Fursphere

I think someone here made LB/BG a PinCab frontend using the 3-screen plugin. I played with the idea for a minute, but then realized the loss of semi-automatic batch media generation would be a deal killer for me. I'm actually surprised that no Arcade front end has done what PinUP has done with the auto batch recording stuff. And with PinUp being free and so feature rich, its on hell of a tough sell to convince someone to not use it in favor of something else. (I tried PinballX long ago - no thanks!)

I have been thinking about dumping Windows more and more. But there are so many shortcomings. Oh, my vPinball cabinet would be a nitemare on linux too. I think there is finally a version of visual pinball ported to linux, but I know of no front ends, or utility software, or anything else in that ecosystem. PinCabs are a nitemare to begin with.... lol

I was playing with Batocera not too long ago on a mini-pc I've got (Intel NUC). Took 45+ minutes of fuckery to get my Xbox bluetooth controller connected. Refused to connect two at the same time. Swapped the drive back to windows - instance connection. No issues. I have a wired XBox controller (USB) and that worked fine with Batocera - but its stuff like that. Basic stuff that should 'just work' that you have to endlessly tinker with. On my main gaming PC - with my RTX 5080 - getting the GPU drivers to play nice with the OS was a bear. Lots of entering the bios to tweak this or that, and then rebooting and hoping it would work. There is a Linux fanatec driver - but it only supports basic connectivity. No FFB, no tweaking settings. So my Daytona Twin racing cabinet was a no go. If you've ever tried to emulate arcade racers - you have to tweak all sorts of crap per game to get things working (its super annoying). Like I said before - you can get it working, its just a crap ton more effort than windows. And it'll be varying degrees of different for every linux OS flavor. In the enterprise setting - my corp. standarized on Red Hat linux - because we got tired of every other flavor of linux bringing their own flavor of bullshit to the table. No thank you! Same thing happens x1,000,000 in the home setting - every linux has something different that you won't know is a problem until your balls deep in some random problem and you go "ah shit, time to re-image to another distro" because some random dev decided to change something for reasons.

I agree with almost everything you've said, with the exception of leaving out the key phase "...for enthusiasts" That phrase belongs after every statement you made, because at some point (I've been in tech professionally for 30+ years now) I don't want to "play tech guy" at home anymore. I just want to use my flipping computer. And Linux is still a tech research tweaky quicky nitemare bullshit game. If I want to deploy kubernetes, linux is my go to node choice. If I was to build a webserver, I'm probably using linux. If I want to play a game on steam? Or use my collection of high end game controllers (Fanatec, VKB, light guns, LED controllers for arcade shit, blah blah blah..) Linux ain't it. Yes, you can most likley absolutely get almost anything to work on linux. It may take minutes, it may take hours/days/weeks to figure out a particular quirk / roadblock. I have better things to do with my time these days. If I was still a young guy in my teens or twenties, I'd probably just white knuckle it and plow through. But those days are long gone. I'm older now, and I don't see value in endlessly searching forums / reddit / youtube / github / etc to get a trivial thing to work. If you do, rock on man. Seriously. Good on you. And..... all of my Win11 machines do not use Microsoft accounts. Its a trivial workaround. If you choose "home / personal" when you're installing, you'll get pushed into a Microsoft account (you can still avoid it, but its harder). If you choose "education / work" - no requirement at all.

There is a new bug when you exit BigBox - it goes to the desktop, then goes to a black screen and acts like its trying to shutdown windows, but just hangs instead. This happened on all four of my cabinets, so I suspect its not unique to just one of my installs. After a reboot, the problem seems to go away. Meaning it only happened the first BigBox 'exit' after the upgrade to Beta 4. And for the previously reported memory leak - I have not been able to consistently reproduce it since Beta 3, so that's why I haven't brought it up again. Hopefully it was just something wrong with my installs that appears to have worked itself out.

*** Breaking change / regression *** Beta 4 has once again introduce controller auto-detection of game controllers (even though I've turned it off). This 100% of the time results in loss of control of Launchbox, as its doing something with controller auto-config that makes the mouse automatically 'go down' continuously. Fix is disable / unplug controller, go into config and clear all the bindings and uncheck the game controller box (again). Please stop turning this back on. I know its minor - but holy crap is it infuriating when I have to do it over and over and over and over again. (Across four cabinets... lol)

After attract mode runs for a few hours, the image cache for wheel images seems to go blank again... Example:

After Beta 3 - I had to force-refresh all images to get the wheel images to show up again. After the force refresh, everything seems fine.

Just installed Beta-3 on four machines. No issues with the installs. Good News - 'BigBox --> Shutdown --> LEDBlinky "execute 'exit front-end' command before executing windows shutdown" code improvement is working. Thank you! Not So Good News - Looks like LaunchBox is auto-discovering and configuring controllers again. 100% of the time this configures a controller that shouldn't be used in Launchbox and causes complete loss of mouse control (most consistent behavior is mouse always moves down). Turning off the game controller stops the behavior, then unbinding everything. This was 'fixed' a few versions ago I had thought, but with Beta 3, it appears to be back. (this time it was the Fanatec wheels). (Not sure if BigBox is doing this too - I forgot to check) On the suspected memory leak issue I observed with Beta 1 - I haven't been able to re-create it. So... hoping that was just something goofy with my installs and a fluke. I'll let them run tomorrow and see how it goes on Beta 3.

I'll get some numbers / screenshots for you later today. I'll fire up the cabinets in a minute. Lets say - 'idle' Win11 on a fresh boot is consuming like.. 6gb of memory (or something). I fire up BigBox and just let it run in attract mode for hours. After like.. 6 hours, system has 11gb of memory consumed (11gb/16gb). I shut down BigBox, return to Windows. Task Manager still shows like 10gb/16gb used. That's a memory leak in my book - something is using memory and not properly releasing it. There is probably a tool I can get to 'see' it (raw memory usage). Maybe. This happens on both of my cabinets / BigBox installs. If I boot up the PC and launch HyperSpin 2.0 instead (I've got a startup menu...), this doesn't happen. Doesn't happen with Launchbox.exe either. Just BigBox. Anyway, let me see what I can dig up to support this.

Beta-2 BigBox Memory Leak is not fixed. Still gobbles up gigabytes of memory and never gives it back. (even after closing BigBox - requires a full reboot to clear out) I ran the updated VLC media player for a couple of hours without issue. No crashes or anything.

Any updates on that memory leak issue?

Beta-1 appears to have a nasty memory leak. After 5-6 hours of attract mode, I'm seeing my systems run out of memory and crash. (16gb total system memory)

ON the cabinet I switched to FFMpeg - BigBox did crash out after a couple of hours. So its not just you. I'm not sure of the exact time, because I wasn't paying close attention to it. But it absolutely crashed to the desktop with no error message on the screen. Other cabinet running WMP was still cruising along in attract mode.

@faeran On the shutdown routine. This is a long standing bug / backdoor feature request, but since you're working on the shutdown code base right now anyway.... My twin driving cabinets use Ultimarc PAC-Drives for lighting up LEDs. These are latching - meaning if they are ON when the PC shuts down, they STAY ON (as long as they have power of course). So on those machines, I have to EXIT BigBox, wait for BigBox to fire the LEDBLinky "exit frontend" routine (turn off the LEDs), then gracefully shutdown Windows. If I use the BigBox built in shutdown routine - It doesn't seem to fire the LEDLlinky "frontend exit" routine, and the LEDs (buttons) stay on, even after the PC powers off. So the ask if you can work it in - Can you add the "LEDBlinky Frontend EXIT" routine to the BigBox shutdown routine and make sure it fires BEFORE it starts the Windows Shutdown commands?