Big Box Feedback

[CoX]

Loving the big box mode! really loving it, though i still launch fs-UAE arcade through LaunchBox for AMIGA games :P So, have begun setting up the HTPC from my main rig, one thing that i would really suggest is the ability to turn on custom filters for select platforms or instead the ability to turn on a specific custom filter to be displayed in the platform list. That way i can make sure that only games with images or a TGDB.net entry is shown. (this is really helpful when you only want one version of each game eg. if you have different versions of the rom present after bulk adding your collection). This would also ease the incredible amount of scrolling necessary... Not a native english speaker so sorry if its not completely clear, please ask for clarification! Thanks again and much love for all your hard work! EDIT: come to think of it, an option to collate all titles with the same TGDB ID into a submenu (say like the additional app submenu) could be even more neat!

[Jason Carr]

Hi @CoX, welcome. :) I'm working on adding more filters options to Big Box for the next release. I do think we still need some way to filter out games that we're working on from Big Box, though, so that is on my list. :)

[CoX]

Thank you Jason, its nice to see things are evolving sp quickly atm. btw. noticed another small thing. If you don't add all your MAME roms in the specific folder in MAME you have to edit a .ini (which i can't find at the moment for some weird reason), which kinda defeats the purpose of the genius way launchbox can import the roms to the games folder inside its archive for portability... any thoughts?

[clarky05]

Ive got a major issue, have everything working perfectly and i can get into Big Box with no trouble at all, the problem occurs when i just want to manually open Big Box. The .exe file returns a big error message and because of this i cant use Kodi to launch Big Box. Does anyone know of a solution to just launch big box?

[clarky05]

System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> SharpDX.SharpDXException: HRESULT: [0x8889000A], Module: [Unknown], ApiCode: [Unknown/Unknown], Message: Unknown at SharpDX.Result.CheckError() at SharpDX.XAudio2.XAudio2.CreateMasteringVoice(MasteringVoice masteringVoiceOut, Int32 inputChannels, Int32 inputSampleRate, Int32 flags, Int32 deviceIndex, Nullable`1 effectChainRef) at BigBox.Audio.SoundManager..ctor() at BigBox.ViewModels.MainViewModel..ctor() --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at System.RuntimeTypeHandle.CreateInstance(RuntimeType type, Boolean publicOnly, Boolean noCheck, Boolean& canBeCached, RuntimeMethodHandleInternal& ctor, Boolean& bNeedSecurityCheck) at System.RuntimeType.CreateInstanceSlow(Boolean publicOnly, Boolean skipCheckThis, Boolean fillCache, StackCrawlMark& stackMark) at System.RuntimeType.CreateInstanceDefaultCtor(Boolean publicOnly, Boolean skipCheckThis, Boolean fillCache, StackCrawlMark& stackMark) at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type, Boolean nonPublic) at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type) at Caliburn.Micro.BootstrapperBase.DisplayRootViewFor(Type viewModelType, IDictionary`2 settings) at System.Windows.Application.b__1(Object unused) at System.Windows.Threading.ExceptionWrapper.InternalRealCall(Delegate callback, Object args, Int32 numArgs) at MS.Internal.Threading.ExceptionFilterHelper.TryCatchWhen(Object source, Delegate method, Object args, Int32 numArgs, Delegate catchHandler) This is the error message if any one wants to pick through the code

[CoX]

Just a quick note, is the big box .exe in your main launchbox folder?

[clarky05]

Yes it is

[Jason Carr]

CoX said Thank you Jason, its nice to see things are evolving sp quickly atm. btw. noticed another small thing. If you don't add all your MAME roms in the specific folder in MAME you have to edit a .ini (which i can't find at the moment for some weird reason), which kinda defeats the purpose of the genius way launchbox can import the roms to the games folder inside its archive for portability... any thoughts?

Sure, I see what you mean. It works well for most platforms, but there are a few that it doesn't, of course. I should probably disable that option for MAME and the others, or change it. I actually have some significant revamping that needs to be done for those platforms to better support searching TGDB, etc.

[Jason Carr]

Hi @clarky05, that's an odd one. Normally that error only happens if DirectX isn't installed or updated. Any chance you're running Kodi as a different user or something? Maybe as administrator? Otherwise, I don't really understand what would cause the problem. I've tried to replicate it with batch files or anything I can think of, but haven't had any luck.

[clarky05]

Im away to try and update direct x, im now managing to launch big box itself after changing the graphics adapter settings. The problem to me seems to be related to kodi. As when kodi is active, i cant run big box. here is the other error message System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> SharpDX.SharpDXException: HRESULT: [0x8889000A], Module: [Unknown], ApiCode: [Unknown/Unknown], Message: Unknown at SharpDX.Result.CheckError() at SharpDX.XAudio2.XAudio2.CreateMasteringVoice(MasteringVoice masteringVoiceOut, Int32 inputChannels, Int32 inputSampleRate, Int32 flags, Int32 deviceIndex, Nullable`1 effectChainRef) at BigBox.Audio.SoundManager..ctor() at BigBox.ViewModels.MainViewModel..ctor() --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at System.RuntimeTypeHandle.CreateInstance(RuntimeType type, Boolean publicOnly, Boolean noCheck, Boolean& canBeCached, RuntimeMethodHandleInternal& ctor, Boolean& bNeedSecurityCheck) at System.RuntimeType.CreateInstanceSlow(Boolean publicOnly, Boolean skipCheckThis, Boolean fillCache, StackCrawlMark& stackMark) at System.RuntimeType.CreateInstanceDefaultCtor(Boolean publicOnly, Boolean skipCheckThis, Boolean fillCache, StackCrawlMark& stackMark) at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type, Boolean nonPublic) at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type) at Caliburn.Micro.BootstrapperBase.DisplayRootViewFor(Type viewModelType, IDictionary`2 settings) at System.Windows.Application.b__1(Object unused) at System.Windows.Threading.ExceptionWrapper.InternalRealCall(Delegate callback, Object args, Int32 numArgs) at MS.Internal.Threading.ExceptionFilterHelper.TryCatchWhen(Object source, Delegate method, Object args, Int32 numArgs, Delegate catchHandler)

[Jason Carr]

Hmm. Well, I've installed the latest version of Kodi myself, and I can't seem to replicate the issue on my end. However, that issue seems related to sound, considering that it's the XAudio2 DirectX library that's throwing the error. I suppose it's possible that something weird is going on like Kodi is stealing the DirectX audio engine exclusively. However, I don't see that issue happening on my machine. Try disabling the sounds in the Big Box options and see if that fixes the issue.

[Kriven]

I'm not good at the technical stuff, but I've been using Kodi and LaunchBox/Big Box on the same machine since I got into LaunchBox, and I regularly run both programs at the same time (I even had LB open Kodi for a while). I have never run into this kind of problem before.

[eric]

just got the big box and it looks great.....in LB it shows all my games but when i go to bigbox i can only view my recently played games,,,how do i change this? in the options, thanks

[clarky05]

SUCCSESS! Thank you so much wouldnt have thought to look at kodi. So basically i think what was happening was that i had set Kodi to "KEEP AUDIO DEVICE ALIVE" because i used to output sound to bluetooth speakers. This was sending an inaudible tone on the Xaudio driver. When big box tried to start up it couldnt use the audio driver because kodi was constantly using it, this is what was causing it to crash. So in short, make sure that in the audio settings of kodi you have "KEEP AUDIO DEVICE ALIVE" set to "OFF". I would also like to say that this is by far the best peiece of software i have ever used alongside kodi. Its just brilliant and setting it up is so easy and well thought out. You honestly have done something ive been waiting for, for quite literally 6 years. In closing all that i can add would be: 1) The ability to select music to play when each platform is selected and 2) custom themes, it looks amazing as it is but im sure the community can throw some extra eye candy on this brillaint set up. Thank you EDIT: Is it possible currently to play specific videos upon selecting a platform (i.e the bios screen video)

[Jason Carr]

eric said just got the big box and it looks great.....in LB it shows all my games but when i go to bigbox i can only view my recently played games,,,how do i change this? in the options, thanks

Hi @eric, welcome. Did you try selecting a platform (Enter key)? Selecting a platform should show you all the games for that platform. Other than that, I can't think of why Big Box would only show Recently Played games.

[Jason Carr]

clarky05 said SUCCSESS! Thank you so much wouldnt have thought to look at kodi. So basically i think what was happening was that i had set Kodi to "KEEP AUDIO DEVICE ALIVE" because i used to output sound to bluetooth speakers. This was sending an inaudible tone on the Xaudio driver. When big box tried to start up it couldnt use the audio driver because kodi was constantly using it, this is what was causing it to crash. So in short, make sure that in the audio settings of kodi you have "KEEP AUDIO DEVICE ALIVE" set to "OFF". I would also like to say that this is by far the best peiece of software i have ever used alongside kodi. Its just brilliant and setting it up is so easy and well thought out. You honestly have done something ive been waiting for, for quite literally 6 years. In closing all that i can add would be: 1) The ability to select music to play when each platform is selected and 2) custom themes, it looks amazing as it is but im sure the community can throw some extra eye candy on this brillaint set up. Thank you EDIT: Is it possible currently to play specific videos upon selecting a platform (i.e the bios screen video)

Awesome! Glad that's figured out. I have both #1 and #2 on my to-do list. Platform videos are not possible as of yet, but I'll add that to my list as well.

[CoX]

Jason Carr said

CoX said Thank you Jason, its nice to see things are evolving sp quickly atm. btw. noticed another small thing. If you don't add all your MAME roms in the specific folder in MAME you have to edit a .ini (which i can't find at the moment for some weird reason), which kinda defeats the purpose of the genius way launchbox can import the roms to the games folder inside its archive for portability... any thoughts?

Sure, I see what you mean. It works well for most platforms, but there are a few that it doesn't, of course. I should probably disable that option for MAME and the others, or change it. I actually have some significant revamping that needs to be done for those platforms to better support searching TGDB, etc.

ok, minor update on the MAME issue, figured that you just need to specify the ROM path in the mame.ini file. This file is not, by default, compiled, you need to run the commandline version of mame with the parameter -cc this creates the mame.ini file, where you can specify your rom folder. This could either, maybe, be done by default as a range of operations that LaunchBox executes (i dont know if mame supports only specific paths in mame.ini), or maybe just make a small notice pop up to the user, where they are noticed on how to do it (like the genius pop up you created for each emulator when bulk importing games).

[EscalatorBoy]

Enjoying Big Box so far, just a couple minor annoyances to point out #1 - When setting options in the options menu, I'm forced to push left on the control stick in order to save the settings made; hitting the B button to go back reverts the options I've just set back to their previous setting. Minor issue, but maybe an "apply changes" button could be the way to go in order to clear that up. #2 - When exiting a game out of UPlay, the UPlay window pops up, taking focus off of Big Box, requiring me to Alt-Tab back in or reselect it with the mouse, making it a hassle for couch use. I tried using the autohotkey setting to 'Show Launchbox' in order to get around the issue, but that command opens up the program in desktop mode, not BigBox mode. a 'Show Bigbox' AHK command would skirt around this problem, but it would be nice if the UPlay window would just auto-minimize so I wouldn't have to use a workaround. Otherwise, it's looking great so far; I'll add more feedback as it comes.

[Jason Carr]

CoX said ok, minor update on the MAME issue, figured that you just need to specify the ROM path in the mame.ini file. This file is not, by default, compiled, you need to run the commandline version of mame with the parameter -cc this creates the mame.ini file, where you can specify your rom folder. This could either, maybe, be done by default as a range of operations that LaunchBox executes (i dont know if mame supports only specific paths in mame.ini), or maybe just make a small notice pop up to the user, where they are noticed on how to do it (like the genius pop up you created for each emulator when bulk importing games).

Not a bad idea. That'd be really nice if we could automate the mame.ini changes; I'll add that to my list.

[Jason Carr]

EscalatorBoy said Enjoying Big Box so far, just a couple minor annoyances to point out #1 - When setting options in the options menu, I'm forced to push left on the control stick in order to save the settings made; hitting the B button to go back reverts the options I've just set back to their previous setting. Minor issue, but maybe an "apply changes" button could be the way to go in order to clear that up. #2 - When exiting a game out of UPlay, the UPlay window pops up, taking focus off of Big Box, requiring me to Alt-Tab back in or reselect it with the mouse, making it a hassle for couch use. I tried using the autohotkey setting to 'Show Launchbox' in order to get around the issue, but that command opens up the program in desktop mode, not BigBox mode. a 'Show Bigbox' AHK command would skirt around this problem, but it would be nice if the UPlay window would just auto-minimize so I wouldn't have to use a workaround. Otherwise, it's looking great so far; I'll add more feedback as it comes.

Hi @EscalatorBoy, per #1, maybe that's because of your controller configuration? It seems to work fine for me to press B on my 360 controller to go back after making changes. #2 - really good point. AHK should really show Big Box if it's open instead of LaunchBox. It's hard to deal with focus issues in Windows, but I'll see if there's anything I can do from that front too.