BigBox / LaunchBox Error Closing During Emulation, Possibly When Controller Disconnects.

[fromlostdays]

Because of how easy LaunchBox is to set up and use, I've been doing a fair amount of actual gaming. Specifically, I'm neck deep in a very satisfying replay of Chrono Cross. I've noticed though that both LaunchBox and BigBox will, rather frequently, close while the emulation is still happening. It doesn't even mess with the emulation at all, just a windows error dialogue pops up, and goes away, and LB or BB closes in the background. Last night, I noticed that it closed immediately following my Wireless Xbox 360 controller powering itself down. (I was eating and playing on my phone at the time). I can't confirm with 100 percent certainty that the two things are connected, and that my controller disconnecting caused it 100 percent of the time, but it could very well be that they are and it has. I often leave the emulator (usually RetroArch) running while I eat, or smoke a cig, or something. I also have been trying to get my Xbox 360 controller, my Wii Motes, and RetroArch to play nicely together (an absolute nightmare) which means controllers were probably powering down a lot and I didn't even realize it at the time. At any rate, just wanted to report on it, and see if anyone else has seen anything similar. Thanks! Should note that I'm using Windows 10 which is great, but seems to have trouble relinquishing focus, and has some pretty serious issues with the taskbar, at least for me, which sometimes steals focus from (windowed fullscreened) applications and at other times just disappears entirely.

[DOS76]

Do you have the auto hot key option enabled to close the emulator I have the same issue but only if AHK is checked in LB settings.

[fromlostdays]

I do, at that. I'll try turning it off and report back in tonight. I can already think of a workaround in retroarch anyway, by setting the RA menu to open with L3 and R3 and exiting from in there. I could also just exit through Rocketlauncher Pause. At any rate, I'll try it.

[DOS76]

Thanks this is just a theory and I'd like to know if you have the same results that I get when you turn it off. If we know that it is only specific when using the AHK then maybe that will help get it fixed faster.

[fromlostdays]

Bad news. I just tried running the game, and disconnecting the controller via taking out the battery. No crash Did the same and waited for it to turn itself naturally no crash. I did this with AHK enabled, and disabled both, and BigBox didn't crash once. It must only happen after the emu has been running for a while.... I guess... and though I'm not too tech savvy that doesn't make much sense. I'll investigate further, but so far the controller thing in general doesn't seem to be panning out.

[DOS76]

I didn't have it occurring every time but as soon as I turned it off it stopped occurring and before I enabled it it never happened.

[Jason Carr]

Yeah, this one has been a real pain to figure out. I have seen it happen myself but it's so rare and random that I can't seem to pinpoint it. I appreciate all the efforts though in figuring it out. It'd be really great if we could nail it down.

[fromlostdays]

Since I posted this, it hasn't crashed once. And I left AHK set to on. I even had Chrono Cross paused for like an hour last night, as company came over, and when I got back everything was still working fine. The only thing I can think of is that when this was happening frequently, I was doing a lot more with RocketLauncher and LaunchBox in terms of set up. RocketLauncherUI was pretty much always open in the background, and I had usually added or subtracted some games or artwork or systems or something. I was also launching a lot, as I had just downloaded the latest version of RetroArch and was rebuilding my per system configs. More action in other words, but that's all I got.

[SentaiBrad]

You can carry over all of your configurations from a previous version of RA. Unless it's a major release there should be no problems. So the next thing to ask the other users when they had crashes was if they were using RocketLauncher.

[fromlostdays]

Tangentially, I have almost 100 configs in my old RA setup I use with HyperSpin, all set up on some nightly from last year, all using the old GUI, and not optimized for my current display. I didn't want to change each config individually, and honestly I have too many systems on that setup, stuff I'll never really use except to show off to friends occasionally e.g Konix Multi System with 3 games. I decided with LaunchBox to focus on the dozen or so systems I actually use. It might be taboo to say here, but I actually have LaunchBox set to launch HyperSpin if I ever feel like scrolling through 50k games. Plus, I learned a lot about RA in the interim and so in the end it actually was easier just to make the new configs. I actually carry two versions of RA now. The newest one I was setting up in the LaunchBox folder, and my old one I renamed to RetroArchMess (as in I use it mainly for the mess core). At any rate, I played ALOT of PS1 games and also set up PS2 and got dirty with some old Devil May Cry last night but still no crash. I think there might be something to the idea that I had RocketLauncherUI open a lot when it was crashing. Or maybe it just doesn't like too much running in the background.. like Chrome, torrent service, etc. I also recently watched a video on how to optimize windows 10 for gaming and went through those steps, so maybe that helped? Just occured me, the only other thing that was different is that now I have my mayflash dolphinbar unplugged completely. Did that to see if I could get a handle on how windows and RA handle multiple 360 controllers. DOS, do you use the dolphinbar? I want to emphasize that for me it was crashing 2 or three times a night, not just occasionally. Now, seems to have stopped crashing completely.

[DOS76]

I do have one but it isn't connected I disabled the AHK settings and haven't had any crashes since then. I have keyboards handy for all of my HTPC's so its not a big deal for me but I know many other users are trying to go full controller. Do you have a link to that video?

[fromlostdays]

This is the video I followed: its pretty generic, uninstalling bloat and turning off certain services. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwiHog2leMM

[DOS76]

Ok This is a custom build so unless it is Windows Bloatware I don't have any OEM stuff on here. Thanks for linking it I'll check it out later.

[SentaiBrad]

I've worked with Windows enough now that I just look up about the new services and go from there myself, or when I want to remove Windows Defender because it sucks. Actually it's really good, but very picky. The other service I want to get rid of Cortana, but no ones made a removal for her yet, I also haven't looked in a while. About the crashes, I am unsure if the other users were using RocketLauncher or the DolphinBar, however something in how they run may be common in everyone, like the driver Dolphin uses, or the code and overlays RL does. Something must be interfering.