Video Suggestion: Setting Up Emulator Hotkeys for BigBox

[jrusso4587]

First off, not sure if this is the best place to start this topic, so my apologies if it is not.

I would like to see and think others (especially newcomers to the scene) would benefit from a tutorial on how to set up the major hotkey functions to a XB / PS controller in the major console emulators (i.e. RetroArch, PPSPP, Dolphin, PCSX2, etc.)

The beauty of BigBox is that it is a couch and controller oriented version of LaunchBox, so it would be ideal if we could easily use a controller, not a keyboard, to map those commonly used hotkeys to a customizable combination of buttons, like save state, load state, change state and fast forward. I know there are others, but those are the ones I use the most. I just tried Retropie recently and it has that function built in (save state being select + RB, load state being select + LB).

I know that it can be easily done with the older consoles that did not use a lot of buttons and can be configured right in the emulator, but would help with the more modern systems. Also, I understand that it will not work for everything.

Not sure if there is a way to even integrate that functionality into LB/BB itself since I know it already allows for many emulators to be closed via the controller. This would be the next step, but in my opinion, the most logical one outside of making more systems work with LB, which I know is a current focus.

Making saving/loading via the controller easy to implement or built in would be a great selling point for the already great BB to be even better. 

Like I said, it's just a suggestion.

Thoughts?

[DOS76]

In the cases of the controller automation we are using now it is actually sending Windows the code to close that process so LB isn't at any way interacting with any of the emulators and for something like this to be added it would be a massive undertaking. In order to be able to access the save states and things like that the program would have to interact with the emulator itself now for most systems you can use RetroArch and all of those controller features are already built into the emulator so it is unnecessary to add the redundancy there and for other emulator I don't really know how feasible it is for Jason to be attaching into the emulator code.

[jrusso4587]

Okay, I completely understand if there are complexities that prevent or dont make sense to be integrated into LB / BB. 

 

 

[Lordmonkus]

The reason this works so well in RetroPie is because it is using set emulator cores (libretro) to emulate, basically it's like using Retroarch with a different front end. This wouldn't work in Launchbox because there are so many emulators people are using and some of these functions either don't exist at all or are on different hot key combos all together.

The only way to possibly do something like this right now is to use RocketLauncher but then you are looking at setting up that or recoding all those features into Launchbox which is not trivial for a one person dev team. There is an awful lot of backend work that would need to be done.

It would be nice though.

[jrusso4587]

Yep, totally understand and agree with your points. 

To my other suggestion, I think people (the ones who are not power users) would still benefit from a video showing how to implement those emulator features on a controller (if possible) as it would make BB that much better to use. I know people use a lot of emulators, but even a few such as RetroArch would be helpful.

I really don't see much online on this topic....unless I am just missing it.

Edited August 30, 2016 by jrusso4587

[Lordmonkus]

Well if people are using Retroarch it's actually pretty simple through the RA interface. Other emulators is where it gets tricky and requires the use of RocketLauncher and that is beyond the non power users. Hell I don't even use RocketLauncher because of the level of ass pain it is.