JaysArcade

Is this a 4x3 screen? Yeah, I just confirmed the 4x3 version looks like its broken. Something major must have changed in the last couple years since I made that one. I guess I'm going to have to update it. The 16x9 works but that's not going to help you right now I'm afraid. I'll see if I can fix it tomorrow if I have time.

Yeah when building the theme, it doesn't let you select what videos are shown. Whatever is in your video folder for a particular platform is what will appear. I don't think there are video priorities in Bigbox (but I could be wrong about that). You should be able to go into your arcade platform in Launchbox and select all games. Then in the menu click tools > Download > Update Media and Media for selected Games. That will get you into the media download wizard. Unselect anything you don't want it to download again and only select the gameplay video stuff. You won't need to delete and re-import your MAME libray this way. Also, I'm not sure but I think this needs an emumovies account. I don't think Launchbox provides basic gameplay videos in their media downloads (but I could be wrong about that too).

Backup any current videos you have and only select the games in the platform you want to try this on. It would suck to lose all the videos you currently have in case you want to revert back to them.

You need to specify gameplay videos when you download your media. If you selected Video - Theme, you'll get the cinematic style.

It should be Vertical Wheel 1 and Platform Wheel 3. Also, in the example, I'm using gameplay videos, not cinematic videos for the arcade platform. 2023-03-04 23-06-49.mp4

I intentionally put the controller for each system there so that no matter what the console the person was playing at the time, they could easily reference the controls originally used on that system. The bezels were built with the intention of them being used with a vertically oriented monitor in an arcade cabinet using arcade controls. Being able to reference the original controller layout was a major focus of the design. Sorry it disagrees with you. You are always free to make your own and share.

The settings menu is the only thing the Community Theme Creator can't edit. All that has to be done manually. It might be possible to delete those files and use the default BigBox settings menu. The only reason this theme has themed settings menu at all is because older versions of Bigbox didn't display the settings very well on a vertical screen. The menu is actually a hack of the settings menu from @faeran's Vertigo theme. So to answer your question, no, I'm not actively working on this theme, but if you put together a good idea (I need specifics), I might entertain the idea of making an update. If you want to try to delete those files and use the default Bigbox settings views, I believe it is the Options views you would need to delete. They are in the ..\Themes\Vertical Aspirations\Views folder. Back them up first so you can restore if needed.

One of the downloads has the Community Theme Creator files. You can download that and edit the theme to your heart's content with the Community Theme Creator. The download has CTC in the file name.

Hey it came out nice Jason. Congrats on finishing it up.

Looks good Jason. For your side pieces - an easy way to get two identical matching pieces, cut your first side, then with your second side, cut it slightly larger. Clamp the two pieces together and run a flush cut router bit around them and you will end up with two identical pieces. Yeah it's an extra bit you'll need, but once you learn this trick, you'll probably find yourself using that bit more than you'd think. I was wondering what your 11th and 12th buttons were for. Mine doesn't have the volume buttons.

Sorry I deleted my post earlier in an attempt to appear like I wasn't trying to steal your thunder. If I could do mine again, I would move the 4 way over to the right a bit more. You're correct that the spinner and 4 way are kind of on top of one another. I think the mag sticks are a good compromise. They're built well and will give many years of service if you stick with them. I've had them on my other cab since 2006 or so. I refreshed the switches in them a couple years ago but that's about it.

Yep, I was a Hyperspin user before I came to BigBox too. And GameEx before that. Been doing this awhile, LOL. Glad you like the theme.

It's user friendly if you want it all built for you already. If you want to do anything yourself, its a big pain in the ass. CoinOps btw is just a RetroFE theme. RetroFE does have the advantage over BigBox that when scrolling between games in a given platform, it is not bound by the video size and orientation. I don't think the community theme creator is yet able to let us change the video size on each game displayed when scrolling which is what it will take to do what that theme does.

It the cabinets are identical in shape, then yes, that would be possible. If the cabinets have different screen sizes and orientations then I'd say no. The position and orientation of the screen has to be constant when scrolling through the wheel. Even if your game specific bezels are identical in shape, it would probably require a whole new theme.

Weird. Well I'm glad one of you got it to work. I checked my system and I don't have NEO GEO AES or the arcade NEO GEO set up. I know I did at one point but it must have been a loooong time ago before I rebuilt my system.

I'll need to fire up my arcade cabinet and see how I did it in the past (I "think" I have NEO GEO set up on there). I "think" I'm using one of the final burn cores for AES and vanilla Neo Geo. I'm going off of memory because I haven't messed with this stuff much lately. You'll probably need to set up individual Retroarch configs for each system, even though they share the same resources. This post kind of shows how to set NEO GEO into AES mode using the fbalpha_libretro core (assuming the core hasn't been renamed something else in the last few years). https://forums.libretro.com/t/how-to-run-neo-geo-in-aes-mode-fbalpha-libretro/8693 You'll need to make sure you are running the correct NEO Geo BIOS that works with this core. I think if you can get away from trying to use the MAME core for Neo Geo, you'll have a lot more success getting the bezel/overlay to work. Going through retroarch AND Mame just adds a bunch of un-necessary complexity in my opinion. I'll try to take a look tonight at my configuration when I get home from work and let you know how mine is set up.

You might need to open your cfg file and make sure it is pointing to the correct png and that it is spelled exactly like the png. What exactly do you need done with this bezel? Do you just want a generic black and white one like the AES bezel but says SNK NEO GEO instead of AES? Not sure I understand exactly what you're asking for.

Are there plans to finish the rest of the options pages? When you go into, say Options - Manage Themes, the back end menu changes to the old default look. It would be nice if the whole backend menu was consistent. Especially for Vertical Themes where the text flows off the edge of the screen. Improvement: All Big Box popups and options pages have been overhauled

Oh, yeah. I guess I should have mentioned that. It's an autohotkey script/exe. If you want to compile it yourself, here is the code. Run it at your own risk. Someone here might say its not the correct way to close Bigbox, but I've had it on this system since well before the pandemic started and I've had zero issues. 🤷‍♂️ SetTitleMatchMode, 2 KillProcessTimer: Process, Close, BigBox.exe SetTimer, KillProcessTimer, -10000 return Exitapp I guess I lied. I have it set for 8 am not 9 am. Kill. Not sure why I set it for Windows vista but it works. I might have just been experimenting. Start. This one is set for windows 10.

Pretty sure that most people don't let their bigbox run constantly, so they're probably not seeing it. Time of the day? Do you sleep? I could be wrong but I bet there's a good chance there is a time of the day you never play games. I run my scheduled tasks around 9 am. I'm usually not home at that time of the day and if I am I'm probably sleeping in, not playing games. Plus this time of day guarantees that Bigbox was started earlier that day so its probably not about ready to crash from being open too long. Also, try superrob's advice above about switching to wmp. I still saw random crashes with wmp but not nearly as often. Still though - running a scheduled kill and startup has fixed my issues of walking into my garage to a frozen, unresponsive Bigbox on my arcade cabinet.

I run 2 scheduled tasks every day. The first task kills any Launchbox/Bigbox executables. The second task opens Bigbox 5 minutes after closing it. If I don't do this, Bigbox will eventually freeze up after a day or so. It's always been like this for me. I have the schedule set to run during a time I'm not around so I don't even notice it. This is the only way I've ever been able to just leave my arcade running all the time without manually fiddling around with it everyday restarting Bigbox.