DivinityCycle

Wasn't me I'm guessing the mods may be able to look into this a bit?

A bunch of things worth mentioning in response to this: -Bro, you are running Windows, so you can easily generate nice screenshots using the built-in Snipping Tool utility. It's been around since at least Vista but like NO BODY knows this program exists. It's probably already on your computer and will help you make nice screenshots. You can read more about that over here if you want. -When troubleshooting RetroArch on Windows, I found it to be really hard to find a way in at first, because by default ALL you get back from the program is the generic "Windows crashed. That.. didn't work for some reason..." message. That's not enough to go by in trying to track down what's going wrong. To get a lot better idea of what is killing your RetroArch, you'll need to delve into the command line a little bit. If you already know how to command line in Windows, just navigate to to the directory where you've got RetroArch installed, and then run retroarch.exe -v --menu 2>log.txt, or you could take whatever command line you were using to fire up Reicast & the ROM and just add the -v switch and then add 2>log.txt at the end. The easiest way I know of to get a command line opened up is to go to your RetroArch folder, hold Shift and then right-click on an empty space in the menu, which should give you a new option in the context menu "Open command line here". That should get you to a command prompt and also automatically move into the directory you're looking at. Once you're in there, like I said above, you'll want to run retroarch.exe -v --menu 2>log.txt. The -v switch tells Retroarch to be "verbose" in its output, so it will output a lot more info about what's going on than normal, the --menu switch tells it to launch to the normal menu you will get if you just double-click retroarch.exe in Windows, and the 2>log.txt tells Windows to capture the error output from the program and save it to the file log.txt. You can use any filename you want for this, it's just a way of capturing the output from the program into a file, so you can open it up and read through it. I find this much nicer / easier than having to navigate through a ton of stuff in a command line window. Anyways, reading the error logs should help you figure out what's missing. My guess is the BIOS files. -The Reicast core is in its infancy as of a couple weeks ago when I tried it. It has serious graphical issues with some games and has no proper BIOS support at this time, so you're going to see the "Set the system date & time" prompt every time you launch it and what you punch in can't get saved yet. The most common cause of it just not launching at all is that reicast cannot find the BIOS files it needs, or the files are "the wrong" files. They need to be in your Retroarch's "system" directory, inside a folder named "dc". The files will usually be named dc_boot.bin and dc_flash.bin. Most forums and places are not OK with linking directly to the BIOS files, as these are copyrighted material that Sega owns, so I don't think I can just pos them here I didn't have too much trouble Googling them up, but PM me if you still can't get them.

Here's the same cover but resized to 1446 wide by 2100 tall. I think this does look better, it makes Officer Murphy more svelt looking.

using the Robocop cover from that project post I linked to, I cut out just the front cover and got an image 1546 wide by 2100 tall, which ended up being like 2MB in size. Pretty freakin huge. What do you think about this one? -EDIT- Wow, so I double-checked this vs the "smooshed" example image and they appear to be the same dimensions, so I'm guessing whoever did the Robocop cover found the same source I did (which I linked to above). I'm going to reduce the width by 100 pixels, BRB

@Freestate thanks for the examples. The bottom one appears to be cleaned up a bit (no box damage along the edges, other small details are "better"), but I agree, looks like the aspect ratio is wrong and the box has been smooshed a bit on the vertical axis, so that's too tall / too wide. It would be trivial to correct the aspect ratio in something like Photoshop and then re-upload / replace them, I'm just not too sure of t definitive "correct" dimensions that the NES box covers should be. Also, when researching trying to find the "correct" dimensions I found what seems to be a pretty good collection of nice front & back images here. Are these good?

So, I've begun work on making custom overlay & "hint" graphics, and found a really nice pack some awesome people put together and made available over here at Open Game Art. I've attached the whole thing here (so we've got it in case the original host goes down), as well as some examples out of this pack in case you're wondering what these look like. These seem to be nice vector images, with most buttons 100x100, which is smallish in the grand scheme of things but just about perfect for use as on-screen help graphics. Xelu_FREE_keyboard&controller_prompts_pack.zip

Two addendums: I figured out how to consistently make this stop working. Still haven't worked out WHY this happens, but if you connect to the computer where you're trying to use the controller using Remote Desktop, and then log back into that machine locally, the system will no longer detect the buttonpresses. I confirmed that this is the case and also found that you don't actually have to reboot, merely logging out and back in will bring functionality back. While testing that out I also confirmed that any 360 controller connected to the same computer appears to get the same virtual scancode assigned to the Guide button, which means the script I posted will detect the Guide button presses on controller 1, 2, 3, or 4 as denoted by the LEDs on the 360 controller. Probably good to know if you're considering this method. I'm a big fan of the classic 4 player arcade action, so I plan on regularly using MAME with 4 controllers simultaneously.

As a professional "fix it" guy, this proposition sounds like it could create a fair amount of new support workload, particularly with regard to what expected functionality is. I can imagine some user saying, "Hey, you said that it will just work, and I downloaded it but the Nintendo controls have the A and B buttons reversed! That's clearly wrong, WTF?!?" or "Why can't my i3 system run PS2 games @ 4K?!? You suck!" A product which is positioned as a front-end that makes it easier / nicer to use other software is a significantly different customer expectation from an application that downloads, installs, and sets up other emulators for you in addition to acting as a nice front end. Right or wrong, I suspect the less discerning user may see something like this as "LaunchBox is supposed to do it all for me" which would run up to and including the actual playing of games and the possible problems resulting from there. At the moment, the world of emulator front-ends is sufficiently nerdy and niche that this isn't really an issue, but further down the road it would begin to be one as the userbase grows and the featureset broadens. I feel like one way to insulate LaunchBox (the "product") from this stuff would be to make downloadable packages available from the community. I was thinking about putting up some stuff along those lines once I get my configs and setup more mature, like an "EasyMode" version of MAME you could just unzip which would have a lot of controller mapping and shader stuff already set up and ready to go. But the key thing is, that'd be me and/or other people in the community doing that stuff for free as opposed to it falling under the umbrella of LaunchBox "the thing you paid money for". My attitude towards this kind of stuff tends to be along the lines of the open source model, where if I spend a ton of time figuring out some issue or building something, and only I use it, that's less good for humanity than if I share my work with other people who also make use of it. Maybe I'm just a weird hippy like that I definitely did wanna build some packs and/or at least write-ups on stuff like MAME and RetroArch, since they both have pretty steep learning curves once you start getting into the weeds, especially if you want to emulate all the platforms like collector-minded people tend to do (guilty of this one myself).

No worries, my question was mostly the least-worst "shot in the dark" thing I could think of to look at in trying to isolate the issue to something specific. I'm guessing @Baz_Rock probably is getting "full speed" outside of BB, but you're correct that it's not specified in that post, so actually is something worth establishing. PS2 emulation is actually very demanding, and even my "big fancy gaming rig" can have issues with it depending on the game and stuff I'm trying to do.

Sounds not great. Can you link to an example of a game where that's happened?

Does the same thing happen if you launch a PS2 game from LaunchBox (not in BigBox mode)?

It seems like the main modes of interaction for most people are "All the arcade games in one big list" and "smaller subsets of arcade games". The way LaunchBox currently works, it's possible to accomplish both with the same collection using Platforms and also Custom Filters, so I'd imagine it just ends up being an issue of what makes more sense for the collection and how the user wants to browse their stuff. The main driving factor for me (and I bet others) in making more platforms is that platforms can have artwork associated with them, and I just think it's cool to see the logos for stuff like CPS-1 and Neo Geo.

You got it, that command line switch will over-ride the default option and/or the setting in mame.ini if one is present.

As I've been adding my MAME ROMs into my LaunchBox collection, I've noticed that EmuMovies has given me "Controller Info" images, most of which show a standard button panel with the various default button mappings labeled. I've attached one of those and also a lightgun example image as well. The main reason why I'm posting is: what do people actually do with these kinds of things? I know you can display overalys in MAME when in-game, but I'm not sure if there's really any easy way to display a particular game's controls. Ideally I'd like to be able to flash something up on screen for X number of seconds when that game is started, so you can easily tell what the controls are, or have a button or hotkey you can press to display the controls in a nice manner. Does anybody on here use these or other images / text to help the end-user with MAME controls?

For anybody who may stumble into this post, I have successfully resolved all the issues involved in this thread and posted a detailed explanation for my solution over here:

Took waaaaaay too much messing around to figure all parts of this out, but I have finally successfully found a working solution. The problem: I use an Xbox 360 controller for most emu gaming, and wanted to use the silver "Xbox logo" Guide button on the middle of the controller as my "Get to the menus" / "Get out of this game" button. My reasoning is pretty simple: the 360 has enough controls to serve as a pretty good solution for almost all kinds of games, up to the Playstation DualShock controls. ALL the buttons on the controller will be used up if you're using a 1:1 mapping to a DualShock controller except for the Guide button. RetroArch native recognizes this button already, and I use that for most of my emulation needs. However, I honestly don't like using the libretro port of MAME, as it's got a lot of weird things going on with its implementation, particularly for controls. However, MAME does not naively recognize the Guide button, because by default it's inputs are hidden. It doesn't show up as a normal joystick button, although it IS possible to read it's inputs. My solution: Because LaunchBox is awesome, it has support for AutoHotKey scripts built right in. This means you don't have to install and manage a separate application to get AHK functionality, you can just put add a script to an emulator's config in LB and LB will make that script active when the emulator is active. This is totally perfect for my needs, as it'll make it much less annoying to use non-RetroArch stuff. This script should be usable with pretty much any program or emulator, and it's pretty simple to customize. Caveats: This took me over a week to fully figure out. One important thing to know: The 360 Guide button will sometimes already do stuff on your system. If you have Steam installed and running, Steam will automatically open up Big Picture Mode. I'm a big fan of Valve and I own like hundreds of games in Steam, so I'm not gonna stop using that. The solution comes in the form of some awesome person on the internet who compiled a custom version of the file XInput1_4.dll. This is possible because a lot of Microsoft's library sourcecode is freely available online, to better assist developers who want to use their APIs & libraries. Some frickin genius built this version of XInput1_4.dll which filters out the Guide button inputs complete. To make use of this, you simply need to drop that file into your Steam install directory (same folder where you'll find Steam.exe). Then, if Steam's already running, completed exit it out of it and then re-launch. Then press your Guide button and marvel at how it does nothing at all. If you're running Windows 10 and you play PC games, you may have run into the "Game Bar" feature. This is new thing they've built in to try and make game streaming and other social stuff easier. Annoyingly, for a lot of people running Windows 10, pressing the Guide button will launch the Game Bar. I'm finding conflicting info on the "best" way to disable this functinality. I've taken some screenshots of what worked nice & easy for me. You can actually bring up the Game Bar in almost any program, including Chrome, by either pressing Guide or Windows Key+G. That should bring up the bar (as pictured in Step1.jpg). You can get into the Settings but clicking on the gear button on the right. That'll get you into the screen I've pictured in Step2.jpg. About halfway down on the settings is the option "Open Game bar using Guide on controller". UNCHECK this option. While you're at it you'll probably want to disable the Recording option completely, unless you plan on being a Twitch star If you have enabled the GameBar in Chrome just to get to the setting, once you're done simply uncheck the "Remember this as a game" option down towards the bottom. So far in my silly emulation adventures, these are the only 2 things I've found that grab the Guide button functionality. I ran into and solved both of these a while ago when I started working on getting my RetroArch setup figured out. Onward to MAME itself! MAME has been under development for years and is the subject of a lot of discussion, so researching my issues in controlling MAME gave tons of results, with a lot of info being old & useless. One great thing I learned: the old practice of having to patch the MAME source code and compile a custom build to get DirectInput working is no more. My AHK solution is working fine with the stock standard builds of MAME available from the official site. I tested both version 178 and 179. The key thing is, some time ago the devs added command line or .ini options allowing the user to specify what methods to use for inputs. The key one to make the AHK inputs work is keyboardprovider. This option MUST be set to "dinput" (for DirectInput). Without this, MAME will not read the keystrokes coming from AHK. The simplest way to set this is to just edit your mame.ini file, but you can also add it as a command line option if you want to do that instead for some reason. The actual script itself took a lot of trial and error, because I just couldn't get MAME to read inputs at all. A lot of this was my own ignorance for how AHK scripts work, but also MAME's intolerance to using the standard "Send" or "SendInput" methods most AHK scripts employ. The trick was to explicitly send both the "key down" and "key up" events with a separate "sleep 10" in between. I originally had a lot of problems with getting input from the Guide button, but I eventually found that using the "scancode" vk07sc000:: actually does work. It randomly stopped working on me a couple of times and I honestly don't know why, but rebooting my machine restored functionality. So, here's the script I'm using to translate the 360 Guide button into a press of the Tab key: vk07sc000:: Send {Tab down} Sleep 10 Send {Tab up} return I have tested this with the current version of LaunchBox and MAME 178 and 179 and it works exactly as expected. By default the Tab key brings up the MAME OSD, allowing the user to do admin tasks like fix inputs and exit out of MAME, which is exactly what I want. You can easily change what keystroke this sends, or remap what Tab does in MAME. Hope this post helps some people out, as it was a lot of work figuring this one out XInput1_4.dll

I figured there may be some MAME experts on this board who would know about this stuff. I've been working on trying to figure out how to get inputs from AntiMicro and AutoHotKey going into MAME successfully, which has been a crazy rabbit hole of silliness. So, at this point I am working with MAME 178 and have already gone through the process of updating my ROM collection for 178. I was able to locate a NoNag patch for 178, but all the references I can find to the "Force DirectInput" patch are old and the source files where those changes are supposedly made no longer exist in the MAME souce code. Also in my research I've found that MAME has the options (both command line and ini) to set the keyboardprovider, mouseprovider, lightgunprovider, and joystickerprovider options to whatever you want, including dinput for DirectInput. It kinda seems like the whole "force dinput via source code patch" thing has been made obsolete by these new features. Can any MAME-heads on here confirm this is the case? I'm still tempted to compile my own MAME since I can (theoretically) make one optimized for multi-core CPUs, My machines all have at least 4 CPU cores so I'd imagine I'll get a mild performance boost out of that. Along the same "long running patches which are now obsolete" lines, I also found that MKChamp has announced he's no longer making hiscore patches after version 178 and has switched over to using a Lua plugin based solution instead. Has anybody tried this out? I'd imagine because this is an official plug-in it's the cleaner solution to use long term, but I haven't messed with it yet.

Took time off from Skyrim: Special Edition to make a logo for Virtual Fighter 3TB.

So, I was able to rewrite the other script I had found to pull input from the 360 controller, and so now I can use AHK to do things with the 360 Guide button. However, I can't seem to get MAME to accept input from other programs at all. I tested AHK, antimicro, JoyToKey and button_on_guide2.exe. JoyToKey doesn't recognize the Guide button, and the others do but don't successfully send inputs to MAME. I tried running a patched version of MAME that has DirectInput, as well as launching MAME with various -keyboardprovider switches, no success. I saw some forum posts here where Jason has mentioned this is a MAME issue he plans on eventually looking into so I'm gonna hold off for now on this one...

I'll do some experimentation ASAP. Because I'm stuck at work I did have time to begin getting familiar with the AHK syntax more. The script I found which uses DirectInput to read the controller state uses seemingly every weird part of AHK's language, but there's really good documentation for pretty much everything, so I think I actually now understand what the code does and how to slim it down to just the essential parts. It's got a lot of extra stuff in it because it can be used to read the state of both sticks, the D-Pad, and all the buttons, and it was written for general use (sort of like the big library I was originally trying to use). I'm about to the point where I'll be able to do some testing and then hopefully find a working solution I can post here. @ckp, what OS are you running? I'd like to control for possible variations, as I know Microsoft has made some changes under the hood in Windows 10, particularly with regard to their own proprietary stuff like the Xbox App. I'm presently using the Enterprise 64-bit version of Windows 10, which does not have the Xbox app installed, although I've seen that same issue on some other machines (like my gf's laptop which has the Home edition of Windows 10).

The stupid "Game Bar" thing can be turned off in the preferences for that app, so you should be able to disable that and side-step that issue. It seems pretty weird that the same script works differently in LB and AHK.

IIRC I tested this method earlier, but I will give it a go when I get off work in ~6 hours. Unfortunately I don't have any controllers at the office

Well, my test script is to just do an #Include scripts/XBOX360.ahk and then throw up a message box. If I run this using AutoHotKey is works fine. If I run the same script using LaunchBox, it crashes LaunchBox. In my research I had found a different script that is able to grab the Guide input, and that does not actually crash LB. However, I had never figured out how to re-write that to do what I wanted. The problem is that the scripts involved here are pretty high level and my understanding of AHK is pretty low level. I'm presently working on teaching myself the syntax, although I won't be able to do any testing on this until I get home from work later on. Ideally, I'd love to just be able to use a full-featured library and keep the main script that the user puts into LB to be as minimal as possible, but we'll see. All of this because Microsoft opted to make the Guide button their special baby, so it's "hidden" as far as the official Windows drivers are concerned. Incidentally, I've attached a version of Xinput1_4.dll which ignores the Guide button. Dropping this DLL into your Steam directory will cause Steam to auto-load it at launch. This is needed to prevent the Guide button from opening Big Picture Mode automatically, which is the other half of the coin. XInput1_4.dll

I've been working on trying to make the center "Guide" button on my Xbox 360 controller usable in emulators outside of RetroArch. I found a brilliant AHK library for working with Xbox 360 controllers over on GitHub, which does allow the user to read the Guide button inputs. However, putting this code into LaunchBox as an AHK script or even using an #Include statement causes LaunchBox to crash when attempting to launch a game. The library does work with the latest AutoHotKey mainline branch, so I'm guessing the issue is something to do with the way the library works. I'm guessing this is probably a question for Jason: What version(s) or AHK is LaunchBox natively compatible with? I may mess around with trying to strip down what I actually need out of that library, since the only thing I'm really trying to do is make a Guide button detector. Generally, all the other buttons are easy to access without any special sauce, and the Guide button would be super useful in Launchbox.

That's pretty dope! Is that some sort of pinball emulator? I have been too busy to look into things like PinMAME & VisualPinball, but they're interesting for sure.