CADScott

slvc said Is there a way to test out BigBox before purchasing? You will like BigBox, it is fantastic! It might not be as flashy as Hyperspin, but it is incredibly easy to setup and works flawlessly. Jason is working on some type of theme support for BigBox, which will hopefully allow people to change it to suit their tastes, but even the standard theme is great.

SentaiBrad said As far as I know I did nothing to change the exclusive mode thing, just one day it stopped acting up. My solution was to end explorer.exe in Task Manager though with Steam closed. With Explorer closed I would plug in the controller, re-boot explorer in Task Manager. If it wasn't exclusive at that point, I unplugged it, closed explorer, plugged it in, waited a few seconds, then turned back on explorer. With InputMapper open with Explorer closed it might not update the log properly sometimes, but it would say even before explorer was back on if it was in exclusive mode. So sometimes the first attempt wouldn't work but the second would, like it needed a flush. This is more or less the problem though, it was a Windows update that kind of broke it and I assumed another Windows update fixed it. I am using Windows 10 as well. That was my experience with InputMapper, it seemed to need a lot of intervention when it wasn't working properly, which made it very difficult for a PC which was not meant to have a mouse and keyboard attached. I was almost tempted to go back to Windows 7 and try it, because from what I have seen most of the issues are due to Windows 10 and exclusive mode.

fromlostdays said There is another option for exiting retroarch at least. Since, you're using the same controller I am, I'll tell you exactly how I do it. Left Thumbstick = Enable Hotkeys This feature is absolutely great, as it allows you to map emulator functions over any button you want. So if I depress my left thumbstick Start = Exit RetroArch Right Bumper = Fastforward Y = Screenshot Right stick up and down = Scroll through cheats X = Use cheat A = Savestate Select = Load state (you'll want to map loading state to a difficult combination of buttons so you don't accidentally load state in the middle of a game. When my left thumbstick is not depressed, all the buttons go back to normal. Just go from the second RA menu down to inputs, and instead of clicking "User 1 Hotkey Binds" go to "Input Hotkey Binds". Bind a button to the "Enable Hotkeys" option, and bind the rest however you want, including exiting the emulator. That is fantastic, I hadn't explored any of those functions, will have to look into that tonight!

Sandisk have a quite good reputation for their SSDs, and are relatively cheap for their capacity. The problem I have with them is that they only give a 3 year warranty for their standard consumer models. Their Extreme Pro model has a 10 year warranty but they do not give any specific warranty for data endurance, and locally it is pretty much the same price as a Samsung EVO Pro. Sandisk state that if you are writing too much to a drive then it is not classed as consumer use and you should be buying enterprise class drives, so they do not give write endurance levels for consumer drives. But they will not give out data about what level the consider consumer usage cuts off and becomes enterprise! Performance wise they are pretty much the same, so I would go for a Samsung unless there was a very significant price difference to make up for the less comprehensive warranty.

SentaiBrad said Also, after reading a few of the posts, I use InputMapper with my PS4 controller and only had issues for a little while with InputMapper not getting exclusive control over my controller, which only effected Kodi. That only lasted a month or two and I had a workaround anyways, but before and after that it has worked completely flawlessly. InputMapper is really super simple. Not as simple as plugging in an Xbox Controller and it just automatically downloading the drivers, but even those drivers are screwed up from Microsoft so it's not ideal either. As per RocketLauncher, my personal opinion is to just stay away from it, there really is no need to use it. Especially now that LB has archive support honestly. That's just me though, there doesn't need to be a second layer, but some users like to utilize it and there is nothing wrong with that. That was my issue with InputMapper, not getting exclusive mode in Windows 10. I would love a way to fix this, because when it worked the PS4 controller was fantastic. I tried for a few weeks, and could not get it to work reliably. The 360 controller just works for me, but the D pad is awful! I also 100% agree with Brad about RocketLauncher, it is really not worth the amount of time you have to spend on it.

slvc said Just an update! I got the computer up and running, hooked to the TV, and SNES through Retroarch working. I'm using my Xbox 1 controller (god is the D-pad awful) and it automapped it pretty well for me. I think the next steps are as follows: 1) Figure out how to exit Retroarch using the controller as I won't have a mouse/keyboard when build is finished 2) Map controller to mouse/keyboard for selecting games in what will eventually be BigBox mode Does Launchbox support point 2 at all? Where I can avoid using a mapper? If I can figure out how to do everything using the controllers I'd be happy, even if it means manually setting configurations for each emulator... it's the actual selecting/launching/exiting a game that I struggle with. Years ago I mapped something to my Dualshock 3 and it was horrible to set up so I'm trying to see the easiest route.. Thank you @fromlostdays and @CADScott !! I'm only looking to get one controller set up for now, I'll worry about two later ha Both of those steps are very easy in BigBox, exiting the emulator is setup in the settings area, and is done by pressing 2 buttons at the same time, usually start and select. You should not need any mapping software in BigBox, everything is selectable by using a controller, that is what BigBox is built for, controller only use from a couch!

Yep, definitely steer clear of the cheap SSDs, in fact what my research the only brands that give a meaningful warranty that includes total data written are Samsung and Intel. Both of them warranty for approx 40GB a day, all the other drives I have researched only warranty for a time period, and most other brands are only 3 years anyway, where Samsung and Intel are at least 5 years. I have 4 different machines with SSDs in them, and all of them are Samsung brand. They may be a bit more expensive, but they have never skipped a beat and are amazingly fast.

I have a little suggestion that came up from my testing of your latest importer last night. I would love to be able to give the imported platforms a custom name at import time. For example, I prefer my arcade games to be under the default Arcade platform name, rather than MAME and CPS1 to be Capcom CPS1, which is definitely something that can be altered after import but it would be great if the importer had an option to create custom names for the standard platforms. Perhaps the platform names in the importer could be a customisable field name as well, with the default name already filled in?

Drilling plexiglass can be VERY difficult, it is easy to have the bit catch and crack the surface. The best bit to use is a forstner bit. I have made several arcade control panels and if you use one of these carefully you should be able to do it with a hand drill if you go slowly.

I really think that there is a lot of paranoia about write cycling on SSDs that is based on the early SSDs which were very poor and wore out extremely quickly. As long as you have a newish good brand SSD you should never come close to hitting the wear limit on a drive under normal home use. For example, the SSD I have in my PC is a Samsung EVo 850 Pro 250GB, which is warrantied for 10 years and 150TB of writes. This is a MASSIVE amount of data to write. If you calculate it out it is 41GB per day, every day for 10 years! To put that in perspective, it is like installing a new copy of Windows 10 twice every day for the entire 10 years. You will not use that much data in normal use, and this is the warrantied amount. Many endurance tests have shown SSDs going well into the petabytes of data written before failure. The Tech Report did a great test of this, and their testing over 18 months had drives going for twice their rated life before they saw even a single error reported, and only failing above 2PB of written data. I compress my large disk based images because it saves a massive amount of space on my secondary mechanical drive, and the speed difference is negligible when you uncompress to the SSD. Even with the largest disk based games (PS2), you would need to be playing many multiple games per day to ever reach an issue with your SSD. I understand many people are wary, but it is easy to check if you have any problems by checking the SMART values on your SSD. This will tell you exactly how much data you have written to the drive and also the time that it has been in your system, so you can actually see the writes per day. Keep an eye on this over a few weeks of normal use and you will see that the data written is actually well below problem levels. Rant over!

There is currently no setting to change this but you can work around this by using symbolic links to point the unzip location to your SSD. If you are unfamiliar with symbolic links in windows, they are quite easy to create. Simply open a command prompt with admin rights, and then type the command: mklink /J C:\SSDUnzip Z:\LaunchBox\7-Zip\Temp This creates a directory link that makes windows think the Unzip directory is on your Z drive (External drive letter), but it is really on your SSD in the SSDUnzip directory.

Just ran a test with a complete set of 0.172 roms into my main LaunchBox setup. No issues at all! I love the ini file that keeps settings, makes it soooo much easier. Imported a great subset of my roms and everything works exactly as expected, many thanks Kris.

I also had these at about the same time, I can't believe how much time I spent playing on Donkey Kong. I didn't realise these were made by Nintendo until I just looked them up.

This was my first handheld game machine, the glorious Galaxy Invader 1000!

I spent a lot of time trying to use a PS4 controller on my setup, as the D Pad really is so much better than the 360 controller. I tried many different configurations, both wired and Bluetooth, and had nothing but trouble at every step. Obviously many people have got this to work, but I could not get the controller to work reliably every time. On the other hand my 360 controller work absolutely flawlessly in Windows 10, just using a generic wireless dongle from eBay. I primarily use Retroarch, MAME, Dolphin and PCX2 for my emulation, with a few others thrown in for weird systems that I really don't play much if at all. All my emulators work perfectly with the 360 controller, without any need for Xpadder or any other mapper. Retroarch is especially fantastic with a controller, as you can change every setting from within the emulator with only the controller. RocketLauncher is an amazing piece of software, but the setup is an absolute pain! I very much agree with @fromlostdays, avoid mappers if possible, stick to the simple install first and then add extras if you need them. For a simple console type system, the less stuff you have running the better off you will be. Less things to go wrong and less to maintain.

Antropus said Another distraction for me these days is to expand my program to import Amiga games, with the possibility of filtering them. I wrote a little app that extracts the WHDLoad games one by one, searches for the readme file inside each one, parses the info from it to extract the game's full name, year and manufacturer and then looks for clues in the zipped file names to extract country (when available) and version (almost always available). My intention is to create an ini file with all this info compiled in it, that can be used for filtering purposes. I know that .dat files are available for the TOSEC and Dat-O-Matic sets, which I'm not interested in at this point (besides, they don't carry a whole lot of metadata in them anyway). The reason is that I bought a registered key for the WHDLoad set years ago and I'm proud to support those guys for the awesome job they've done over the years. Besides, WHDLoader is a pretty straight forward launcher. -Kris Kris, that would be amazing, Amiga games are another system that has very little support and information in the game database, so anything that would help with importing this system would be fantastic! The data files that are available for WHDLoad seem to be very lacking. No pressure, but that would be an amazing addition to your import tool!

As @SentaiBrad said MESS is a mess, I have tried to get multiple systems running in it and had absolutely no success, and always gone back to a standalone emulator or Retroarch. You might find that most of the CD-I games were actually released on other systems, so if you really want to play them, look at the Sega CD, Daphne Emulator and Saturn, there were a lot of FMV games released on those platforms.

You do not need to remove any of your other systems, just the MAME ones, copying the XML is just in case you want to go back to before you did any changes, like @DOS76 said, just use CTRL+A when you are in the Arcade platform to select all the MAME games only and remove just them.

Very nice collection, I would also be interested in these covers, and if you have a template from Photoshop or something and would be willing to share that would be fantastic as well.

From what I have seen there is only one CD-I emulator that is actually working well and compatible with most games, cdiemu, and it is paid software, costing 25 euro. I have not used it, but it does have a time limited trial, so it would be worth trying.

Looking good Kris, those are some fantastic new features, the config file will be much appreciated! The relative paths that are stored in LaunchBox are actually in the second format, "Games\Mame"., so I imagine that would be preferable.

That is not too bad a machine for emulation purposes, you should be able to bump the graphics up a little. Don't worry about tweaking at first, most emulators will run at their default settings just fine, and only when you have everything working well, then you can look at graphical tweaks. The good thing with most emulators is that they are portable apps, so every setting is stored in their install directory. This is great for tweaking, because you can zip up the entire directory and save it somewhere, then muck around with settings and if you stuff anything up, just delete the directory and replace it with the one from your zip file, and you are back to a perfectly working setup. I, and many others on these forums can help you out with the setup of the individual emulators, and there are also many great YouTube clips on high end tweaks for Dolphin and PCX2, which are where I got most of my information to start with. Just get the basics done first, then worry about the nice to haves once you are sure everything is running well.

As long as your PC is not too old you should be able to run those without much issue, especially if you don't bump up the original rendering resolution. If your PC is a bit faster and you can tweak the graphics, it is very much worth it, the PS2 and Gamecube / Wii look amazing in high rez! My dedicated box is a i5 3570K with a GTX670 video card and 4GB ram, and I can run PS2 and Gamecube/Wii at 3x resolution and anti-aliasing without any frame drops. This is pretty close to full HD and looks amazing on my TV. Make sure you have LOTS of storage, it is very easy to run out of space quickly once you start collecting roms, especially the PS2 ones, they can be massive! It has taken a bit of tweaking to get things smooth and reliable, but now it boots fast and straight into Kodi, and plays all games I have tried so far, exits perfectly from a game to BigBox and all with an xbox360 controller. It may take you some time to get things working as you want them, but it should work, and it is worth it! There are a few people on here who have done similar setups, so if you run into issues there will be someone here to help.

If you are going with Windows 7, then you should have no issues with running BigBox alone. I do not use Xpadder, from what I know it is only needed to emulate a mouse and keyboard for functionality outside BigBox (And with some odd emulators), so you may not need that at all. I would advise you to setup Windows 7, install LaunchBox and BigBox and add some games and emulators, ensuring that you setup the controller to be able to exit the emulators in BigBox. Then set BigBox to run on startup and play with it for a while to see if there are any problems. If it all works as you hope, then either leave it as is, or replace the shell in windows with BigBox for a more seamless system. For interest, what level of system are you trying to emulate? If it is just the lower end stuff, up to N64 and Playstation, then you should be able to do nearly everything with Retroarch as your emulator, which makes the setup even easier, because you can use the controller for changing all your settings on the fly. If you are wanting the higher end machines like Gamecube, Wii and PS2 then you will need separate emulators, and a keyboard and mouse to get everything running perfectly, but when it is done you shouldn't need anything but a controller.

Sorry, I must confess I love me some Rick Astley as well, it was the memory of me in a much younger time with much more hair and bad clothes dancing in clubs to those type of tunes that was disturbing!