snarfo67
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Posts posted by snarfo67
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4 minutes ago, damageinc86 said:
Yeah I don't know why, but it never seemed that intuitive to me. maybe it's gotten better. but i spent hours trying every different input driver and mapping never worked. Ever. It would only ever recognize the xbox360 controllers. Maybe something has been fixed in terms of allowing other controllers to be mappable, I should try again. You just hit a wall at some point though when the basic stuff doesn't work. Launchbox itself lets me map more controllers than retroarch has ever done lol. It's definitely worth looking at though, maybe it will be a different experience for the OP. I would do mednafen/retroarch. Those are the first two I'd take a look at.
I agree with you. I find RA to be horrible to work with (a freakshow of a gui and horrible controller mapping) as well, but hey... to each his own. If RA would add simple direct input button/axis mapping (like, say, MAME) I would get over the gui and give it another try for its other advantages like low-latency input.
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15 hours ago, Govinda said:
Thanks, Rincewind! I've started reading/watching a little about Retroarch, and I was a little dubious, but that may just be my old-school mentality kicking in. Does it complicate things a bit more? Are there drawbacks to using RA instead of individual emulators? And, maybe more importantly, can you recommend a good RA intro video or utube channel that may help with my trepidations?
I know Retroarch gets a LOT of love, but I'll cast the dissenting vote and be unpopular :-)
I tried for months to get RA to work well for me ---and honestly, it's a pretty amazing accomplishment in emulation with its various cores and configurability in general. However, there are a couple things that kill its usefulness for me. Mind you I should preface this with the caveats that I fully understand that one man's tea is another man's poison, but these are deal-breakers for me so you should be aware of them before you make the plunge in case you're of a similar mindset.
First, the UI/UX is abysmal. It follows no conventional interface standards that have been established in the last couple decades. If something is different and better for it, great! ---but this is different without any tangible benefits and just makes it more impenetrable to quickly grasp. Yes, I eventually wrapped my head around it but it never felt intuitive to use. I used to do some UI/UX design and this would never have passed.
Second (largely related to the first), much has been said about RA and its ability to configure controllers on the fly and how fabulous it is. It's not. Rather than trying to jam a square peg into a round hole and use controllers not even close to the original designs (some of Nintendo's controllers in particular come to mind), I use various adapters for console controllers that are beyond the standard gamepad layout. That would include of course the N64, Gamecube, Wii, Intellivision, Colecovision, etc. The controller setup in RA makes much of this impossible or at best a teeth-gnashing experience. RA has a good core for the N64. Great! Now try setting up a N64 controller with it. Try Colecovision. Try Intellivision. Try some of the Atari systems.
So what would I suggest? After a year of dabbling I've largely stuck with dedicated emulators for various consoles and MAME for the rest. Need to change inputs for your Colecovision? No sweat. Open a game in MAME, press TAB, go to the machine controls, and enter the buttons, axes, and keypad inputs on the controller for each player. Dead simple.
RA has a lot of cool stuff that's of minimal or no interest to me (achievements and shaders seem to be popular items for other people) but if that's important to you, go for it. I tend to prefer usability and flexibility over fluff and that's where RA falls down for me. I hope the interface and control setup gets to the point where I can use RA, because it has a lot of positives going for it and I wish I could love it.
Anyway, I hope that was useful for you. I don't want to take anything away from how impressive RA is (because it really is!), just offering my cautionary tale :-)
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No issues for me, though I can't speak to RL.
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Improvements to the database and an integrated PDF/document viewer controllable with a controller! Sorry, just warming up my voting fingers prematurely...
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I can't find the poll from a while back about prioritizing future features--- just out of curiosity, where on the list was an integrated pdf/doc/text file reader? I figured out a bit of a hackaround, but it's not the most elegant solution--- I'd much rather have an integrated reader that's controllable with a controller :-P
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7 hours ago, Jason Carr said:
Thanks guys, by chance, could it be happening on imports? Have you been importing any new games or using any of the new merging tools?
I haven't used the merge tools at all (I only keep one version of a given game), but I have been adding several systems from scratch. I'm ashamed to say I can't tell for sure if the new platforms were all added without details or not--- and I think some existing platforms (that I hadn't tinkered with) had missing details. I manually re-added the infos a week or so ago not thinking much of it at the time. If it happens again I'll pay better attention.
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I noticed I was missing some platform descriptions as well, though I had no idea when it happened or what caused it.
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Man, I really wish I could use RA. I like the shader functionality a lot as well, and I like the idea of the simplicity of most emulators running under one roof, but RA has two issues (again, for me) that kill its usability: I dislike the UI in general, but the one huge thing that blows the whole potential is the controller config. With different consoles and systems having wildly different controller layouts (N64, Intellivision, Colecovision, even the 6-button Saturn pads, etc.) the 'one-size-fits-all' retropad just doesn't work for me at all. It would be great if the cores could support, say, a controller diagram of whatever system you're working on so you can easily match buttons and axes to it.
Anyway, that's off-topic. I didn't know there wasn't savestate support in RA with the ScummVM core. It's not something I use often, but when I want to use I usually really want to use it... most of the ScummVM games I play tend to be the older point-and-click adventure games though and most of them allow you to save any time. There are a few though that could definitely benefit from savestates...
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Oops, that was supposed to be for the OP. Attempting to think before caffeine is bad :-)
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59 minutes ago, Zombeaver said:
That post was with 1.3.6.
I'm not sure if this will be relevant to you if you really want to use RA but if you use the SCUMMVM app, this method worked great for me. All I had to do when it was done was edit the properties of some of the non-scraped games to get the metadata and images and videos, which didn't take long at all. Being able to do a quick mass import without headaches was a HUGE time-saver.
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48 minutes ago, jaythompson said:
I made that video. As far as I know, this is the only way currently to add all Scummvm roms at once, but I hear you about trying to get away from RL. For me though, there are still too many benefits to using it to give it up just yet.
It's a good video! I'll probably just end up adding them one at a time and tweak along the way which of course will be a lot more painful than your method. I had a harder time giving up RocketLauncher than HyperSpin tbh, but I'm trying to keep the HTPC with BigBox as simple as possible. I admit I miss the RL pause and fades and such, though.
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I found a couple YouTube videos about this. The most recent one (from December 2016) was also using RocketLauncher which I got away from when I transitioned my emulators from HyperSpin to LaunchBox so I won't be using this method myself. I was thinking about adding SCUMMVM to my LaunchBox this weekend so I was starting to research the issues and quirks... should be interesting. Here's the video if you want to tackle it with RL:
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The default theme is actually my favorite since it's thisclose to having a view that's exactly what I want. If I had the time and desire to learn XAML I'd give it a couple tweaks, but I really do like it well enough as is aside from my suggestions above. I've never had performance issues since my htpc has pretty decent specs (GeForce 980, overclocked Skylake i7, 16gb RAM, SSD system drive, Windows 10 Pro x64, etc.), but I could definitely see that running on a lower-specced system could be problematic. For fun I tried running BB on an i3 Gigabyte Brix (8gb RAM, SSD, crappy Intel graphics) and it actually ran just fine.
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I'd like to toss in a couple (hopefully) small requests:
1. In the default theme would it be possible to have a game list view without box art or a screenshot? While I really like the other available themes I'd really like a view with just a list of games (no clear art logos so more of the list is visible), the blurb on the selected game in the lower-right, some metadata I find relevant (developer, release year, # of players, etc.) in the upper-right, and a full-screen background gameplay video. Basically, a full-screen video with just some non-excessively distracting metadata overlayed. There's a near-ideal view in the default theme, but the box and screenshot take up a huge center chunk of the screen which obfuscates the full-screen video.
2. Related to the above, an option to play the fullscreen video in its native aspect ratio would be great. I'm one of those types who prefers black bars on the sides of the screen over horizontally stretched and distorted images :-)
If this would be better served as a Bitbucket request or some other method I'd be happy to submit a request wherever you'd prefer. Thanks!
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I don't have my HTPC in the Fast Ring (if it acts up at all with Kodi betas or the core OS my partner gets very frustrated) so it's pretty stable. The only taskbar issue I've had (on LB 7.5) was exiting BigBox and the taskbar stayed hidden. It turns out that the Big Box process was still running, but even after force-killing the process and reloading explorer.exe the taskbar didn't come back. I had to reboot to get things working normally. I updated to the new beta this morning and checked the box to leave the taskbar unhidden since I never had a problem with focus or anything. Tonight I hope to get enough time to try opening and closing BB numerous times to see how it behaves.
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1 hour ago, SentaiBrad said:
All of those questions would be theme dependant. So @snarfo67 if I am understand you correctly, you'd just want the game video in the background as the focal point and maybe a clear logo to denote where in the list you are? The City Hunter theme has a view just like that which is why I got very specific. There are also a few new themes recently too, so it might just be searching for a theme and a view that caters the best, or asking one of the theme creators to add a new view to one of their themes.
Yeah, ideally for me (and I know that everyone's tastes are different) I like the standard vanilla view without clear logos so I can see more of the games list along with the game info blurb in the lower right side and a few of the things I have interest in (developer, publisher, release year, etc.) in the upper-right. That allows the video to be seen clearly with just a bit of relevant data overlayed. I've tried out several themes and their various viewing permutations, but maybe I missed the view in City Hunter--- thanks for the suggestion, I'll revisit it and see what I can come up with. Otherwise I'll just ask Jason to tweak the view to offer to hide the game box and maintain the video aspect ratio.
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Loving development of LB/BB as always. Just a thought for a future update--- while I'm really impressed with the various themes available for BB I find myself using the default most often since it gives me the ideal balance of pretty vs. practical.
The two things I'd like are a way to hide the game box art on the Game Details screen because I would like to show the game videos as backgrounds and the big box art in the center of the screen just doesn't work well with that aesthetic. On a related note, the background videos always stretch to fill the screen. Personally for videos that are 4:3 I'd prefer to have the black bars on the side instead of a distorted video. Just an idea for a couple checkboxes to add in the options.
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Awesome work as always. The audit is looking very good. I know there are bugs to squash, but is there any timeframe on including an integrated document viewer? It's the only thing left I can think of that feels like a missing feature (well, and maybe an integrated way to download themes like the videos, but I don't want to sound too crazy).
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12 hours ago, spycat said:
Some while back Jason added the %romfile% variable to allow the use of parameters after the ROM file.
I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for.
Aha, that sounds like what I'm after. There are some emulators, MAME functions in particular, that require arguments after the romfile so I'll give that a shot. Thanks.
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I haven't see a way to do this yet--- is there a way to append a switch to a MAME (or any other emulator that uses switches after the ROM name) command line?
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@Eirulan Don't sell yourself short on your apps--- without them the Launchbox Amiga integration would be miserable right now (I tried many times and kept giving up). Kudos to you.
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I updated to the new dev build last night and had time to try out a couple games, both of which exited gracefully with f10 mapped to my right thumbstick button. So success! I haven't dug into save states yet, but that's next on the list if I can stop myself from going down the list of games and reading all the the blurbs.
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Thanks, guys--- everything's working great for me now. I'll be sure to keep lurking here and on the FS-UAE forums to keep abreast with updates. Fine work, both of you.
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Yep, I had the buttons correct and it affected all games--- it actually worked fine on the first xinput controller (a regular XBox One controller which I use for second players), but the Elite is my go-to default for all my emulators that don't require specific controllers (N64, Colecovision, Intellivision, Gamecube, Wii). Annnnnnd as I'm typing this I see the FS-UAE dev has replied to my post over on
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=85446
Looks like I need to shorten my work day and get home to try again. I can't tell you how happy I am to not have to futz with WinUAE and be able to run Amiga games in LB :-)
**IDEA** PC Case Badge
in Collections and Builds
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Great idea.