly to 12.16 beta 1. I have "Check for Updates on Startup" and "Automatically Download Updates in the Background" OFF. Only "Update to Beta Releases" is checked ON @skizzosjt This should resolve your game count issue you reported. Please confirm you see it corrected in this update. This is all fixed up, the # of games are being reported correctly in Big Box. Thank you all! @atbc @Thornback @skizzosjt Could you please confirm if this update corrects the behavior you reported in 12.15? If you do still have this issue please let me know what theme you are running so I can try and reproduce. This one, I'm sorry to report it's still capable to reproduce. I'm creating the issue by timing a select or back button press during the transition animation. I tried all the same themes, they are Colorful 4k - reproduced with views Platform Wheel 1 and text list with details (I have custom edits on this theme, so made sure to try the default vanilla version and the issue persists regardless of custom edits) Retro Console - reproduced with Platform Wheel 1, BUT, I could not get text list with details to create the issue ** Retrotastic - reproduced with Platform Wheel 1, BUT, I could not get text list with details to create the issue ** RetroFresh - reproduced with Platform Wheel 1. No videos in text list with details so no problem there CoverBox - reproduced with views Platform Wheel 1 and text list with details ** = these themes didn't have it happen when in Text List With Details view ....BUT.....there is one scenario where I got it mess up. when I would switch from Platform Wheel 1 to Text List With Details view OR even if I was already in Text List With Details, if I selected Text List With Details view again, whatever platform was currently selected, the platform video gets messed up. But once you switch to another platform, I cannot recreate the issue on these themes when in Text List With Details view using the timed button press method Further, after finding that ** way of making the video mess up I went back and checked all the themes again. Despite that the selected platform video is playing fine at this point, when you click to switch to Text List With Details again it screws up that selected video. So this seems to be an exception to recreate the issue, as I was def under the impression the only way I was making this happen was during the transition animation time frame. And this happens whether you're in a different view and go to Text List With Details, or if you are already in Text List With Details and select Text List With Details again. This also impacts Category and Playlist videos Just ran into a new one with the videos. Impacts Category, Platform and Playlist videos. When a video starts playing, if you change your selection but change back to the original selection without letting the video's audio stop playing, now the video is a black screen....BUT.....the audio is still playing. This happens with themes Colorful 4K Platform Wheel 1 and Text List With Details. I tried Coverbox, but only happens with Text List with Details and in that case it's the static image is shown instead. But with this theme in Platform Wheel 1 there doesn't look to be a transition as you make your new selection so the problem doesn't happen with that config.

lol oh man of course it's something challenging like a required encoder! I assume this means you need this for an arcade/cab setup so I get the idea that it's out of the equation to remove it. Any chance it has something like a secondary engage feature? ( I Know that's not the proper term but I'm drawing a blank here) ie if you press key/button A it puts it into a mode to alter the next key/button detected? Further explaining, you hit K and get K typed out. But if you hit the key assigned to this secondary mode and if you hit K this time it types out P ? I'm just wondering if such a feature existed on this, does it actually output something or just engage this feature? The secondary engage button might do enough to disrupt the video even though it doesn't physically make an input you can see on your display like typing out a key or moving the cursor position etc. If it exists I would turn this feature off to check and make sure it isn't a culprit to send a phantom input errr, just saw your new post here as I wrote this. I'd say you found it with those wires more or less being crossed. Certainly sounds like it could be the smoking gun. I'd say, crack open a cold one 🍺, enjoy playing some games and see if the problem continues. No reason to fret over it if it's very possible you found the problem and solved it. Being vigilant is good, but you might really be chasing your tail looking for a problem that doesn't exist. So basically keep an eye out for any more funny behavior before you go diving head first into your cab again lol

Great! Glad it sorted it out. Do be aware you cannot add these .self files to your game list in the actual RPCS3 emulator, they currently don't allow it. If you ever wanted to boot a .self file directly from the emulator you have to use their File menu and select "Boot (S)Elf". Alternatively you can drag and drop the self/elf file onto the emulator to launch it that way. Otherwise what LB/BB does is using command line and it obviously works that way. So it's kinda sorta lame how the function exists but for whatever reason the RPCS3 devs have restricted this ability to list them in your game list for one reason or another. This all means you cannot have custom settings for these games booting this way.....because it's not in the game list so cannot be setup. I got around this, and the reason I stumbled on to this, is because I needed specific settings for games like this, I used a script to copy/move config files around prior to launch of the emulator so what it would do is take the custom setting file and put it in place of the main config file (works for controller configs too). Then upon exit of the game, takes a copy of the main config file and puts it copies it back where it normally is. So this way you can get custom settings for each individual game but also keep all your other games working well since the main configs all return to the settings they need. That's all a bit more advanced but wanted to let you know of there is an * asterisk going this route. Best case scenario is you didn't have any special settings required for these games so you wouldn't even noticed it defaults to the main config.

navigate to LaunchBox/Updates. All the install packages that were downloaded through LB will be in there.

ok very good then, all thorough checks there! I don't got much for ideas here but I do know there are two ways to make the startup videos appear. Method #1 is putting a video file called "Startup" in your LaunchBox\Videos folder Method #2 is putting a folder called "Startup" in your LaunchBox\Videos folder. Inside the Startup folder, place any number of videos named whatever you want, it doesn't matter since it cycles through them for random videos at startup. Depending on which method you're using, see if the opposite offers anything different? I would go so far to physically disconnect my peripherals, or really just any keyboards and controllers. The mouse is not supposed to not be capable of disrupting the startup video. So the idea here is if you removed the peripherals from your system that could interrupt it, and it doesn't happen anymore, maybe one of them are acting up and sending some phantom inputs without you knowing? Might sound silly but it's easy to check! And Saieno has the right idea.....just gotta start eliminating variables here so BB version is good one to add to the list of stuff to check.

@FormulaFox have you confirmed the video(s) play all the way through if you opened them outside of Big Box? Best to make sure you're not chasing your tail if they got corrupted one way or the other

If it were me I would be booting directly into the specific game and bypass the whole game selection boot process all together. If you navigate deeper into the game's folder structure you will find additional "*insert game title here*.self" files for the various 3 specific games rather than the one EBOOT.bin you're currently using that brings up the game selection. It will reflect better in your collection since you could list all 3 games in your platform and boot directly to all of them. The couple games I have like this are simply just giving you the ability to select game A, B, or C, so I got no idea what exclusive features you may be alluding to since I too do not have this specific game. @Garosath If you were to adopt this launching method I've detailed, your script would then work as normal, by theory. The problem you're having is due to the "game selection" game coming up before the "actual" game....it boots the EBOOT.bin file for game selection, and when a game is selected it boots the specific games .self file. My suggestion eliminates the "game selection" game from booting. What you would have to do is add those 3 specific .self files to the Playstation 3 platform, which I would argue is actually easier since it requires no additional emulator setup or revision to existing scripts. It's no different than setting up any other PS3 game, with the exception you make your ROM file the "game name here".self file instead of the EBOOT.bin file

So are you saying bc HDR is enabled in Retroarch your display flickers as it switches modes? (SDR to HDR) If so try turning on HDR at an OS level first which I would believe would eliminate any handshake/mode switching when the game launches...if your OS is running with HDR that is the mode your display is already in when the emulator/game launches. Therefore should be no need to switch at game launch which is when the black screen flicker would occur and I think what your alluding to as the cause of the problem "missing the Sega logo".

there are controller mapping options in LaunchBox and Big Box. I think the specific one you would want is called "Close Active Window". You can set your start and select button combo there and when pressed it will close the emulator. Beware this really does close the active window, so if you hit that button combo again with LaunchBox or Big Box up it would close that application too. (or any other application at that if it was the active window)

so depending on what you're really referring to, I'm giving you both locations not knowing which one specifically you mean. you could be talking about controller remaps or actually remapping controls for specific games Controller remaps are going to be in MAME\ctrlr and will be named after whatever you made them as These are ones for ex I use to make sure a xinput controller is always detected as controller #1 (aka "joycode_1" in MAME syntax) Remapping controls for specific games will be in MAME\cfg and then the individual file would be named after the specific ROM file. These are commonly referred to as config files, hence the folder name and file type These are what is used if you wanted to change individual buttons for games. ie changing the default jump button from left shift to spacebar. Though note they may contain more than just making button A act like button B, this would be where data is stored that says to toggle on/off crosshairs for a lightgun game for ex. By theory, I would believe you could simply copy these folders and paste them over the new/updated location. Alternatively you can also change where MAME searches for these files. In the mame.ini file you could either change the path all together, or list a 2nd path (or 3rd, and 4th, and so on) for MAME to look in. The mame.ini file will be in your MAME root folder, or more likely in the MAME\ini folder. For example I've circled specifically where these settings are in the ini. They are right at the top so pretty easy to find. Notice how the ini folder path has what looks like two entries? The semi-colon separator tells MAME to look in both the folder ini, and in ini\presets. So that is how you would format it if you wanted to add additional folder paths rather than change the single one that is there.

Ahh ok, thanks for the update and all your continuous improvement support! Glad I could help guide ya towards the culprit too.

Hi C-beats thanks for taking a moment to help! I have tried your suggestion but the problem persists in Big Box. The total game metadata still seems to function OK in LaunchBox for me though. Some more screen shots for reference. Still looking ok in LaunchBox. I notice the checkbox you had me tick adds the qty of games in parenthesis so that also is working ok here But Big Box is the one that still doesn't want to read or display this data for the custom Collection category And want to show here again if I select into the category Collections the individual playlists do list their total game count OK Please let me know if there is anything else I can try or share to help with troubleshooting. Thanks again!

Do you have stuff like "hide all windows that are not exclusive fullscreen" checked? Something like that might be blocking the border from displaying. You could try turning off the startup screens if they are on to make sure they are not part of the issue. Here is a possible alternative solution. Use a bezel in Retroarch that has the border built into it. These are on Sinden's website. I don't use these types of lightguns, but it just sounds like you need a white border....so it shouldn't matter if it is generated by program A or program B or an image. These things wouldn't exist if they didn't work. Since we know for fact LB/BB doesn't block bezels from being used in Retroarch (or MAME) this would be a workaround to get your required white border here is the page I'm talking about. They are for MAME so you would need to setup the bezel in Retroarch manually (they are called "overlays" in Retroarch) or switch over to playing these games on MAME. So it's got a little setup which ever way you went there, doing the overlay in Retroarch would be quicker in my opinion https://sindenlightgun.miraheze.org/wiki/Sinden_Bezel_Packs