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cammelspit

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Everything posted by cammelspit

  1. My Cammel sense is tingling! There's no need to fear Cammelspit is here! So, There are a few considerations with the steam controller you have to take into account here. Firstly, since the steam controller, at a hardware level is not a controller at all and is, in fact, a HID compliant KB and mouse device, technically 3 mice. Anytime you want the steam controller to work as a gamepad, you will HAVE to launch the game via steam itself as a non-steam game. So, if you want the steam controller to be a gamepad in LB/BB you will have to add it and launch it via steam. When you do this, LB/BB will open the emulators under itself in the hierarchy of processes and then you emulator will also work. The only exception I know of is FS-UAE because of some shenanigans it pulls while launching itself that messes that up. The other issue is steam will actually see LB/BB as a launcher and will actually use the desktop config instead. You actually have several ways to deal with this and get gamepad controls in LB/BB and the method you choose is entirely up to you and how much fiddling you are willing to do. Once you have added LB/BB to steam as a non-steam game, go to the shortcut in BPM and select controller options, not configure the controller. There is a checkbox in there named something like 'allow desktop config in launcher', uncheck this. Then you should set a basic gamepad config for the LB/BB shortcut and all should work. Instead, you can just use a KB/M config. This works equally well, besides, all you are doing is viewing roms, there isn't really a big need to use gamepad controls in BB, only the emulators. You can use a few third party pieces of software that actually add a virtual gamepad device and make the SC show up as a standard gamepad device but there are some MAJOR drawbacks tho those. For completeness sake, they are Xoutput and GloSC. I would recommend staying away from these unless you ABSOLUTELY must use them, like with UWP games. The final option is using a program called proxy. Technically, this won't actually give you gamepad in LB/BB but it does allow per emulator and even per game configs for the SC. Personally, I use this but it is a tad cumbersome right now. A new version is being made by the author right now but will likely be some time till it is finished. I did write a guide on how to use it if you are interested. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=753876809 The main drawback I see with using option 1 is the fact steam will always say you are playing LaunchBox/BigBox and not the emulator so you may have to swap configs out for each emulator you use if they are different or if you need a special config for a specific game. I used to do it this way and I used touch menus and over 30 action sets to handle this. With touch menus, you can even use your own PNG images and such so it was super cool but got a little silly with having so man sets, nested touch menus, shifts... At this point, as I mentioned above, I use method 4 but its setup can be a bit fiddly. The payoff, however, is much cleaner and smoother IMO so it MIGHT be worth it to you. Bottom line, the steam controller is strange and will always be strange in the way you use it so you do have to work around it if you want to use if a certain way. As a point of fact, I am perfectly fine with you sending me a friend request on steam if you like or if you need a hand getting anything set up and you should feel free to do so. My name on steam is just cammelspit so hit me up sometime if you like. Otherwise, those are the options you have available to you so you will just have to decide which one best suits you personally. Good Luck and Happy Gaming!
  2. Also, I agree, the Steam Controller is amazeballs. Since OCT2015 I have literally not used anything else to play anything and that includes KB/M games. As a point of fact, the steam controller actually doesn't emulate anything at all. What the steam controller does is it talk directly to the API and does not load a GamePad driver. OFC, there are downsides to this, like not being able to use UWP games out of the box because of how M$ locked UWP into ONLY working with XBOX controllers, thanks, M$. You can use Xoutput or GloSC to do some actual emulation, though. Those two pieces of software actually add a virtual gamepad driver but they have their own downsides too. As far as RA is concerned, I had a conversation with one of the DEVs on their forums. See, RA MAME is less performant and less compatible than MAME actual so that's what they had recommended to myself and another user having issues getting it to load some of the software list games. The multi-threaded thing? It's not actually multi-threaded emulation. Emulation, more specifically the way MAME does it, is not something you can actually thread properly. Nearly all emulators use only one single thread and RA is no exception to this. What that check actually does is it breaks off the video processing so you simply have a bit more of the main thread left for emulation. This WILL add input lag to the whole process, though. If you were a big Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat fan then you would likely see that lag and that will certainly hinder your gaming. MAME also supports doing the exact same thing and, if I recall, it's the default. As long as you are happy with how it's working then that is fine. Still baffling that you get an outright crash with MAME, though. Either way, if you ever want to do some more troubleshooting or just want to chat, hit me up on steam. I am a stay at home Dad so I am on steam about 90% of the time. My name there is just cammelspit so throw me a friend request if you like. I especially like talking to people who have a passion for the steam controller like I do. Have a great day Manuel!
  3. Not to worry Manuel, I get it. I am still of the opinion standalone, especially for MAME, is the best way to go for MAME but if you are happy then I am happy. You are not the first person to randomly have issues with MAME crashing on launch when launched via steam. I wonder if that has something to do with a change in MAME or a change in Steam, maybe even a driver update? Anyways, glad you can at least play your arcade games ATM. Have fun and Happy Gaming!
  4. Sure @DOS76 I can certainly chime in here and I know exactly what is happening here so I will try and break it down if I can. First things first, Don't use RA for MAME stuff at all, it's not very good. This is not a sentiment I alone espouse and in fact is the recommendation of at least one RA dev. The problem is they just don't develop RA cores super often and MAME updates too quickly to keep up beyond only periodic updates. So, our goal here is to use MAME actual with the Steam Controller using Launchbox or BigBox to launch those games with the whole thing working properly. First question I ask you is, how EXACTLY are you launching MAME? If you add MAME.exe to steam and launch it does the steam overlay show? It should be. When you add LB from steam and then launch the MAME game via LB does the steam overlay show? It also, should be. If both of these situations you get the overlay then you are perfectly fine here and it IS working but MAME has a few issues that are easily fixed. The symptoms of the issue would be that the SC when using a GamePad config will simply not be recognized but you SHOULD still be able to use KB/M bindings. If that is enough for you then go right on ahead and do that. You will lose analog inputs for games that use it so generally, this is undesirable. The problem is MAME uses RAW input and not the normal Windows Dinput or even SDL for its inputs. The reason the SC does not work is because this requires only inputs from a driver in Windows and cannot get anything from keycodes or keypress injection, which is precisely how the SC works. The thing is, you can change this! Thankfully, the MAME devs have a few different backends build into MAME itself, you just have to change them for whatever input device you are using. I found this out by a LOT of googling and I found a post from a while ago from a disabled gamer who uses handicap accessible controllers that rely on software injection of the key presses, just like the SC does. GO to your MAME install directory Open MAME.ini in you favorite text editor You need to search for two lines <keyboardprovider> and <mouseprovider> You will notice that each of these has a value of <auto> you need to change this to <dinput> Save the file Enjoy! Now, if you are still having issues, or if your overlay is not working then the SC will default to using the desktop config as a general rule. If this is the case then we will have to take a step back and figure out why that is the case because it works for me and pretty much anyone else I know that uses and SC, the number of which is actually quite excessive. Another thing of note here, make sure you are using the official builds of MAME directly from http://mamedev.org/ because some of the third party builds have patches or changes that can either change or outright destroy compatibility with the SC and other kinds of controller software. This is the version I use and it works a treat so I would highly recommend you do the same. Besides, you have LaunchBox so you don't actually need things like MAMUI or any of the other variants. I hope this helps somewhat. I can't comment on why your changes arent being read by MAME from the ini so if you have some issues, you should paste what those entries say from your ini here and I will compare them to my own, confirmed, working ini. Here is also a link directly to the original post I made on the steam controller discussions about this exact topic. http://steamcommunity.com/app/353370/discussions/0/350541595120301147/ Never fear, when it comes to the steam controller, if anyone can help you get it going it would be me. I am somewhat obsessed with this silly little hunk of plastic and wires so I will promise I will at least do my best.
  5. Frankly, I have already been using the Audit feature a lot recently. OFC, since it is new there are some missing features I would like that we all talked about on Wednesday but other than that, it is already very useful. Just being able to sort and exclude games you already know have a video for downloading those is a HUGE benefit. The audit scan takes a lot less time than the time it would take to have the media download wizard scan those hundreds or thousands of games that are already fully populated. SUPER cool. Suggestions for future Audit functions that would make it ten thousand times better than it already is. Custom columns or even just a search box so you can type what you want to sort by. Mainly for tags and such that are not already included in the audit feature, specifically useful for more obscure systems with unique tags. Amiga having (AGA) in the filename for example. Really need to be able to allow or disallow auditing the LB name OR the FileName. Ability to output an XML or RTF file with the results of the audit. This will keep me from having to rerun the audit multiple times or keep the audit window open while I search for certain missing media or data. I could just open it in notpad++ while browsing and such. Ability to run the audit while downloading media or metadata would be SUPER useful. This way, I could sort and do those kinds of things as it downloads media and such int he background. Need to be able to tell it not to close the audit window on edit unless the download process is actually started. I had a case where I can accidentally closed the media wizard and had to run the entire audit again rather than just restarting the wizard. Again, this feature is totally badass and super useful but those are the things I would like to see so we can greatly increase it's usefulness even more and improve workflow. I am loving it so far in any event. Thanks Jason for all your hard work! EDIT: Just thought this would be better to be a ticket so I copy pasted it there. If you guys would please vote for it, that would be super amazing since I kinda need a few of these sooner than later. https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/2335/suggestions-for-audit-feature
  6. I will keep you posted. I will also try to import into a fresh LB install. I will say, though, I keep all of my roms, the LB cache and most of everything in different folders to what is normal. I even have all of my stuff split onto miltipleHDDs and even my SSD. Further investigation will be required but if I find anything or have a theory I will be sure to let you know.
  7. Personally, I feel the biggest concern is the fact that most of the video players out there do not rely on internal decoding, VLC does. This means if you wanted to play a certain kind of file not included with Windows, you can't without manually installing splitter, filter, codecs... It's a real mess. This would also mean that each person would have a completely different setup so the amount of bugs and work needed to make them all function will be multiplied many times over. VLC is also a great little player and even supports many non-standard formats like VGM and they play just fine as audio clips or soundtracks too and OFC this is not specifically intended to be a thing in LB but is a happy side effect. Now that we have found out why VLC had been performing so badly recently, we can focus on sussing out the last few issues and should be fine.
  8. After using it, I actually got LB to throw and error and stop starting. I will try again and see if I can figure out what combination of settings causes it.
  9. After a successful audit and download of a big chunk of missing videos for my N64 platform on beta 3 I tried to audit again and got this and then LB died. Version 7.5-beta-3 System.ArgumentException: An item with the same key has already been added. at System.ThrowHelper.ThrowArgumentException(ExceptionResource resource) at System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2.Insert(TKey key, TValue value, Boolean add) at (Game , String ) at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Data.Game.GetImageFilePaths(String imageType) at (Game , String ) at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Data.Game.<GetActualFrontImageCount>b__328_0(String imageType) at System.Linq.Enumerable.WhereSelectArrayIterator`2.MoveNext() at System.Linq.Enumerable.Sum(IEnumerable`1 source) at (Game ) at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Data.Game.GetActualFrontImageCount() at (AuditForm , Int32 , Game ) at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Desktop.Forms.AuditForm.PopulateRow(Int32 index, Game game) at (AuditForm ) at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Desktop.Forms.AuditForm.PopulateGrid() at (AuditForm ) at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Desktop.Forms.AuditForm.<AuditForm_Shown>b__46_0() at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.RunInternal(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state, Boolean preserveSyncCtx) at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state, Boolean preserveSyncCtx) at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state) at System.Threading.ThreadHelper.ThreadStart()
  10. @Jason Carr The only issue I see with not having DXVA enabled is that now, with VLC ignoring the main config you can't easily change it if you want to and will require the user to manually edit the config or launch VLC with the same command line options you do to change via the app. So, I have a suggestion to make that simple for the people who don't know how to do it manually. Make a setting in LB to enable it. make a link somewhere in LB that opens VLC with those same command line options so they can be changed by the user in an easy way. Has anyone tested to see if enabling DXVA manually on a system that doesn't support it will actually harm anything? It may be that DXVA will just not be used on those systems or it could be that it crashes or errors out. If the former is the case you can safely enable it for everyone since that one seemed to have the greatest benefit to the VLC speed in BB as far as I could tell.
  11. My new DATA with the Amiga stuff to for you Jason. @Jason Carr Data.zip
  12. @Jason Carr As per your request on the stream today I have posted a snippet of the settings I am using right now for VLC. As a reminder, this is because LB is not using the portable version of VLC so it is using your systems global settings. The big one is enabling DXVA and turning off post processing. This makes a HUGE difference. The others I set were animation and max decoding speed but I am not sure if that makes such a huge difference. I figured the videos for games are animation so optimizing for that was a good idea.
  13. @cleverest ATM I am at about the same size as your collection right now. Kissing the 5TB range. I feel like I must have all the regional variations because they can be interesting to try out from time to time. My PS2 collection is not very large because of a few reasons. Mainly, because they are HUGE 4 to 5 TB for the US set alone. I only get those game that I intend to actually play at some point. Currently, my PS2 games number 63 and I am more or less happy with that. I have two 4TB HGST NAS hard drives, one is exclusively for emulation and the other one pulls double duty as my steam library and even more emulation. I have room for another 2 drives in my machine without any hassle but I have to mirror my setup to my brothers PC and my sons PC so that is just plain wasteful. So all of our 4TB drives will go into a NAS later this year after I financially can afford to put a nice server together. @SentaiBrad Thanks for the info there. I did watch that one but I must have missed it. I have all of my PS1 games in 7z archives to save a rather substantial amount of space. PS1 games are rather fast to decompress so waiting that few 10 seconds for launch doesn't bother me. The ones that are a little annoying are GameCube and PS2. They can take a goodly long time to unpack but the space savings is well over the hundreds of GBs range and that leaves me more space for more games. This way they also can be used from my OS SSD which is tons faster so for me this works out. It's funny, I have as much compressed as I possibly can so I am literally the opposite you are. I used to decompress them manually and load them by hand but with LB it makes that whole process so easy. Anyways, thanks again! @LukeArio Keep telling you that you need to be slightly less anal about it. There is nothing like hitting the select random game and launching it without even a care in the world. Dunno why it tickles me so much to randomly play something I have never played before.
  14. The A10 APU, because it is an APU shares system memory with the GPU core on the die. The biggest problem with an APU like that is that the ram in the system is substantially slower than what you would normally find on a dedicated GPU. That CPU is also entirely too weak for any reasonable expectation for it to run Dolphin or PCSX2 at full speed even most of the time. It may be high on the Ghz but AMDs IPC (instructions per clock) is entirely too low. The way I see it you have only 3 options... Say to heck with it and replace the entire machine, from personal experience with that specific APU, even overclocked, this is the best option. Get a MINIMUM of 8GB of the absolute fastest memory that board can possibly handle. The faster the better. Get a dedicated GPU. This will solve the Slow RAM access of the APU by bypassing it but even still, 4GB is simply too low for a modern machine even if it is just used for emulation. With AMDs ZEN architecture right on the horizon, likely coming out this month, there should at the very least be a rapid drop in price for really good CPUs. Basically, if you do decide to get a dedicated GPU you may be able to run some or even many GameCube titles with only a little slowdown but not all, or even most, games will work well. PCSX2 is actually quite a bit more demanding on your hardware than Dolphin is so you will likely be running into the problem of slowdowns very often. I put my son together his own PC, it is based on the Pentium G3258. Since neither Dolphin nor PCSX2 can really take good advantage of more than two cores, to begin with, his PC at stock speeds runs pretty much all of the GameCube games he wants to play. With a moderately decent air cooler, you can easily clock that bad boy into the 4.5Ghz+ range and that makes pretty much anything you throw at it buttery smooth. Point is, you don't need a fabulously expensive system to run these high-grade emulators with ease and speed. You just seem to have picked the worst combination of parts you could to be able to run them well. Sorry for breaking up the fun talking about sports but I saw this and I just couldn't let it go without commenting.
  15. Oh, then yes, they are all merged into one entry per game and not per disk yeah. As far as multi disk stuff goes, yeah I know about the way LB doesn't handle multiple disks. Some emulators do have formats that have more than one disk in one file and those do work but others do not. To work they need to have all of the disks in the command line at startup, somehting like this... Emulator.exe -l -floppy -disk1 "disk1.img" -disk2 "disk2.img" Or they won't work at all. I will ask you, however, PBP, is this for Amiga specifically? Do you happen to have a link somewhere that I can get some more info? I am at this point unwilling to modify my entire set seeing as they are a complete and untouched no-into set ATM. BUT, that might just be convenient enough to be worth fiddling with. I also read the post you mentioned about hoe eXo is going to use LB instead of Meagre. I am super happy this is happening but TBH, I just couldn't wait! It could be a month or two or it could be another year and I wanted my stuff to work and work right now so I MADE it work. I mean, had to get some SimCity2000 action going on, right? lol In reality, I only went to my friend with my problem asking his help if he knew of a renamer that could base the rename off of a directory that was two steps back. Same directory they are all over the place but not basing off the name of another directory. Took him maybe 15 minutes to write it up for me and i didn't have to do much of anything so i would certainly consider that the easy way, at least for me it was easy!
  16. @SentaiBrad If you are referring to the eXoDOS and win3Xo packs then yeah, I guess. I am not sure what you mean by merging because that is not how I thought those packs worked. Either way, I have them all setup so that if you run one that has not been installed yet, it installs just like normal, if it has been installed it just runs like normal. The problem with LB is that it expects to do the install itself so you can't just import exes or bats right in there in bulk, only one at a time. If you import them as roms, you can't remove the emulator because it is not available in bulk edit. So I ended up using a third paty app as the emulator to launch the normal eXo BAT files. The Artwork, now that was a bit of a challenge. A buddy of mine actually ended up writing a renamer that used the directory name of the game and applied it to all of the images in the Maegre folder and then copied it out to a work directory. At that point, it was just a matter of deciding what art type I wanted to go into what folder in LB for it to show up nice and purdy. I actually intend to write a guide on how I did it, precisely, and include a copy of the renamer app but my friend said he wanted to include the source and clean up some rough spots first before I could release it to the community here. THis is why I haven't said anything till now and it was just a passing mention. If this is not what you meant, let me know. When it comes to C64, the only ones that LB can handle are the tapes and carts. The disks, like amiga, commonly have two disks. Same buddy from the DOS expedition above is writing a new kind of middleware to handle all of that itself with scripts. Somewhat of a spritual successor to Proxy DETAILED HERE. Imagine it being able to do most of what Rocket launcher can do only with a focus on user experience and extreme ease of setup and use. THis, however, is only in the beginning stages of development so it will prolly be a few more weeks at least before anything approaching usable happens. Unfortunately, for the time being, I simply have to manually start the emulators and load the disks myself for systems that use multiple disks since LB simple can't handle them yet. So I leave those out of my imports entirely ATM. You CAN, however get WHDload to work via LB because those are modified version of the games so they no longer even have disks to swap out. It's complicated and I know a guy who has done it but I just haven't figured it out personally yet. Did any of this answer your question? Not too sure about that so if not let me know.
  17. Currently up to 57,784 games and counting. This is not including most of my OLD 8-bit computer stuff except it does include the Tandy CoCo, Commodore64 but only the tapes and I also have the amiga imported even though I haven't gotten those to work yet. I did find an awesome way to get eXoDOS and win3Xo fully imported into LB with the artwork all at once so that is a good 6K+ games right there. My PS2 collection is only about 60 games large but I don't have enough HDD space for the whole set, about 5-6TB worth. I am also missing the EUR and JAP Gamecube collections, even though I do have a good chunck of those games not released here. At least this is the largest collection here so far in the thread. I am curious to see how many people have such large collections. Now all I need to do is put a NAS together, too much hassle all being local. lol
  18. Oh my GORSH! No-intro auditing right from within LB? I would think I died and went to heaven if I didn't still need to do the dishes... This is going to be EPIC!
  19. @Jason Carr Ah, thanks for the clarification Jason. I hope there is a way to handle this sometime soon. I don't know why this actually bothers me so much.
  20. I guess it's a whenever it is done kinda thing. I will say, every time I come here to check and it's not there, I think i die a little inside.
  21. Using 7.4 stable and it seems now that when I open BB the background video will not play at all until I hit escape to open the options menu and then close it again.
  22. I had some insanely slow downloads for the last beta and I am in Arizona. It is usually nearly instant and it took nearly 3 minutes. Not that it's a real problem or anything, I just let it finish in its own time. The 7.0 stable was the same way too.
  23. I can also confirm that Pacman's issue seems 100% gone from what I can tell. I would have just chalked it up to being a big library if @Pacman56 hadn't brought it up. I am also super happy for every little thing possible to improve performance. BIG +1 from me!
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