Bigbox, Steam Link & Mame crashes

[dingodan]

Disclaimer: not a problem with LB, but I've seen people here use bigbox and steamlink, so thought I'd try my luck. 

Has anybody else got mame working via steamlink & bigbox? Works fine for SNES and NES (retroarch) but plain old mame 179 (and mameui 179) has problems. Works great via big picture + bigbox, just not over the steam link. As soon as mame opens it crashes. Verbose output doesn't explain the behaviour: video, audio, input init, then it crashes without saying why. 

I know this seems like an edge case, but my htpc is linux, so I'm hoping to get my frontend sorted in a single place. Also, my romset is 179, and I don't have an older one (am aware of libretro mame support and steamlink mame support). 

edit: win10x64, 980ti

Edited November 28, 2016 by dingodan

[dingodan]

Has anybody else got mame working via steamlink & bigbox? 

[DOS76]

@Zombeaverdo you have any experience with this.

[Zombeaver]

MAMEUI works via Steam Link, that's what I use. I'm not sure how you have yours setup but Big Box needs to be added to Steam as a Non-Steam Application and then when you start the Link, you connect to the host in Big Picture mode, then start Big Box, launch your emulator; when you quit it'll drop you back to Big Box and when you quit Big Box it'll drop you back to Big Picture. One thing to note about MAME is that it doesn't accept simulated inputs which means that Launchbox's controller automation quit function doesn't work for it - you can, however, add in a custom combination of buttons (I use select + left bumper for example) to quit through MAME's own tab menu, and that will allow you to quit while running it over the Link.

As to the crash, I'm not entirely sure what the issue would be. You might want to try enabling the "attempt to hide console window at startup" box in your emulator entry in Launchbox. That resolves some issues with Link streaming in some cases. It might also be an issue with the video mode setting that you're using - if it's set to D3D, try switching to OpenGL or vice versa. Those would be the first two things I'd try. If that doesn't resolve the issue, I can provide you with screenshots of various settings that I'm using when I get home tonight.

EDIT: You could also try out the various MAME cores for RA since you've already got that working. Standalone MAME is generally better, but it's an option.

[dingodan]

aaaaannnnnd I'm an idiot:

joystickprovider          xinput

Every steamlink tutorial tells you to use xinput, but I had left this at auto. Thank you very much for responding - knowing that it was possible made me double check my assumptions. 

Pro tip for anyone troubleshooting mame in windows without easy access to a keyboard: set your LB emulator to use a batch file, then redirect the verbose output to a log file:

mame64 -verbose %1 > output.log

%1 is the first argument LB will give it (the romname).

2500+ Coin-ops in my lounge room! Yeah! 

[Zombeaver]

10 minutes ago, dingodan said:

Every steamlink tutorial tells you to use xinput, but I had left this at auto.

Yep, if there's one universal rule for Steam Link, it's that you need to be using Xinput with everything.

11 minutes ago, dingodan said:

Pro tip for anyone troubleshooting mame in windows without easy access to a keyboard

I bought one of these when I bought my Link. It's extremely handy. That is a useful tip though.