paddyG

Well, I spoke too soon. The running script works too well. I set the check time to 300000, and the game exited while I was playing! Back to the drawing board...

Google to the rescue! Had to add "hooks" for mouse and keyboard, and use A_TimeidlePhysical to the AHK. I changed the idle time to 10000 for testing purposes so I'm only waiting 10 seconds to check results. So now it looks like this, and it works! Whoo-Hooo!!! #Persistent #InstallKeybdHook #InstallMouseHook SetTimer, Check, 6000 return SendMode Event Check: IfGreater, A_TimeIdlePhysical, 10000 { SetKeyDelay, -1, 110 Send {Escape} Sleep, 1000 Send {Escape} } Thanks again JV for helping me yesterday... I owe you a very large coffee!

I figured out the culprit is Joy2Key. When J2K is running, the exit on idle AHK in Running Scripts does not execute... I guess maybe J2K is causing some disturbance to the idle timer in the background. When I close J2K, and run the game in LB/BB with RA, the AHK runs as expected and closes the game/emulator once the idle time is met. Hmmm... how to use J2K and have this script do it's thing at the same time?

Thanks JV, I tried that script, but no-joy. Must be some permissions issue with RA. I'll keep digging. I'm like a dog with a bone with this. I might spend the weekend building everything from scratch. I just wanna play pac-man, man!

Thanks JV... I added MsgBox, script started after #Persistent and disabled -f and startup screen so I could see the game open in RA window. When I launched the game, I saw the message pop up and it said the script was running. I clicked ok and the message box closed. I clicked the RA window to make sure it was active and I watched the game demo play in the active RA window for 5 minutes and it did not exit. There was nothing disturbing the mouse or keyboard or any other input device, all idle the whole time. I have RA set to quit with Escape key, and also "confirm quit" is on, so Escape has to be pushed twice to actually quit RA. I disabled "confirm quit" to see if that changed anything, but it did not. I know we verified the script is running, but it seems it is not actually sending the Escape key (x2). I've also tried this script in Running Scripts, but same... it does not quit Retroarch: #Persistent SetTimer, Check, 6000 return Check: IfGreater, A_Timeidle, 300000 { WinClose, ahk_exe {{{StartupEXE}}} } return $Q:: { WinClose, ahk_exe {{{StartupEXE}}} }

Does that AHK script above still work? I've copied and pasted it into the Running Scripts section under Edit Emulator (Retroarch), but nothing happens after 120 seconds... any game that uses Retroarch (mame-libretro) just keeps running. I've also used this AHK in Running Scripts with Retroarch a few years ago and it worked well, but I stopped using it. I wanted to start using it again but it is not working on the latest LB version: #Persistent SetTimer, Check, 6000 return SendMode Event Check: IfGreater, A_Timeidle, 120000 { SetKeyDelay, -1, 110 Send {Escape} Sleep, 1000 Send {Escape} } I'm using Windows 10 Pro, Launchbox version 13.22. I've tried Beta 13.23 too, but same thing... nothing happens. It's like the AHK is not executing from Running Scripts when the emulator starts. I can manually press Escape two times and Retroarch will quit. So, why can't I do this with AHK in Running Scripts?

I've updated to the latest Beta 13.23, added all my videos back to the Video folder, enabled WMP in both LB and BB, and it has been stable for over 12 hours now. Using previous beta versions and VLC, BB in Attract Mode would freeze randomly between 15 minutes to 4 hours. The only difference in my system is that I am using internal speaker (I let someone borrow my 3.5mm audio cable for my external speaker). Finally after many years, Attract Mode seems to be working perfectly now! Thanks Devs!

If it might be of any help, is there a way I could actually send my entire PC to the LaunchBox dev team so they can see first hand what is going on when it freezes in attract mode? I don't mind parting with it for a few months. It's just a small HP EliteDesk 805 G6. I would pay for shipping both ways as long as it is in the US. Getting desperate to fix this.

I've been having the Attract Mode freeze issue for over a year. I installed the latest beta update last night, but it did not resolve the freeze. I started Big Box at 10PM last night and when I woke this morning at 6AM, it was frozen, with the time displayed in the upper right corner as 1:35 AM. BigBox was unresponsive, so had to quit it from Task Manager. I restarted Big Box at 7AM, left for the day and when I returned home at 3PM, it was frozen again. No one was around while I was gone to disturb it. There was no attract video playing, but I could still hear audio. That is the only difference applying the beta update... audio was still playing even though Big Box was frozen and unresponsive. When I went to Task Manager, BigBox showed 4 running processes: CefSharp.BrowserSubprocess, CefSharp.BrowserSubProcess, Launchbox, Big Box. BigBox showed about 800MB of memory usage when I quit it from Task Manager and also when I restarted it. I have 15GB of total memory. I rebooted the PC at 3:45 PM this afternoon and restarted BigBox (I have it set to autolaunch Big Box on startup). I checked Task Manager and it showed only 3 processes this time: CefSharp.BrowserSubProcess, Launchbox, Big Box. I'll keep an eye on it to see if it freezes again. Hope not though. Update: It froze-up again at 7:18 PM. ::SHRUG::

Can someone help me? I'm having an issue, when I use mini bluetooth Rii keyboard with Launchbox to launch TP games, if I highlight the game and hit the OK button, Teknoparrot Launcher launches twice consecutively, giving an error popup that Teknoparrot is already open. This behavior doesn't happen if I use the trackpad and double click on the TP game, it launches fine. Something about the way Launchbox responds to the OK button on Rii mini bluetooth keyboards? I would think it should behave like a single "return" keystroke? This doesn't happen with any other emulators, only TP. Thanks!

So I removed the original Videos folder. LB automatically generated a new Videos folder, but not populated with any video files. BigBox no longer freezing up and runs steady all day with no video files in the new Videos folder, only images in attract mode. This maybe means there is something wrong with the original video files. I re-encoded all the original videos in Handbrake and put them in the new videos folder, but BigBox freezes up again after a few hours with videos playing in attract mode. Hmmm. I think I will just start from scratch with a new fresh build of LB and see where that goes.

Ok, sounds easy enough to try your suggestion. I will report back with my findings soon! Thanks!!!

Hi, just to follow-up with this issue, after updating to 13.8, BigBox still freezes/becomes completely unresponsive after a few hours in attract mode. When I go to Task Manager, it shows BigBox (2), 0% usage, about 400Mb of RAM usage out of 15GB total. When I expand the BigBox processes in Task Manager, it shows BigBox and CefSharp.BrowserSubprocess only. When I end the BigBox process and restart BigBox, the Task Manager shows BigBox (4) with running processes Launchbox, BigBox and two CefSharp.BrowserSubprocess. Everything works fine for a few hours, then randomly BigBox freezes up. So it seems that Launchbox is quitting unexpectedly, which is causing BigBox to freeze. Is there any way to check the logs to see what is causing Launchbox to quit? I don't know where to look for those logs. Anything else I should check for that I can report back to you to diagnose this problem? Specs: HP EliteDesk 805 G6, AMD Ryzen 5 Pro 4650G, 16GB Ram, Windows 11 Pro, 256GB SSD (only 1/4 full).

CriticalZoneV2. Any suggestion for a more stable theme to try? I really like the presentation... games list on the left with nice sized video preview on the right.

Hmm, interesting. Is there a way to implement the persistent AHK feature to cause virtual press of the !f12 key? I'm currently using the following AHK to exit Retroarch games after 60000ms of inactivity using the Q key: #Persistent SetTimer, Check, 6000 return SendMode Event Check: IfGreater, A_Timeidle, 60000 { SetKeyDelay, -1, 110 Send {Q} Sleep, 1000 Send {Escape} } You see where I am going with this? Thanks skizzosjt!

Any update to this? Bigbox (Launchbox 13.5) running in attract mode freezing up after a few hours of idle. It's embarrassing when I have guests approach the machine and touch the joystick to scroll through the games and BB just freezes. I'm using JoyToKey as the controller interface, but I have no reason to think that is the culprit (?). BB is not responsive to keyboard either. The only thing I can do is kill Bigbox with Task Manager and relaunch BB or kill the whole machine and restart. After rebooting the machine it works fine... for about another few hours then it freezes up again. It happens on my other machine too, completely different hardware specs, but same Windows 11, Launchbox 13.5, so I don't think it is a hardware issue. Is the latest beta release addressing this at all?

skizzosjt, thank you for the suggestion. I like the way you think, very clever! Technically, you did answer my question and found a solution to my post. Unfortunately this would require too much user intervention to pause the script prior to gaming and then remember to resume it upon exiting the game. I might just hire a dedicated person to stand next to the machine and hit the down joystick once every 30 seconds except when someone has entered the game.

Hi, I only have a small curated listed of about 20 games on my LB/BB setup, so with BB set for Attract Mode, it randomly seek out games to preview, which is nice. But since I have such a small number of games, it seems to only "randomly" select the same two or three games to "attract", as I've observed from watching it for the past 4 or 5 hours. Mostly it randomly selects the same game over and over and over before it moves on to a different game. Is there a way to disable the "random" selection and change it to a sequential selection, so it just moves on to the next game below (or above) in the wheel? I'm looking, but I don't see that feature. Surely for such an advanced (and expensive) program like this, this simple common-sense setting is hidden somewhere and I just haven't found it yet. Would you please tell me where to find this setting? Thanks!

Wow... it worked! That was TOO easy, even for a noob like me! This is incredibly invaluable to me! Thank you so much!!

Hi Fry... I love your plug-in! It's really a great solution for me. Was wondering if there was a way to increase the delay slider to say... 1 or 2 minutes instead of just 30 seconds? I have big box set to launch at startup, and sometimes there are too many things going on in the background and I need some extra time for Windows and Steam to settle down before I launch a game in Big Box, otherwise conflicts arise. I see the two plugin files are .dll, but not sure if there is anything in there that I can edit. I don't want to tinker and break something, but then again, I've never attempted to open a .dll file, so I wouldn't even know where to start. Thanks!!