Zombeaver

Glad to help @DOS76! It's strange about Clockwork Knight 2 though - I've got that one running fine in SSF. I do have that problem with Three Dirty Dwarves though. In fact, I can't really get anywhere with that one - in SSF I'm basically stuck on the main menu - you can move up and down but not actually start the game. With Yabause it gets passed the menu and to the loading part, acts like it completes the load, but then just sits there on a black screen forever... I'm using version 0.10 Alpha R1 on SSF and whatever the latest stable is for Yabause. I've tried SSF version 0.12 beta R4 as well but it seemed to break some games and the additional settings that are added in are extremely obtuse... I swear there are like 4 different check boxes that say something along the lines of "Full Screen" in that version's video settings. I have no idea what they were trying to convey with those but I think something was lost in the translation for sure... (dev for SSF is Japanese). I mean seriously... look at this:

Well, I don't know if it's the result of a Steam update, some rogue setting that I adjusted without realizing it, restarting computers... I dunno... but SSF is working perfectly through in-home streaming/Steam Link now. So huzzah for that!

Here you go @Jason, it just happened again:

I'd love to see this happen, although I'm not sure how I could help. RocketLauncher seems like it could be a really powerful tool...but it's such a convoluted mess that I couldn't stand messing with it. Retroarch has taken care of much of my needs in that regard. Having an actual BigBox dedicated overlay would be sweet though. As far as specific functionality, I think Steam's overlay is a pretty good example. Having a web interface to look up information would be nice. Some kind of PDF viewer for manuals/guides would be cool. Maybe some kind of activity log - like the recent games you've played and for how long; and you could launch those games directly from that list. I dunno...just throwing some stuff out there

This is a really great idea! I'll have to check this out as it should cut down setup time quite a bit. I've just been setting up each game with PCSX2's master config files until I'm happy with them and then copy them into the specific game's folder and then add a launch command to the game to direct it to those configs via -c "config folder location".

You don't really need to do one for the unmount unless having a mounted disc really bothers you for some reason. If you have a mounted disc and then want to launch a different game it just replaces the mounted disc (assuming you're using Daemon Tools). I have each game's rom path directed to the cue file for that game and uncheck "use an emulator". Then under additional apps you just direct it to SSF and tell it to "launch automatically after main application". Launching the game mounts the disc and then launches SSF once complete. If you launch another game setup like this, it mounts the new disc and launches SSF with that disc. All that said, there might be some streamlining that could take place here, although it's a pretty one-off situation. The vast majority of other emulators out there allow direct loading of a disc image. SSF is actually the only one where I have to do this workaround. Yabause is such a piece of junk though that it's currently a necessary evil :(

Perfect! Thanks! So far I've gotten the following to work on the Link through BigBox: Commodore 64 (CCS64) NES (Retroarch / Bnes Core) SNES (Retroarch / SNES9x Core) N64 (Retroarch / Mupen64 Core) Gamecube (Dolphin) Wii (Dolphin) Genesis (Retroarch / Genesis Plus GX Core) Sega CD (Retroarch / Genesis Plus GX Core) Sega Dreamcast (Demul; and nullDC to some extent but Demul is far superior anyway) Playstation (Retroarch / Mednafen Core; ePSXe works as well) Playstation 2 (PCSX2) GBA (Retroarch / VBA Next Core) PSP (PPSSPP; Retroarch has a PPSSPP core but I've found it's a little buggier and performance isn't quite as good as standalone PPSSPP which works fine over Link anyway) CPS1 (Retroarch / FBA Core) CPS2 (Retroarch / FBA Core) Neo Geo (Retroarch / FBA Core) (other) Arcade (Retroarch / MAME Core) Sega Saturn is about the only thing giving me much trouble. SSF is the only Saturn emulator worth a crap (Yabause is a joke) and while it works fine on my host PC, it seems to cause issues for the Link which I've yet to resolve. Just setting it up to run properly on the host through LaunchBox was a bit of a task in and of itself - SSF doesn't actually load ISOs directly like many other emulators, it has to actually read either a physical disc or a mounted one in a virtual drive so you have to setup LaunchBox to not "use an emulator" so that launching the game in LB/BB will actually mount the disc, and then add in an additional application directed to SSF and tell it to "automatically run after the main application". So you launch the game -> disc mount process starts -> disc mount completes -> SSF launches and boom you're up and running :D The Link doesn't seem to like it though... And because you're not "using an emulator" in LB like normal and doing it through "additional apps" you don't have access to some of the normal features that you would have access to in LB like auto-hiding log windows and AutoHotkey scripts. Would it be possible for those to be added into the "additional apps" options? I think the Link's issue with SSF may also be focus related (because a little message pops up from Daemon Tools when you mount the disc) so I was hoping to try out the WinWait+WinActivate script for this but it's not available for an "additional app". Sorry, I didn't actually intend for this rant to turn into another request :(

Thanks @Jason! I'm not sure how you're going to implement that exactly but if there's any way that I can help with that or anything you need me to do to that end, let me know!

@Jason Not to be a hyper turbo ultra nag-o-tron, but any idea when the logo disable could be implemented? My Steam Link finally showed up yesterday. Everything's working great and Big Box looks sweet on the living room TV...but I still have to use the wireless keyboard to control the UI. I did some reading and was considering trying to do a WinWait+WinActivate auto-hotkey script for the focus issue, but that's just sortof a hack and I'm not sure that it will even work. The Steam Link seems to have issues with some games that use launchers (where it pops up with a little window that's like "play game / settings / website link" etc.) and I think that's essentially what's happening with Big Box. If it's any incentive I'm planning on making a nice big detailed tutorial on how to set everything up in LaunchBox to work best with the Steam Link / In-Home Streaming once I get all the kinks worked out.

I can confirm that I've had this happen to me as well. I'm not on the new new beta, but I'm on the first one after 5.5 (5.6 I think is how it's listed?) and it's happened to me. It doesn't always happen, but it's definitely occurred multiple times. I'll grab a screenshot the next time it pops up.

Time for some handhelds! GBA and PSP for now. Full gallery here.

There is limited hotkey support within BigBox, but probably not for the functions that you're wanting. However, Xpadder allows you to remap buttons or combinations of buttons to other keystrokes. I have back+left bumper set to "ESC" and back+right bumper set to "Alt+Tab" for example. This carries through to anything in Windows, not just emulators.

If you right-click on a game and go to edit, at the top-right section does it say "Download Metadata" or "GamesDB####"? If it says "Download" that means the entry isn't currently associated with a GamesDB entry - so you can hit the download button and it should come up with a list of possible matches. Once you click one of the results, the metadata should auto-populate. You can then hit the download button on the images section at the bottom right as well. It should do much of this for you automatically with the default settings when you initially import your games, assuming your games are named in such a way that it can recognize them. On the final screen of the import process make sure that the correct game title is on the left side of the table and not something with a bunch of gibberish or erroneous numbers or some such.

I'm not sure about MAMEUI as I use MAMEPlus, but with it you need to setup the actual mame.exe (or whatever the non-UI exe is called) as the emulator in Launchbox, not MAMEPlusUI - the UI exe will just launch...the UI, not a game. LB is serving the same purpose as the UI anyway.

Here's three more: Jaguar, Sega CD, and Saturn. Full gallery here.

As a followup, I didn't have this happen again for the rest of the night so I'm hoping it was just a fluke.

@Jason I've developed a strange issue where this error pops up and then LaunchBox crashes. It happens every once in a while and seems to be happening in conjunction with launching a game. In case it matters, it's been happening on MAME games (MamePlus is the emulator, specifically), but MAME is all I've been working on for the last couple days (and this problem just started up today) so I don't know if anything else is affected or if it's even related. Any ideas?

@Blu_Haze That would be pretty sweet. I guess technically you can kindof do this already just with an alt-tab back to Big Box, but that's kindof faking it haha. I think the biggest hangup would probably be the pause functionality that you mention - every emulator handles that a little differently so it might be difficult for that to be incorporated into BB. I think some magic could be worked with AutoHotkey though - something like this probably, but I'm not sure about the pausing thing. I suppose if an emulator has a specific pause hotkey, it could be incorporated into a specific script that you create for that emulator in LB. That could maybe work... It still wouldn't be a true overlay at that point, mind you, but the functionality that you're looking for could still be possible.

@Adik You could do that, although you'd be losing your frontend functionality at that point, which would be unfortunate. The RetroArch method works beautifully through LaunchBox; no issues whatsoever. The initial setup takes a bit longer than the "Additional Apps" method in LaunchBox, but there are a lot of benefits to it in the long run. "Additional Apps" in LaunchBox will serve the necessary function in most cases and is actually really easy to setup, so you could at least try that out. LaunchBox/BigBox combined with RetroArch is pretty awesome though, and will work better for you in the long term if you invest the time and effort. I was skeptical at first and had some issues when I was initially setting everything up but once you get the hang of it the two combined are amazing.

ePSXe won't load specified roms without --no gui as a launch command so getting to the GUI is not possible, unfortunately. You have a couple options for changing discs - you can either use the "additional apps" method (I explain how to do this here) or you can use RetroArch combined with the Mednafen (PSX) core and use the m3u method mentioned here. Additional Apps lets you still use ePSXe (or any other emulator for that matter) but it has limitations. Doing it that way means you're closing the emulator and then relaunching with a different disc. That sortof works, although it's a little inconvenient since that means booting the whole system up again and loading a save; but therein lies a bigger problem - most games will allow you to save for a disc swap, but some games don't (like Metal Gear Solid, for example) and that's where you're gonna have a real issue. Technically you can still get around it doing it this way - but you'll have to create a save state on the disc swap screen, exit the emulator, find the save state file and rename it to the file name of your second disc, load up the second disc, and load your save state. That's super inconvenient, time consuming, and not a good option in my opinion. The much better option is to use RetroArch with the Mednafen core and creating .m3us for your .cues - all you have to do is create a text file that has the name of each disc's cue file, one per line, and save it as a file called (whatever your game name is).m3u - then you tell Launchbox to load that "rom" instead of your normal .cue file. Then, when you're in the game, you can just hit the button that you assign in RetroArch to "open/close tray" and then the button for "next disc" or "previous disc" (and it shows you a prompt on the screen of what disc you're selecting) and then the "open/close tray" button again - you can now continue playing just like if you had physically swapped the discs. It's great! RetroArch has a bit of a learning curve, but it's great once you get passed the initial hurdle. I initially only looked into it to solve this very issue, but I've come to love it and use it for another of other platforms as well. It has shader support (CRT-Royale and CRT-Easymode are my personal favorites) and you can assign controls once in RetroArch and they carry through to any cores (emulator modules) that you add in. If you do decide to go this route and need any help getting things setup, let me know.

Here's a new one for MAME. Full gallery here

@Jason I think I've figured out what the problem is with the 360 input over streaming! I think the logo that pops up for Big Box when you initially launch it is causing the Steam stream to "lose focus" and the inputs aren't being sent to the correct window as result. I created a batch file that's simply "start /min" that I added as a "non-steam application" for the purposes of doing a direct stream of the desktop itself (normally you add an application and it just streams the contents of that window, when you close whatever program the stream just ends, but doing it this way basically tricks Steam into thinking you're running a program when it's just your entire desktop) - when I launch Big Box through the streamed desktop the inputs from the controller work! I think what's happening when trying to launch Big Box as an application to stream is that it's taking that initial window popup as active and then doesn't know what to do after it disappears. The reason this occurred to me is I ran into a somewhat similar problem with PCSX2 where it kept wanting to focus on the log window that's enabled by default. Disabling it fixed the problem. Would it be possible to add in a toggle to turn off the initial Big Box logo and just launch directly into Big Box? I would bet money that will fix the problem.

Blu_Haze said The way things work right now LaunchBox will create 3 library entries as if each disc was a separate game. Instead it could see that these are duplicates and bundle them together. Then when you import a multidisc game you'll only have one entry for Final Fantasy 7. When you select that game and choose to play it a small sub-menu could open asking which disc you wanted to run. When it's time to change discs you could just save the game there, quit the emulator, and then choose disc 2 when you start it back up instead of disc 1. You can basically do this already. When you get to the final screen of an import, just remove the additional discs (keeping the first one), then right click on the game in Launchbox -> click edit -> additional apps tab -> "add application" -> check the "use emulator" box -> browse to disc 2 -> put "Disc 2" or "Final Fantasy VII Disc 2" or whatever you want in the "Application Name" field -> hit okay (repeat steps for additional discs). Now when you right click on the game, it shows a new entry for "Disc 2" or whatever you named it. No need to have multiple entries for multiple discs. Probably a few too many steps but yeah... The problem with this method is that it closes the emulator, and then relaunches with a different disc. That's not always going to work because sometimes games don't prompt you to save for the disc change. You can kindof get around it with a savestate and then renaming the savestate file to the name of your second disc...but yeah that's not a good solution at all. The m3u method for RA+Mednafen is WAY easier and faster than all this.

@Jason Thank you good sir! Glad to hear 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, and 10 are on the list! Jason Carr said #4, I am using XInput through SharpDX (DirectX), so I'm not sure what the problem would be; that is admittedly going to be very difficult to figure out. Hmm... strange. The keyboard still works just fine through streaming, and the 360 controller's inputs work fine in the emulators themselves. I'm not sure what the difference would be other than, like I said, the input plugins in various emulators seem to all actually say "Button A", "Button X", etc. when you're mapping via Xinput as opposed to "Button 1", "Button 2", etc. like it's listed in BB. Take a look at this for example. The first one is from PCSX2 and the second is Dolphin. I'm not sure if there's any real significance to the discrepancy, but I'm just throwing stuff out there. I'd be happy to help in any way I can, or test anything you need. If you have two computers on the same network that both have Steam installed and a 360 controller you can test it. In the Steam UI you just have to go to Steam -> Settings -> In-Home Streaming -> Enable Streaming on both computers. Then you just have to add Big Box as a non-steam app and you're pretty much good to go. Launch Steam Big Picture on the computer you're trying to stream to, find Big Box, hit "Stream". Again though, if there's any way I can help with this, or anything you need me to test, please tell me. Jason Carr said Per #5, I don't even really know what Shark is, but if ePSXe is crashing just from using command-line parameters, there's probably not much we can do about it. LaunchBox doesn't do anything special when launching emulators other than give them command-line parameters. You're right! I hadn't thought of it quite like that - I just knew that I could use Shark without ePSXe crashing when I used it normally, but I wasn't using command line parameters like --nogui for that; I'm sure that's what's causing it. I think Shark may just be coded poorly. It's not a big deal. Basically it's just a mod to ePSXe that adds a couple features including external pad plugin support; namely Pokopom's Xinput plugin. You can patch in the plugin without Shark though, by way of PeteOpenGL2Tweak. I've got that working just fine. Jason Carr said #8, I don't like that either, but I couldn't figure out a good solution. But lol, I think you're right, we just need to allow moving up or down whether you're in the recent/favorite lists or not. Yeah, I realized after posting that that favorites were probably the issue (since it adds a second line). Maybe you could add in a "if cursor position=on favorites, up input=move up platform list, else=move up to favorites list" or some such. Jason Carr said #9 is definitely a problem in some situations, no question. The issue is every emulator does this differently so it's just incredibly difficult to support it properly. I'm still up for suggestions. RetroArch+Mednafen have a pretty brilliant solution of using m3u's with a list of the .cues that you want to use, but like you said that's dependent on the emulator's support itself. RetroArch+Mednafen have taken care of the issue for me, for PSX titles, but there isn't a PS2 core for RetroArch (and probably won't be any time soon). I wonder if there's a way to tie in PCSX2's CDVD -> Iso Selector to some kind of autohotkey command? RocketLauncher has an interesting feature called MultiGame which theoretically patches on-the-fly disc switching in on top of the emulator (I had some mixed results with it), but I think there's a lot about RL that leaves something to be desired. RetroArch took me a bit to get working the way I wanted, but it's a cakewalk compared to the convoluted mess that is RL. Jason Carr said #11, I'll look into how we might be able to streamline that stuff. This one isn't nearly as big of a deal once I noticed the "Use Custom Command-Line Parameters" option under a game's "emulation" tab. Doing it that way makes it a one-step process rather than about five. No biggie! Jason Carr said Thanks for all the feedback, sorry it took me so long to respond. There's some great stuff here. :) No problem! And thank you!

Jason Carr said Ah, interesting. I think #1 is already fixed in the latest beta. Per #2, though, I'm guessing it's an image that's somehow corrupt or unrecognizable and hence the height is being calculated incorrectly and pushing the items down. It's probably a corrupt image but I should probably add some kind of maximum there so it doesn't obscure the entire view, thanks for that. 1. Yep, looks like that fixed the issue. Thanks! 2. I figured it was something along those lines. Glad to help!