Xpendable

I don't know if I have something configured wrong or what, but as soon as Attact Mode starts in BigBox, all LEDBlinky animation stops. As soon as I touch the controls, the LEDBlinky FE Active animation resumes playing. How can I get animation to play while AttactMode is running?

I am having this problem, too. Many of my games have disappeared for unexplained reasons. What gives? :(

Thanks for the tip. However, I was able to solve my issue by tweaking frameskip while in a MAME game. I think it is F8 and F9 that decrease and increase frameskip.

Did an upgrade on my arcade machine last night. Changed out the GeForce 9500GT I had in there for a 970GTX I had lying around. Had to swap power supplies too in order to get the 970GTX in. Overkill, I know, but might as well. The main reason I did this is because the platform videos were sluggish. I figured it was worth a try. Changing it to the 970GTX made no difference. I then switched the video driver to Windows Media Player (from VLC) and now the videos are perfect. I see the VLC is recommended but it runs like crap. Any idea why?

Okay, I think I fixed my audio issue in MK3. I messed with the frame skip feature (F8/F9) in MAME. It was set to auto-skip, but I tried setting it to 4/10 and this seems to have resolved the audio issue. Now the only thing I need to keep an eye on is the mysterious exits of BigBox.

So my new install of LaunchBox seems to have fixed the xaudio error that was reported in the log. I also think BigBox is loading faster than it did before. Load time was around 23 seconds. It also seems more responsive than it was prior to the reinstall. I used to get massive lag in the user interface after BigBox launched that wouldn't go away for at least a minute or two. That said, I am still getting audio problems in heavier games like Mortal Kombat 3... Sound samples will repeat and there is some static and popping. I do not get this at all when Hyperspin launches MK3, and it's actually using the SAME installation of MAME.

Actually I just decided to rename my LaunchBox directory to LaunchBox-Backup and I downloaded and installed a fresh copy. I fired it up without any games and did not see the error about xaudio. I'm in the process of copying the data from the backup directory to the new directory and will test again. It's taking a long time to copy that data... I was unaware that I had acquired 33GB of "stuff", lol. The one big difference with this fresh install versus the old install is the fresh install was done while I was still running BitDefender. I had some problems with BitDefender in the past where it quietly quarantined stuff as false positives without asking me. I was able to undo most of that stuff but it's possible I missed something or it crapped something when the updates were being processed. Hence the desire to do a fresh install of LaunchBox and see if that fixes the issues.

I confirmed that GeForce Experience is not installed. I did write a watchdog program last night and it is running BigBox now and will log to both the console window and to a file each time BigBox exits and it will restart it if it does. Hmm, I just realized I should probably have also logged the exit code if any, but that may not show anything, depending on how the application is written. I will admit that my watcher won't know the difference between manually exiting the program versus a crash. i do have BigBox set to locked with a pin and only I know the pin, so I know my girls aren't pressing anything to exit BigBox as far as I know. Anyway, it ran overnight for just over 17+ hours without any exits. I also did check the Windows event viewer logs last night and have nothing at all from BigBox/LaunchBox. I noticed the Logs directory for LaunchBox is empty. I just changed the DebugLog setting in settings.xml to true to see if it creates any output. Yes, it does, but interesting enough, the log does not appear to record anything about what games are selected and launched or anything else other than starting/stopping/resuming music. I also had an error at the top about missing xaudio8_2.dll or something. That maybe explains why I never heard any background music...

No, I do not have GeForce Experience installed on this computer. At least I don't think I do. I will recheck this.

Oh, and I wanted to mention one other thing. I can 100% absolutely confirm that BigBox is exiting on it's own, and it's happening quite often. I can't keep BigBox running overnight. Nobody is ever around when it exits. I don't see any errors on the screen or any indication that anything went wrong, it's just not running anymore. Extremely frustrating. I haven't yet checked the event viewer to see if anything's being recorded there. But something is definitely going on. I'll launch BigBox, play a few games, then exit the game and have it sit at the BigBox menu. Attract mode is off, so it sits at whatever game details is being shown. I'll leave there and come back later and it's sitting at the desktop and BigBox is no longer running. I'm tempted to write a simple C# watchdog program to record the exits and maybe even restart it when it happens. If I do that, I'll share my findings in the interests of helping you track down what the issue might be.

The stuttering sound problem for MAME games seems to have improved somewhat after switching to text only (not logos) in the wheels, but is still present on some games. Those same MAME games have no stuttering whatsoever when launched from HyperSpin. My guess is BigBox is more resource intensive than HyperSpin (which itself is supposed to be fairly resource intensive) when it's in the background. I don't know if it's how BigBox is using threads, memory, or what. At least on my class of machine, it doesn't do all that great. It is an older computer... Running on an Asus P5G41 motherboard with a DuoCore processor and a lower-end (think GT) Nvidia graphics card. Also it only has 4GB of ram. I used to use this PC as my Windows Media Center computer in my family room with a Ceton 4-channel HD tuner card. It performed that task well until I retired it. I did just order another 4GB of ram for it to bring it up to 8GB. I'm hoping that will help things. I also have some newer Nvidia cards that I can throw on it, but I'm not sure that will make much of a difference. OS is Windows 7. I've stripped unnecessary hardware from it and purged almost all programs, including antivirus. (I had been running BitDefender, but after the recent false positives, I have decided to ditch that pile of crap). I might, at some point, replace the hard drive with an SSD.

It happened again. I had BigBox running and left for about 2 hours and came back and it was sitting at the desktop and BigBox was no longer running. No-one else was home so I know nobody was messing with it. I'm also continuing to have the problem where sounds effects in Mame are often stuttering... This problem in Mame does not exist when launched from HyperSpin. It is only when launched from BigBox. In fact, both HyperSpin and LaunchBox/BigBox are using the exact same installation of Mame. I've disabled all transitions, and I'm now using text (not logos) for my game wheel.

It has been 24 hours and BigBox is still running. I need to consider that maybe my kids are exiting it.

Latest beta of BigBox is either crashing or exiting to desktop on its own if I leave it running for awhile (at least an hour). I do have attract mode on. This is happening every time. It did not happen before.

No, it is not launching multiple instances of Mame. I have confirmed that is not the issue.

I've been having performance problems in most MAME games since I updated LaunchBox/BigBox in March. I'm getting the audio "echo" where sound effects are playing twice in most of my games, and this is well known issue that occurs if the computer is being bogged down... and in this case I believe it it is happening because of recent changes to BigBox. I actually went BACK to HyperSpin and the problem goes way. The latest version of BigBox is definitely causing a significant performance hit that it did NOT have before.