Zombeaver

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!

Holy crap is CRT-Royale gorgeous... So much so that I've converted several other platforms over to use RetroArch at this point. The more I use RA the more I'm actually loving it. It works perfectly with Steam's in home streaming as well, for anyone interested.

Success! I was finally able to get the controls remapped correctly in RetroArch to what I wanted and after some testing the m3u method works perfectly! "Eject" -> next (or previous) disc button -> "Eject" again (close) and it trucks right on along. Now I just have to go through the process of correcting all my cue sheets, creating m3u files, and re-configuring those games in LB to use Retroarch instead of ePSXe... Then I'll have to see how I can tackle this in PCSX2...

Blu_Haze said With Retroarch I have numpad 0 bound to open/close tray, and numpad 1/2 to switching disks. So with all of my multidisc games I point LaunchBox to the .m3u playlist instead of the individual .cue files and when it's time to switch discs I just press 0, 2, 0 on the numpad. Done. I can not get this to work. For some reason no matter what I do it's only letting me remap the keys to my 360 controller (which I don't want). I'm fine setting it up like you've got it but unless I assign the key to a button on the controller it won't accept it. Getting pretty frustrated at this point... I have no idea why something so bloody fundamental has to be so convoluted and has so many hoops to jump through.

DOS76 said @Zombeaver during the import on all pages of the forms there is a back arrow located in the top left area of the form if you make any mistakes using that will allow you to go backwards through the import forms. Huh, okay cool - I'll check that when I get home. I never noticed it. I just looked at the bottom where there's a "next" button and I expected there to be a "previous" button to the left of it but there's nothing there. Thanks for the heads up!

I may have spoken too soon when I said I got it working... It does show the multigame menu, and the initial load into ePSXe does load the correct disc that I select, but once the game is actually loaded and gets to a disc swap screen, I press the swap menu button, the menu comes up, I choose the appropriate disc to change to, it goes back to the emulator...and says I have the wrong disc in. Game started via Rocket Launcher -> start Disc 1 (via multigame menu) -> select "new game" -> game proceeds normally Game started via Rocket Launcher -> start Disc 2 (via multigame menu) -> select "new game" -> game asks "Insert Disc 1" -> pull up multigame menu via "-" key -> select Disc 1 -> goes back to emulator -> "Wrong Disc" Now that I've figured out why RetroArch was crashing on me, I may just try going back to that. I haven't messed around with the actual video settings much for Mednafen - does it do upscaling like ePSXe?

polygonslayer said With RL I currently press the "-" key (planning to set up with gamepad combo) on my keyboard to bring up a screen which lets me pick what disc to swap without the emulator closing. That sounds great! I'll have to check that out. polygonslayer said Another good thing regarding PS1 emulation (LB might have similar options, not checked) is that you will find that a lot of times you can get some games that just don't work right with your chosen emulator. For example I have never gotten Toshinden working right with epsxe, it always runs way to fast, but in RL I have that game flagged to be launched using Xebra instead. You can setup LB to use whatever emulator you want, on a game by game basis. I've currently got both ePSXe and RetroArch (Mednafen core) setup as usable emulators in LB. Guess I'll have to add RL to that list. polygonslayer said I seem to recall that epsxe doesn't load CUE files correctly and that it won't play the music tracks. It might have been an issue in earlier versions, but it works just fine with 1.9.0. Loaded, Re-Loaded, and Twisted Metal 2 are all games that play the music from the disc as specified in the cue sheet and they work in ePSXe. Back to the topic of feature requests in general, one thing did jump out at me last night: 12. There should be a "previous" button when importing games - currently there's only a "next" button. I've had a couple instances where I realized I had made the wrong selection in an earlier part and then had to close out the import and start over. On a related note, I think there should be a "remove" button once you get to the final screen that shows the files to import. I know (now) that you can just hit delete to remove them, but it wasn't initially obvious. Edit: Initial impression of RocketLauncher is that it's an overly-convoluted mess with seemingly little to no setup instructions on the actual site - a bunch of stuff for setting up HyperLaunch (apparently the older version of RL?) transitioning from HL to RL, and how to use it in conjunction with HyperSpin (which I don't care about). I can't get anything to launch through it at the moment - I have the path to ePSXe setup in the ePSXe module, added a PSX "system" and associated it with that module, directed it to the rom path...and that's as far as I can get. It doesn't seem to find any games at all. Edit 2: Okay, so I finally got it working, including the disc swapping. Apparently you have to add in a database XML file for the platform (I got the PSX one off of Hyperlist) and then you have to have your file(s) named exactly the way they want it. The whole process seems pretty unituitive/non-user-friendly but it should work once I get everything squared away... which is gonna be a while . It's something at least, though. I will say, I definitely appreciate having the on-the-fly swapping functionality regardless of whether or not it's a built in feature of the emulator itself. Now I just have to test to make sure it works over Steam's IHS (I think it should, but who knows).

SentaiBrad said ePSXe doesn't require cue sheets, but cue sheets can be superior as it can point towards multiple pieces of data. [...]where there are music files in the folder as well. There can be compatibility issues if you loaded the image and not the cue sheet. Yeah, I figured that out with Loaded/Re-Loaded/Twisted Metal 2 where it pulls the music directly off the disc. The weird part about that is that once you direct ePSXe to the .cue that's named identically, the music plays correctly, regardless of the fact that the cue sheet itself is directing it to the wrong file. Files: Re-Loaded.bin Re-Loaded.cue The text in the .cue? FILE "Re-Loaded [U] [SLUS-00382].bin" BINARY TRACK 01 MODE2/2352 INDEX 01 00:00:00 TRACK 02 AUDIO PREGAP 00:02:00 INDEX 01 13:13:23 TRACK 03 AUDIO INDEX 01 17:20:19 TRACK 04 AUDIO INDEX 01 21:25:11 TRACK 05 AUDIO INDEX 01 26:07:05 TRACK 06 AUDIO INDEX 01 31:25:01 TRACK 07 AUDIO INDEX 01 36:06:19 TRACK 08 AUDIO INDEX 01 40:42:58 TRACK 09 AUDIO INDEX 01 44:48:16 TRACK 10 AUDIO INDEX 01 49:32:00 TRACK 11 AUDIO INDEX 01 54:10:69 TRACK 12 AUDIO INDEX 01 58:15:34 TRACK 13 AUDIO INDEX 01 62:49:00 No music if the bin is loaded directly. Music works normally if loaded via .cue. I guess ePSXe must take the "file" field and replace it with the file that it actually finds that's named identically to the .cue? I had no idea... I may just end up making the necessary changes only to multi-disc games since ePSXe is working just fine and serving my purposes for everything else.

So...I think I figured out the problem here... It's actually a combination of a couple things. 1) I've got quite a few .ecm roms which Mednafen doesn't seem to like. I know there are conversion tools, but I've never needed them for ePSXe 2) The second issue I'm running into is the .cue path problem you mentioned. They're not directed to the wrong directory...but they sure as hell are directed to the wrong file name considering...I rename almost all of them so that they don't have a bunch of SLUS#### garbage in them. I'm not sure how/why this isn't a problem for ePSXe but is for Mednafen. Actually... Blu_Haze said It could just be looking for a .bin with the same name instead of actually reading the data in the .cue file. I bet that's it exactly. That's the only thing that could explain it really. I tried renaming some of the cue entries (that weren't for .ecm roms) and it worked. That's gonna be a ton of work to fix. What a nightmare :(

Thanks Blu_Haze, I'll take another look into it. Don't you find it a bit odd though that the exact same .cue files work perfectly fine in ePSXe but not in Mednafen?

I ran into a couple bugs earlier in Big Box. 1) Unchecking "Show Favorited Games First" under Options -> Games List doesn't seem to do anything. They still show up first in the platform's game list. 2) There's an issue with Star Fox's game menu which I tracked down to being caused by the Clear Logo. Unless you delete the logo, it looks like this when you select the game. You can still navigate up and down and choose menu options, but you can't actually see any of them. Once you delete the Clear Logo it goes away (I also tried re-downloading it and the issue came right back). The logo looks normal when viewed in LB. Maybe there's something funky with the logo's resolution?

polygonslayer said I use RocketLauncher to manage all my emulators and handle the launching, fullscreen, closing etc... Those are things that LB/BB are already setup to do as well though. How exactly is RocketLauncher going to help me with disc swapping in some way that LB doesn't currently? I've got them setup in LB already as additional apps, I just don't know if that implementation is necessarily always going to work. If the game asks you to save specifically for the disc swap then it's not a big deal, but I know some games don't do that and I think that's going to be a problem. By the way, I messed around with Retroarch and it was a complete disaster - I just kept getting crashes through the Mednafen core. I made sure I had all the bios files where they needed to be and even verified that the MD5 checksums were identical to the suggested ones. A couple games loaded but most just crashed outright - ones that work perfectly fine in ePSXe. Not sure that I'll be going back to RA anytime soon, unfortunately. I actually thought the m3u idea for multi-disc was pretty brilliant :( I've also read about savestating and then renaming your save-state file to the appropriate disc file name, loading that disc, and then loading the savestate, but that just seems like a bit of an unwieldy/impractical nightmare. Edit: I can confirm that creating a savestate on the disc swap screen, exiting, renaming the savestate file to the name of the second disc, loading the second disc in LB/BB and then loading the save state works... A very inelegant and impractical solution, but it should at least allow for overcoming situations where a game doesn't specifically ask to save for the disc swap. Mednafen apparently allows you to just create a text file with the name of each disc (disc1.cue, disc2.cue etc.) and then save it as a .m3u file in the same folder, then you load the .m3u file instead of the .cues and while in game press F8 to switch to the next disc in the list. That sounds awesome, but I wasn't able to get Mednafen to work sufficiently to even test that out :(

I appreciate the suggestion, but I'd prefer to remain within Launchbox/Big Box. The ultimate goal is to get everything setup so that I can browse and play via Big Box by way of Steam Link. From what I've seen, RocketLauncher looks fine for desktop usage but isn't really conducive to couch use unlike Big Box; and I mean if I were to do something other than Big Box, I'd just be using the emulators themselves - ePSXe and PCSX2 both have disc swapping functions built in which work just fine; the problem is there's not really a way to get to them (as far as I know) if they're setup to close on ESC (which they pretty much need to be). I've been looking into ways to remap hotkeys for them but it doesn't look like there's a disc swap function for either that's actually mapable. There might be something that can be accomplished via AutoHotkey, but I have absolutely zero experience with AutoHotkey programming. Even if that's possible, I'm not sure if it would work for ePSXe because you have to use --nogui for Launchbox to be able to launch specific games directly. I've considered specifically configuring multi-disc PS2 games to not close on ESC so that I can use the built in disc-swapping functionality, but that wouldn't help with PSX due to the --nogui issue. Edit: Upon re-reading your post, it could be that I just don't understand how exactly you've got things setup. I did look up RocketLauncher but it looked like it was just a different frontend. How exactly are you using it in conjunction with Launchbox? Edit 2: I also found this, which could work. I don't have any experience with Retroarch, but I've heard good things. I may give that a shot.

So, regarding 11 above, I just now noticed the "Use Custom Command-Line Parameters" option under a game's "emulation" tab and feel like a bit of an idiot. Doing it that way maybe isn't quite as fast as it could potentially be (you still have to type the cfg path in), but it's much faster than the way I've been doing it previously - which has been unchecking "Use an emulator", pointing the rom file field under the game's "Launcher" tab to the emulator itself, and then putting the full string of commands into the "Application Command-Line Parameters" field (like -fullscreen --nogui "X:\Emulation\PS2\Final Fantasy XII\Final Fantasy XII (USA).iso" --cfgpath="X:\Emulation\PS2\Final Fantasy XII" for example). So uh, yeah, no big deal there. Just disregard :P

Hello all! I'm new here, but I wanted to add my contribution. These are a number of platform banners that I've created. I've included both "sketch" and normal versions as some might prefer one or the other. I've got a number of additional ones planned but this is what I've got so far. I've also got all of these in an imgur album if you want to look through them that way.