Big Box on low res CRT

[supergameco]

Hi all, What experiences have people had running LaunchBox and especially Big Box on low resolution 15KHz CRTs? Thanks, Bob

[SentaiBrad]

I think this might be a purely unique questions. Technically speaking there is nothing holding BigBox or LaunchBox back from performing assuming you have the VGA converted to Composite cabling. The resolution may be funky and really squished too, but like I said, technically it should function.

[Jason Carr]

Hi @supergameco, it should work fine and it should actually scale down properly to a smaller resolution. That said, it doesn't look quite as nice with a 4:3 aspect ratio instead of 16:9, but it still should work fine. If you're considering purchasing Big Box, feel free and if something doesn't work right on your CRT just let me know and I can refund you (or fix the issue if you'd like).

[Domarius]

I'm writing my own emulator front end specifically for CRT screens. For this reason, it uses a simple 3x3 tile view of game screenshots and very minimal text. I'm not going into competition with LaunchBox, no way - it's just that this feature, and a couple of other things I want for my arcade cabinet, don't yet exist in LaunchBox. Also I don't plan on re-creating most of what LaunchBox does, it's just these specific features I need. If LaunchBox had these features, that would save the the time doing it myself and I'd give up my project. Happy to know what the LaunchBox developers think though. I suspect they might not prioritise the features I need though - hence me making my own :)

[Jason Carr]

Hi @Domarius, I won't discourage you from writing your own frontend, but I would say that instead of writing your own you could re-theme Big Box to work better for CRTs. Big Box visuals can now be fully customized so in theory everything should work great that way. What features are missing from Big Box that you're looking to implement?

[Domarius]

Jason Carr said Hi @Domarius, I won't discourage you from writing your own frontend, but I would say that instead of writing your own you could re-theme Big Box to work better for CRTs. Big Box visuals can now be fully customized so in theory everything should work great that way. What features are missing from Big Box that you're looking to implement?

Well if it's possible to customise LaunchBox and reach the result quicker, I will totally do that. Not sure it's the case at the moment, but maybe you can verify; It's all about exposing random games to you in a visual way. I know you guys have taken some steps towards that with screenshot view but in my experience we can do even more. Imagine walking into a room and being immersed in a random selection of game screenshots - you get reminded of games that you forgot about and get excited to play them. I want to move as far away from a text list of game titles as possible. The reason I have the following features is to combat the demoralising effect a flat list of game text titles has on your motivation to find a fun game, and also the overwhelming number of games and not knowing where to start. I have some of these already working but I'm doing a re-write and adding some more features. All are listed below;

• Attract mode: (This is what I have working) This is a "kiosk mode" kind of feature, meant for a cabinet that's left on during a party. It randomly plays games every few minutes like an arcade machine plays demo play-throughs of its games. This works really well for emulated console and arcade games, since when you start them, they naturally do this. So every 3 minutes or so, it closes the game down and starts a new random game. At any time you can walk over and start playing and it will stop the timer when it detects input and let you play the game. You can also just press the favourite button if you like what you see and it will tag it as favourite without stopping the timer. (Actually the favourite button works anywhere - during gameplay, in the menu, etc.)
• Games of the day / week / month: You can change the setting but let's call it "games of the day". As well as your other playlists, there is also one randomly generated called "Games of the day" which randomly picks X amount of games (eg. 20) and puts them in a play list each day or whatever. Opening it should be like "What's in the surprise box today" kind of feeling.
• DOS game interface: Should work for other emulated computers like Amiga, C64 etc. When you choose the game screenshot, it pops up a list of executable files. You choose one and it runs it. The next time you run it, it will automatically have this selected, so you can just hit the "Confirm" button twice to start the game quickly in future. This also gives an easy way for you to run the Setup program of the game. This eliminates the need for a game to have a specialised D-Fend profile imported.
• Manage playlists from within the interface: I have a simple way of creating / deleting playlists and adding / removing games from them, all with the joystick input. This is another "kiosk mode" feature. My approach is centered around what you call "Big box" mode, since that's what I want for my arcade cabinet. I want to be using it and go "That's a cool game" and quickly add it to the "4 player" game playlist in a few seconds rather than have to switch out to another interface or back to windows to do some tweaking, which I will never get around to and forget about the game.

Of course I have other features like onscreen keyboard, searching, etc. which are double-ups of what you have in LaunchBox, but I haven't bothered listing them here. And there are some under-the hood things that are meant to make it easy to just drop in roms and screenshot files, and have them all magically match up and show up with screenshots without you having to do stuff, but I know you have your own version of that too. So what do you think, keep going, or can I help update LaunchBox, or something?

[Jason Carr]

Hi @Domarius, very cool. It's certainly up to you whether you want to continue down your own path or work with us, of course. You do have some great ideas there. Attract Mode and playlists are definitely things we had already planned on adding; attract mode should be here sooner rather than later. I really like the "games of the day" idea as well. So Big Box will get all of those features eventually. I'm not sure on the DOS game thing since we already have a DOS import that makes that pretty seamless already without having to manually select the EXE, but other than that, I'm on board with pretty much all of it. We don't currently accept code contributions from the community (for many reasons), but we could discuss the possibility of hiring you on part-time as a developer if that's something you're interested in. I have no idea what your background is or any of that, but I won't rule that out as a possibility.

[Domarius]

Thanks @Jason Carr, well I can send a résumé, let me know what's involved. May as well put the time towards doing it in an existing system than re-inventing the wheel. Let me know what you need to make the decision.

[Jason Carr]

Glad to hear you're interested, @Domarius. A resume and a requested hourly rate would be good for starters. :) Edit: Do you have an example of what you had been working on? Edit 2 (lol): My email is jason@unbrokensoftware.com.

[Domarius]

Thanks @Jason Carr :) Yeah I'll send a portfolio / examples as part of that. We'll discuss the details I guess.

[VACRMH]

Just chiming in that I've been using Big Box on some CRTs (PVM 14m4u and PVM 20n6u) it took some messing around with, but I'm getting good results. Started with using crt_emudriver, and then moved on to a Extron Super Emotia.

[Jason Carr]

Great to hear, thanks @VACRMH. :)

[Domarius]

On 01/08/2016 at 0:44 PM, Jason Carr said:

Glad to hear you're interested, @Domarius. A resume and a requested hourly rate would be good for starters. Edit: Do you have an example of what you had been working on? Edit 2 (lol): My email is jason@unbrokensoftware.com.

Hey Jason, just checking you got my email.  I guess I'm anxious cause I'm kind of excited about this, I really want this thing to happen

[Jason Carr]

My apologies @Domarius, but I actually didn't get the email! I'm not sure why. I assumed you had decided not to and moved on.

[Domarius]

14 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

My apologies @Domarius, but I actually didn't get the email! I'm not sure why. I assumed you had decided not to and moved on.

Ah wow - ok I'm forwarding it again, to jason@unbrokensoftware.com right now - maybe check your spam folder too??

[Jason Carr]

Got it @Domarius. It was my fault, I somehow let it slip through the cracks. My apologies for that. Reading.

[bxbentendo]

Hey, Im creating my cabinet and use a crt. I am using big box and the text and all the features are not really readable. Any improvement or advance on this topic.

[SentaiBrad]

Since then, Big Box has had a 4:3 theme created for it, so that might help a ton. However, too low resolution of a screen and I'm not sure there will be too much that we can do with the scaling going down that far. Try the theme in our downloads section first and see if that helps.

[Domarius]

Hey guys, keep in touch with me.  Progress is going great on my "kiosk style, CRT friendly" interface, it's a separate program that uses Launchbox data for convenience (because it does a great job at what it does and why re-invent the wheel) but is a completely unique and simple interface.  It's something I want to do but the part that crosses over functionality with Launchbox (scanning your games and building a library) is left to Launchbox, because I will never replicate how good that is.  Instead I should just make the part that's different than Launchbox.

Oh yeah - Jason and I had a chat, turns out what I'm aiming for is too far out of scope of Launchbox.  Particularly the interface.  It's super simple and a lot of the "windowsy" stuff would get in the way of trying to make it as simple and clean as possible for a CRT.  I'm taking inspiration from 8bit and 16bit consoles for how to best make it usable in that resolution.  I'm using SDL2 and C++ and essentially drawing my own graphics.

Also it's built around having this thing in your living room and making it very easy for people to just start playing random games.   This is a different design goal than Launchbox.  Launchbox is for the game enthusiast who wants to organise their games.  My interface is for the game enthusiast who wants to show off their games to people who may not be into games and not know which ones to play.  There are a number of features built around this concept.

Send me an email at domarius@gmail.com and I'll keep you up to date.  I guess I'll also post in this thread with updates and screenshots.  While progress is going well, I'm the kind of person who won't post any updates until the thing is near completion and it's all about adding features.  We've all seen projects that post updates from the start, get people excited, and then fizzle out.  My preference is to not start posting pictures until it's so far along that the thing is definitely going to be completed.

Edited May 27, 2017 by Domarius

[ghettoandroid]

On 5/27/2017 at 6:41 PM, Domarius said:

Send me an email at domarius@gmail.com and I'll keep you up to date.  I guess I'll also post in this thread with updates and screenshots.  While progress is going well, I'm the kind of person who won't post any updates until the thing is near completion and it's all about adding features.  We've all seen projects that post updates from the start, get people excited, and then fizzle out.  My preference is to not start posting pictures until it's so far along that the thing is definitely going to be completed.

 

I would love to see a demo vid or screen shots of your "kiosk style, CRT friendly" interface when you're ready to post some up!