EazyCheeze1978
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Posts posted by EazyCheeze1978
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Awesome! Well, thank you for offering; I do hope either you or someone else can try to pick this up. Sounds interesting, all in all , anyway
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Well, I absolutely see your point; LaunchBox is amazing and should be used as much as possible, but on my install at least, LaunchBox can be up to a 15-second load (or longer if I haven't run it in a while), and if I am of a mind to play a particular game and start it as soon as possible, and I want to exactly duplicate the command-line settings that LB has for launching the game (especially for more intricately configured games such as automatically done by another plugin like the PCSX2 Configurator), this might be a good idea, barring taking the time to create a shortcut manually, which I guess is really what a big fan of a particular game should be doing...
The faster startup, once in a while, might be nice, for particular games...
I have said that I am a huge fan of LaunchBox. One of the reasons for that is a streamlined way that it allows me to run games. One more might be nice... but if this is a silly idea, I apologize.
EDIT: The long startup time doesn't necessarily apply to BigBox, or at least it is heavily masked with the extreme eye candy it provides, so maybe I should be using that instead.
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While LaunchBox is absolutely amazing and I'll always think so, I do have an idea that might be able to get us to our very favorite games as soon as possible, right from the desktop even! (This, then, would be best for those who have a few games that they'd like to get into right away without having to start up LaunchBox, but still don't want to make a shortcut manually.)
Let's have a plugin that introduces a new item to the right-click menu on games, called "Create shortcut..." - this will allow us to, well, create a shortcut from the command that LaunchBox creates and sends to the emulator. The shortcut would operate the same as if we were to double-click on the game or press X or the assigned 'Run' controller button, except of course it wouldn't show the startup screen if it's enabled. (The ellipsis would be for a game that has multiple applications assigned, and we can choose which one.)
Well, just a thought. Would be an interesting feature to have I think. (I suggested a plugin instead of a main LB feature, because it seems that this would be beyond the scope of the frontend itself.)
Take care!
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Am happy to see this has been done (added to the Bitbucket) for me! That's awesome, and I thank IceLancer SR for doing so.
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Hey all! Hope everything's doing all right
What you've got for your Auto-Populate system is great so far. It's really helped me come up with some interesting and varied playlists, and I have a couple suggestions that may improve this awesome feature: a smaller one and a bigger one.
(If my statistical theory here is super wrong or confusing, please feel free to correct me or just ignore this, as it's been a long time since my Elementary Statistics class in community college, and I'm just throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks, to paraphrase a certain wacky inventor.
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First, AND/OR (boolean) operators, that we set for each field across the board. Or, nested boolean operators: for example, a playlist's fields could all be set to AND, meaning all of them must be TRUE, but within the fields is a group that is set to OR, meaning that while all of the the fields' conditions must be TRUE, in this particular field, either or all of the sub-fields' conditions may be TRUE and the main field condition would still be TRUE.
I'll give an example. This is hypothetical, but say there were a selection of games with titles starting with a certain name, but there are other undesirable elements within the title. So, we set up a playlist like this (the indenting implies that: all of the OR sub-fields - any or all of these must be TRUE, would be taken as one AND field - at least one of these must be TRUE; this might be reflected as spacing or indenting in the user interface):
AND: Title Contains "Mario"
AND: (OR): Title Contains "Bros."
AND: (OR): Title Contains "Kart"
AND: (OR): Title Contains "Party"
... (any other desired Mario franchise)So, this means all the titles like Super Mario Bros., Mario Kart: Double Dash!! and Mario Party 4 would be added to the list, but other titles like Mario is Missing or Mario's Time Machine or Hotel Mario would not.
EDIT 10:12 AM - I just realized that this boolean operator addition could also assist in solving the issue I reported in Troubleshooting, the one about making multiple Source Does Not Equal statements makes all of them be ignored and all consolidated sets be expanded... just put each Source Does Not Equal statement in in OR sub-field under an AND field.
Also, I have a suggestion for one field set (a field plus conditions) that you could add.
The Community Star Ratings have seen great use in making my True Classics playlist, which include those games released in or before 1984 with a Community Star Rating of 3.5 or higher. But, I would like to have a standardized sample size when determining which games go in this playlist. I mean, currently it doesn't matter if a game has only one vote in the community that is 3.5 itself, or 50 that average out to 3.5 or higher, and I am seeing some obscure games that, while they're probably really good, don't have enough public saturation to determine their 'classic' status, in my opinion.
So, let's have a playlist field for the number of community star ratings (above or below a target number), that average out to my desired star rating. I can set the minimum to 20, for example, and that might be enough public saturation for a reliable sample size.
ALSO, to keep the playlists in check, if a playlist is taking, or will be expected to take, past a certain threshold of processor time to populate, over a certain amount of iterations, the option should be given to freeze the playlist, change it to a normal static game list to save on display and processor time. Also check boxes for "Don't ask again for this playlist" or "Don't ask again for any playlist", just to cover all the bases.
So... there you go. Hope these help, or at least get some ideas going.
Take care!
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First off, I absolutely LOVE the new Auto-Populate playlists that work with the new Full MAME Set Import feature. It really helps/looks more polished to see all my games separated in this way: by manufacturer, by genre and by number of players! That's pretty awesome, and I praise greatly whomever came up with this idea.
That being said, I have an issue which I wish to discuss and hopefully get a fix going if this is applicable.
First - in my experience and opinion, back in the 80s, manufacturers mostly created arcade games using the JAMMA wiring/interface standard. Being the 80s and part of the 90s, this standard predated most other named standards/platforms such as Capcom Play System, SNK Neo Geo MVS, and so forth. It's for this reason that I wish to have these classics, which are represented in the Capcom Classics, SNK Classics etc. playlists, to be separated from the more (relatively) modern platforms such as the aforementioned CPS and Neo Geo.
It just so happens that perhaps due to the additions for the MAME Full Set Import feature, LaunchBox is now able to SEE the Source files from MAME which drive each game! So, while I have observed that many Source files exist for the aforementioned Classics, a relatively small amount of Source files exist for the aforementioned more modern platforms. It's here where I have discovered that the Auto-Populate feature of the playlists also has a feature for detecting the Source for each game!
Now, here is the crux of my issue:
If I attempt to tweak the existing Auto-Populate list to exclude more than one Source entry simultaneously - if for example, I wish to tweak the Capcom Classics playlist to exclude all CPS-type games, by adding entries for Source Is Not Equal To for cps1.cpp, cps2.cpp, and cps3.cpp (that is, three separate entries) - the Source-excluding directives are ignored and every game is expanded in the playlist (all clones/alternate apps exposed) where once they were consolidated (all represented by one entry for a more streamlined list)! Fortunately, immediately taking out those entries will re-consolidate the expanded games, as though I hadn't put the Source excluding entries in.
If, however, only one Source entry is used in the Auto-Populate options, such as with separating SNK Classics from Neo Geo games, which use the neogeo.cpp Source, this IS effective, and thus does remove all Neo Geo games from the SNK Classics playlist, save for a few which use the neopcb.cpp Source.
So, it does turn out that the Source detection of the Auto-Populate feature does work, if only one Source is called for - otherwise we see these results, which do not seem to me to be desirable.
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Just wanted to give my experience and information regarding this issue. I do hope it helps in making our experiences in LaunchBox much better! One tip, which I don't know how difficult this may be to insert, as I'm not a programmer: there does exist "Contains" as a condition for forming an Auto-Populated list. Could there not also be a "Does Not Contain" condition? That way, I could simply enter in "cps" as part of a Source Does Not Contain directive, and thus still only use one entry in this list. Just a thought.
(This is, of course, contingent on the idea that no Classic game would have those letters in that combination as part of its Source's filename, so it may not be best to rely on that.)
Take care, all of you.
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A suggestion for the beta... Whenever controller automation is used to exit an emulator or program (send the Alt+F4 combo), lock out automation (or else only allow it to be sent once every reasonable interval) for a second or two to prevent a duplicate combo from being sent. I believe this actually occurs when exiting from Demul (Dreamcast/Naomi emulator), as when I hit Back+Start on my controller (Xbox 360 Wireless Controller), the emulator exits, LaunchBox restores, and simultaneously (and alarmingly) I see the old-school Windows shut down dialog. I think this is down to Demul exiting and LaunchBox not correctly recognizing that it's truly exited, and repeating Alt+F4 even if I simply tap Back+Start for the shortest possible amount of time. It's weird, but not a huge problem especially since it doesn't shut down Windows right away. But it might alarm new users.
Anyway, just something to think about.
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@Jason Carr: This is the issue we discussed on your stream.
Hi everyone!
I was inspired, after seeing the news about the Disney Afternoon Classics collection, to make a custom playlist for those games in LaunchBox! And, I saved a video which was the intro to that wonderful block from YouTube, and placed it in the Playlists folder for BigBox to pick up and use!
Unfortunately, now this is the result: (attached)
Yep, it's on the left. I think due to a non-standard or low resolution, BigBox isn't sure how to place the video so it defaults to the left. Is there a way to default videos like this right-aligned, so the platform wheel is not overlapping on this view which I am displaying? (CriticalZone's largest video view, my preference for category/platform wheel views)
Thanks!
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2 hours ago, Jason Carr said:
I would have to dive into your collection to determine exactly what's going on, but unfortunately I need to move on for now. I do still need to come back to the arcade playlist creation to fix a few minor things, such as non-arcade games showing up in the list.
That's okay
Take your time and know that your work on this front end is absolutely wonderful and I appreciate it so so much, as does everyone here I'm sure!
And, I noticed that too. I can't remember which game(s) were affected in my collection, but it was a couple, so far. (Mostly visible in BigBox.) I'll keep an eye out for you.
EDIT: Got one! Frogger prototype on Game Gear was added to Konami Classics, in lieu of the original arcade Frogger we all know and love.
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Maybe it is the title, but it's the one that's being scraped from the DB (and it is an arcade game with the 'classic' 8-character filename limit which is naturally not changed from its original name). Is the file extension looked at when determining if an item in the playlist now exists? If so, I use 7-Zip instead of ZIP exclusively for arcade ROMs now because of generally higher compression. If that is the case, then it's weird because the currently-existing games were found fine when I first created the playlists.
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2 hours ago, Jason Carr said:
Games *should* be being automatically picked up in the playlists after adding new games, but I did do some heavy caching in order to help with performance. So you may just need to restart LaunchBox.
Gotcha
The first time this happened to me I did restart thinking a cache needed to be cleared, and it didn't help. The games are still not being shown a few sessions/Windows sessions later, but perhaps they are being suppressed since I manually added them to the playlists they should be in? But then it seems that there are now duplicate entries in the Playlist Properties dialog, one for the existing game I added and one for the "missing" set down below which should have had the "missing" check taken off.
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@Jason Carr got a question about importing to playlists (still on 7.8, not moved to the beta just yet). Is it intended behavior, or a bug, that when one selects "Scan for Added ROMs" in the Arcade platform when ROMs are added to the correct directory assigned in LaunchBox, that the games when found and imported are not automatically added to their appropriate Arcade Playlists if created? Is this only available for "Import ROMs" for the platform, and should it be available for both? Personally I think it should, but I of course defer to your knowledge and experience concerning this.
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Fortunately Police Quest 4 has built-in General MIDI support; just needed to find the correct driver name (GENMIDI.DRV) and change the resource.cfg file to match.
Works wonderfully.
BTW of course General MIDI being better only applies to native DOS games when digital sound is not present, not arcade emulation where amazing things are done with YM FM chips
hehe. Great stuff I hear in MAME on the regular, no need to change that.
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Thanks Zombeaver
All I had to do was uncheck DOSBox. Really should have tried that before. Now, need to tweak things so that General MIDI gets used, if possible (FM synthesis sounds a little bland when GM is available )
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Go, Jason, go! I'm afraid I don't consider myself technically adept enough to beta test, but I will say that I am rooting you all on in all matters LaunchBox! With all of your efforts, I'm sure the release will be absolutely wonderful!
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Hi all! Got a question
I got the GOG version of Police Quest: Open Season, one of my favorite games! (I also have many other old-school adventure games, but
) This game runs through DOSbox and has two configuration files being called from its shortcut (LNK), one to set the configuration for the game, then another to mount a disc image that contains the game data. From what I'm seeing, the LaunchBox DOSBox configuration does not include a functionality to run two configuration files at once like that. So, loading the game through LaunchBox does not work, apparently. Can LaunchBox indeed load two configuration files and pass them to DOSBox, and I just don't know about it? Or is there something else that can be done?
Thanks
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13 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:
I'd still appreciate it if you could, because that will really help me pinpoint the issue. You can check or set the key mappings easily enough under Options > Key Mappings. It's just arrow keys, Enter, and Escape by default for navigation.
Okay. I just did with the keyboard, and same issue. It actually took a bit longer to happen (more view switches) by my reckoning but I may have just been imagining it.
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I have one, an Xbox 360 Wireless Controller, and that is what I use mainly... I don't know the keys to accept/go back/change views or I would sure test that out for you
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Okay, the blanking out of views when changing them is still happening, and now is to the point that sometimes when I hit B to go back to the Options menu to try to quit, I get into an endless loop of going back to the same view (though one of the screens I hit B on is blank, so that would probably be the Options screen I need). It's sort of hard to describe when it happens as it seems to happen at random, but only when changing views. Very odd.
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Issue has been bitbucketed
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Okay, doing it. And also updating my video drivers
Will let you know if the views changing thing is still a problem, when I can get to testing that. Thanks for the advice on that!
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Something else I just noticed today; if scanning for Added ROMs for All Platforms, the process gets hung up on ScummVM, which is not a ROM-based platform and shouldn't be in this process, as MS-DOS is not. I have to close the program and re-open it to continue (it doesn't hang the program but just froze the progress bar for three-four minutes, so I don't have to force close it in Task Manager), and I'm now sort of discouraged from using that option until it can be fixed to exclude ScummVM (If MS-DOS is also part of the bug, then I don't know about that because the process didn't get to it).
Is this something I should put into BitBucket?
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1 minute ago, Jason Carr said:
Hmm, that certainly shouldn't be happening and it's the first I'm hearing about it, so it must be some kind of odd fluke with your setup. Do you use Windows Media Player or VLC for the video playback engine?
VLC. Hmm... I don't know, because pretty much everything is standard setup as far as video, as far as I know anyway. Does BigBox rely on having the latest video drivers for best results, or should I download the K-Lite Codec Pack?
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AH! That's wonderful; thank you, Jason!
A suggestion for a plugin - Shortcut creator!
in Third-Party Applications and Plugins (Development and Beta Testing)
Posted
That's pretty awesome, int3! I'm no programmer but this seems like a great start. I'm more of an ideas man
but I defer to programmers' wisdom in this.
Thanks! Take care