AutoHotkey and auto-key press (ePSXe)

[Dormat]

The problem: Loading some PSX ISOs takes away valuable game-playing time for us with low attention spans and patience.

One solution: Load a save state via command line to get to a game menu more quickly. Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be an option in ePSXe.

Another potential solution: Load the first save state right at the menu by pressing 'F3'. This seems like something an AutoHotkey script could do but having never used them before, I don't know the ins and outs. Looking at the AutoHotKey docs, I thought the below might work (I added the sleep for 6 seconds after 'Send {F3} didn't work) but no go. Sleep 6000 Send {F3} I added the above to the autohotkey portion of the epsxe emulator definition but it doesn't do anything. I'm not sure how to troubleshoot it. It seems autohotkey is mainly meant to convert one keypress into running a script but in my case, I want it to run regardless.

Are there AHK headers which are necessary to make a script run? Can I just start running commands without a detected keypress to start the script? I'm open to other thoughts ideas also.

Edited February 23, 2017 by Dormat

[Zombeaver]

If you're willing to go outside of ePSXe, I'm fairly certain that you can enable auto load/save states on game load/exit in the Mednafen core of Retroarch. I know that standalone Mednafen has it so it's likely that the RA core does as well. Mednafen (and Retroarch for that matter) is seriously awesome. It's much more accurate than ePSXe. There were some games (like Jumping Flash 2, for example, which has lots of weird/missing geometry in ePSXe) that I was convinced were never going to be right unless I broke out a real PS1... then I used Mednafen with them and they're perfect.

[Dormat]

Thanks for the suggestion. I started with retroarch (I use it for most of my roms) but PSX games were painfully slow for some reason. I'll revisit why that might be. ePSXe works pretty great for Crash Bandicoot with HiRes 3D but the 2d textures don't look as good as retroarch probably could with the right filters.

[Dormat]

After working on this more, it seem AHK scripts will only run upon custom LB events: https://www.launchbox-app.com/forum/features/using-autohotkey Now, I'm trying to run an Auto Hotkey script externally with the AHK standalone executable but am running into another problem. - I created a Windows batch script to run my AHK script and ePSXe. - I changed the ePSXe emulator definition to point to my .bat (instead of epsxe.exe). When I try to run a PSX game, I get an LB error.

An error occurred while trying to launch the game. The specified executable is not a valid application for this OS platform.

Here's my batch script:

c:\emulators\utilities\ahk\autohotkey.exe c:\emulators\utilities\epsxe.ahk epsxe %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

Does Launchbox not support batch files?

Edited February 23, 2017 by Dormat

[Jason Carr]

Batch files are definitely supported; lots of people have used them successfully. That's a pretty weird error; I'm guessing that maybe something that the batch file is doing might be causing the error?

[Dormat]

Jason, you were correct. Somehow, my batch file was 0 bytes. Thanks! For anyone curious, here's what I ended up with for my ePSXe definition. I used AntiMicro to map the Xbox 360 Guide button (I'm actually using a DS3 controller with Xinput driver) to the ESC key. AM can be used just as easily to map to Alt-F4. NoTrayOrphans is an AutoHotkey compiled EXE used to clean up dead system tray icons from here: https://autohotkey.com/board/topic/80624-notrayorphans

My batch script:

start "AHK" c:\emulators\utilities\ahk\autohotkey.exe c:\emulators\utilities\ahk\epsxe.ahk
start "AM" "c:\Program Files\antimicro\antimicro.exe" --hidden --profile "c:\users\living\documents\AM - Guide button is ESC.amgp"
cd \emulators\psx\epsxe
start "ePSXe-from-script" /WAIT c:\emulators\psx\epsxe\epsxe -nogui -loadbin %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9
start "kill AM" /WAIT c:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe /F /im
antimicro.exe start "kill NTO" /MIN /B c:\emulators\Utilities\NoTrayOrphans.exe

 

My external AutoHotkey script (epsxe.ahk):
=================
SetTitleMatchMode, 2 ; Relax title matching a bit

#Persistent ; Start loop

SetTimer, ePSXeLoadState, 75 ; Wait 75 milliseconds before checking again

return

 

ePSXeLoadState:

IfWinExist, ePSXe - Enhanced PSX emulator

    {

        WinActivate ; Use the window found from 'IfWinExist'

        ; SetTimer, ePSXeLoadState, Off ; Turn the timer off (not needed in this script)

        Sleep, 450 ; May have to lengthen this delay if ePSXe isn't ready to receive input

        ; Send {F3} ; Normal 'Send' operation isn't recognized in ePSXe

        SendInput {F3 down} ; so we use the 'SendInput' Method

        Sleep, 50 ; to load state from slot 1

        SendInput {F3 up}

        Sleep, 500

        SendInput {F2 down} ; Switch to a save slot besides 1

        Sleep, 50

        SendInput {F2 up}

        Sleep, 500

        SendInput {F5 down} ; Enable Analogue control

        Sleep, 50

        SendInput {F5 up}

        Sleep, 100

        ExitApp ; Quit AutoHotKey

    }

else

    return

==================

Edited February 23, 2017 by Dormat

[Dormat]

Update: The intended use case for this was Crash Bandicoot 2. Unfortunately, I later found that loading a save state in ePSXe also loads a cached read of the PSX memory cards. This causes memory card saves on disk to be ignored; you only see mem card saves at the time the save state was written.

Thus, for now, I've stopped using the save state shortcut in ePSXe. If ePSXe could be configured to not cache mem cards, this would work again.