markmon

Wiping windows is never necessary. First, you never figure out what was wrong. You just wipe everything and start over giving up in defeat. Nothing is random. There's now 3 users reporting shutdowns. It won't be the video driver, either. If you read what they're saying, the PC actually goes into the shutdown screens and does a *clean* shutdown not a crash or blue screen of death. (The blue screen referenced above is the shutting down blue screen not a windows BSOD). Video driver won't / cant cause that. It's also very interesting that someone above running 'Dont Sleep' app solved his problem: https://www.techspot.com/downloads/5953-dont-sleep.html

Please be clear. Windows goes to sleep (not shutdown) as soon as you launch bigbox or launchbox? How long after? Do you have to be not touching the system? You said you uninstalled launchbox/bigbox but the issue still remains. Does this mean you remove launchbox by uninstalling it and never launch it and just sitting at desktop your pc goes to sleep? Or did you mean to say you did a fresh reinstall of launchbox not uninstall it? Since your PC is going to sleep first, what happens if you go into power settings and disable the sleep button, set the PC to never go to sleep whether on battery or power?

Demulshooter needs to run as admin. But the actual demul should *not* be running as admin. Demulshooter needs to run as admin so that it can hook into the emulator process. Also, I have had massive mixed success running demulshooter before the emulator. Therefore, I always start demulshooter after the emulator process is up and established. The same with timing of running nomousy to hide the mouse cursor. Here is an example of my arcade demul launch AHK: #NoEnv ; Recommended for performance and compatibility with future AutoHotkey releases. SendMode Input ; Recommended for new scripts due to its superior speed and reliability. SetWorkingDir,\Light Gun Games\Dreamcast\demulgun #SingleInstance force ; Sets sound 15 notches lower for this game, its louder than most. SoundSet,-15 ; Set my control panel leds Run, \Light Gun Games\Tools\setleds\settwoplayergun.exe ; Run the emulator Run,demul.exe -run=naomi -rom=deathcox ; Wait and run demulshooter after demul is running Sleep, 15000 Run, \Light Gun Games\Demulshooter\DemulShooter.exe -target=demul07a -rom=deathcox ; Hide the mouse cursor Run, \Light Gun Games\Tools\nomousy\nomousy.exe /hide ; Wait for demul to close Process, WaitClose, demul.exe ; Clean up after demul closed. Run, \Light Gun Games\tools\setleds\setfrontend.exe Run, \Light Gun Games\Tools\nomousy\nomousy.exe SoundSet,+15 ; This runs as admin to make sure demulshooter is exited. Run, \Light Gun Games\Demulshooter\killdemul.exe ExitApp ;FOR EXITING THE GAME ESC:: Process,Close,demul.exe return Note we Run demul not RunWait. Then we sleep for demul to be active and the game to start booting before we finally launch demulshooter and nomousy. This has been extremely reliable for me. Without demulshooter hooking the process, you won't get raw gun input which means you won't get player 1 and player 2 individual controls.

Thank you this is good information. No, I run it all on h:, which is a local SSD. So instead of copying the theme files and making them read-only, should I deleted that copied folder and do a: mklink /D "core\themes\CriticalZoneV2 - BlueBox" "themes\CriticalZoneV2 - BlueBox" ? Any idea why this would suddenly stop working? What is the bigbox start and exit flow regarding the current theme? Does it make the link on launch and remove the link on exit?

I never updated to 12.14. I disable auto updates. I'm on 12.13.. Then it's odd that the theme won't work without specific xaml files located in that core themes folder. I'm sure picking another theme will work. It would be great to understand why the theme is looking for files in the core\themes folder instead of the themes\ folder to begin with and if they aren't supposed to be there, why were they there for months leading up to now.

Yea it's definitely not caused by moving too fast. The PC boots into bigbox and sits there. Later you touch one button and the error pops up. If you alt tab out, you can see that entire folder is empty still. I can then copy the theme folder into the core theme folder and everything works. As soon as I exit bigbox, it clears that core theme folder out again and it never repopulates. Not sure what could spontaneously cause this as it was working fine before. Perhaps instead of making that folder read-only a better fix is to copy the theme folder to core theme folder in my bigbox launch ahk every time.

Everything was fine and then suddenly bigbox is presenting an error dialog that it cannot find a theme file: \Core\Themes\CriticalZoneV2-BlueBox\Styles\HorizontalListBoxItemStyle.xaml In fact, none of the xaml files are there and it gives those errors, too. I investigated a bit more, and the entire Themes folder is empty inside launchbox\core\themes. If I copy the CriticalZoneV2-BlueBox theme from Launchbox\Themes to Launchbox\Core\Themes\ bigbox finds all the files and works correctly. But exiting bigbox wipes out the core\themes folder on exit and then the error is back on next start. I copied the Themes\CriticalZoneV2-BlueBox folder into core\themes\ and then made it recursively read only and the problem seems solved. But I'm guessing this isn't a real solution. So a couple questions: 1) What is the core folder for in the first place? It seems to duplicate a ton of files including lauchbox and bigbox.exe 2) Why would the themes folder be emptied on exit? 3) Why all the sudden would this be a problem?

If you have added an exe like we are describing above, then you know your platform as that exe replaces only one emulator. In the example above you know your platform is c64. In my example with pcsx2, I know my platform is ps2.

Ok here is an example of how I do this exact thing using an AHK script for pscx2. I have a set up that determines which game config to use based on the game that is being requested by the front end. In this case, the front end passes full path and rom name. I extract the full path and rom, use AHK function SplitPath which extracts just the romname, then substr to grab the name of the rom without the extension (.iso or such). From there, I am running my own script that knows the rom passed in. In my case, I then check for whether or not a config with that rom name exists and if so I launch pscx2 with config. Otherwise we use default config. I call this launchboxstartps2.exe and I told launchbox that pcsx2.exe is actually launchboxstartps2.exe. Here is my script: #SingleInstance force ;Prevent multiple instances #WinActivateForce ;Hopefully makes pinball fx window activate. exitEmulatorKey = Esc SetWorkingDir, H:\Game Launcher\Theater\pcsx2 GameName = %1% SplitPath, GameName, ConfigGame ConfigName := SubStr(ConfigGame, 1, -4) ConfigBase = H:\Game Launcher\Theater\pcsx2\gamesettings ConfigPath = %ConfigBase%\default Hotkey, $%exitEmulatorKey%, ClosePcsx2 ifExist, %ConfigBase%\%ConfigName% ConfigPath = %ConfigBase%\%ConfigName% RunWait, "pcsx2.exe" "%GameName%" --cfgpath="%ConfigPath%" --fullscreen,,UseErrorLevel ExitApp ClosePcsx2: Hotkey, %exitEmulatorKey%, Off Process, Close, pcsx2.exe

You will get the exact command line that the emulator receives in this case. You can tell by launching a game, load task manager while it's running, poke around to select columns and enable command line and you can see the exact command line sent to the emulator. It'll most likely be the executable for the emulator as arg 1 and the path to the Rom and rom file as arg 2.

This is super easy to handle via an ahk script that launched the game emulator executable (and I'd argue that anyone that knows how to write an ahk script to do anything with the Rom name would also know how to write an ahk script that also replaces the emulator executable) . Happy to provide an example here. Basically, create an ahk like starthosx64.ahk and have it parse the incoming command line, runwait the actual emulator and then it can handle events as well in the script. Edit the emulator set up inside launch box to run starthosx64.exe instead and you're done.

There are always alternative ways to do things. The ahk script here may not be needed at all. On my set up, for example, I point launchbox the emulator exe which is actually an ahk script that runs the emulator and does some other stuff. You'd handle that outside of launch box and you get passed the full path and filename of the Rom. You would know the name of the emulator at that point as well. Not sure what you're trying to do but the launch box ahk only runs when a game is launched anyway

Well since the AHK scripts are specific to emulators, you already know your platform and system names so you don't need the script to pass that. I would try this: Create an autohotkey script for your emulator that does something like: msgbox %0% msgbox %1% msgbox %2% msgbox %3% and run a game. See if any of those populate with anything useful.