REQUEST - Show controller mappings before launching game?

[DOS76]

lol the mapping for the 2600 controller is funny its one button if you can't figure it out without a diagram you have bigger problems then emulator issues.

[Retro808]

@ItchyRobot I designed my own. A couple different styles for my cabinets. One is based off my Big Fade pause theme. The background image in that theme will display the control image instead. Sorry on a business trip and not near my pc to share a pic. 
 

I did make single platform images for systems like NES after I learned how to code better so I no longer needed to make images for all games. Tue theme would look for a game specific then fall back to platform specific if none located. 

[ItchyRobot]

1 minute ago, Retro808 said:

@ItchyRobot I designed my own. 

That's what I was afraid of. This stuff is easy for you guys, but people like me struggle with this stuff. Hopefully you can share what code to edit, or what to add, and where to edit, etc when you are back in town. It would be much appreciated. 

I can make my own images and artwork for the controllers, but the code tweaking is over my head. But I am good at following instructions ?

[Milleland]

On 3/13/2017 at 11:13 AM, Crush said:

You can assign a controller button to an AHK script which goes into window mode, displays your image, waits for mouse click and then reverts to fullscreen.

I use a script like this to display a MessageBox with the most common keyboard shortcuts when i run Amiga games with WinUAE.

 

 

Hi maybe it's a bit old post, but could you share the AHK to display the MEssageBox, please? I'm nood in this AHK and showing game control options. Thanks a lot.

[sirgubster9]

On 10/7/2019 at 3:51 PM, Retro808 said:

@ItchyRobot I designed my own. A couple different styles for my cabinets. One is based off my Big Fade pause theme. The background image in that theme will display the control image instead. Sorry on a business trip and not near my pc to share a pic. 
 

I did make single platform images for systems like NES after I learned how to code better so I no longer needed to make images for all games. Tue theme would look for a game specific then fall back to platform specific if none located. 

SO Im using start up screens and I would love to be able to have two of the images fall back to platform specific images like you mentioned.  Right now I would have to copy and paste my controller image into every single game, but if I could have it fallback to platform images I could just use one controller image per platform... any ideas.  within launchbox priorities I couldnt find anything that worked, everything was game specific.  I know I have a pause theme that uses platform images but every startup theme I have uses only game images... help guys.

[Retro808]

44 minutes ago, sirgubster9 said:

SO Im using start up screens and I would love to be able to have two of the images fall back to platform specific images like you mentioned.  Right now I would have to copy and paste my controller image into every single game, but if I could have it fallback to platform images I could just use one controller image per platform... any ideas.  within launchbox priorities I couldnt find anything that worked, everything was game specific.  I know I have a pause theme that uses platform images but every startup theme I have uses only game images... help guys.

There really is not LB setting to do what you need. It has to be coded into a theme. I made a Pause theme that will do what you want. Preferred to do it as a Pause versus Startup since people playing could use a little extra time looking over a games controls.

To use it be sure to read the instructions for file location and naming. Specifically pay attention to game naming.

[sirgubster9]

4 hours ago, Retro808 said:

There really is not LB setting to do what you need. It has to be coded into a theme. I made a Pause theme that will do what you want. Preferred to do it as a Pause versus Startup since people playing could use a little extra time looking over a games controls.

To use it be sure to read the instructions for file location and naming. Specifically pay attention to game naming.

Yes thank you! I use your pause theme and I love it! I got all my consoles set up with it and its awesome!!! I'm still working on all the arcade games because I'm using like an arcade cabinet so no gamepads like you had. I was able to alter your art files for the consoles so thank you so much. Obviously the arcades are individual so going to take me a while.... anywho I was hoping to basically use your art files ish and have them be during the start up screen as well as the pause screen. I thought since there was a code to populate the specific art file in a specific location I could maybe take that script or line of text and like copy it into an existing startup screen theme. Like hey instead of this upper right hand picture grabbing from this game location it instead grabs from this other platform location.... thoughts?

Edited July 1, 2020 by sirgubster9

[Retro808]

@sirgubster9 What startup theme are you using?

[sirgubster9]

2 hours ago, Retro808 said:

@sirgubster9 What startup theme are you using?

Multi image start up theme. Goal is to switch top right image for platform controller. And bottom right image for home made controller 

[Retro808]

1 hour ago, sirgubster9 said:

Multi image start up theme. Goal is to switch top right image for platform controller. And bottom right image for home made controller 

Can you post a platform controller image and a game image and I can tweak the theme for you. Want to use you images to test how the layout looks.

Here is a quick edit. I did need to adjust the the layout of everything a bit. Top right is general platform control and bottom right is game specific. It uses the image path and naming convention requirements from.

 

[sirgubster9]

1 hour ago, Retro808 said:

Can you post a platform controller image and a game image and I can tweak the theme for you. Want to use you images to test how the layout looks.

Here is a quick edit. I did need to adjust the the layout of everything a bit. Top right is general platform control and bottom right is game specific. It uses the image path and naming convention requirements from.

 

Oh dude this is amazing! For arcades I haven't really gotten started yet since they are all different ish.  For platform, let's say dreamcast I was trying to use your dreamcast remote just by itself in the top right. And then an altered version of your generic arcade arcade in the bottom right (I probably would have used your sweeter joystick setup that you have in this photo at the bottom right but I couldnt find a photo shop version of it)

 

But ya in theory top right would be real system controller and then bottom right would be custom system controller. But then in theory you could over right one or both with game specific stuff. Almost exactly how you have your pause screen but for 2 images instead of just one.

[neil9000]

2 hours ago, sirgubster9 said:

Multi image start up theme.

Good taste.  

[ItchyRobot]

I don't have a start-up image showing controls (not enough time for me to study it). But I do use Retro808's pause theme for displaying my own custom images. Here is an example of how I have it set up for NES...

And here is an example of one of my Arcade fighting games, Mortal Kombat III...

[sirgubster9]

3 minutes ago, ItchyRobot said:

I don't have a start-up image showing controls (not enough time for me to study it). But I do use Retro808's pause theme for displaying my own custom images. Here is an example of how I have it set up for NES...

And here is an example of one of my Arcade fighting games, Mortal Kombat III...

Dude that's an awesome setup. I have mine setup very similarly just not as nice. My custom stuff is very obvious that I dont use photoshop...  but I try ha ha.  

 

I love the pause theme for sure. Just thought it would be cool to have something very similar for a startup screen as well since newcomers wont know to pause to look at controls. Atleast they will get a quick general idea of the controls as the game starts up. Honestly if i knew how to i would possibly even just use the pause screen as a start up screen

[ItchyRobot]

2 hours ago, sirgubster9 said:

Dude that's an awesome setup. I have mine setup very similarly just not as nice. My custom stuff is very obvious that I dont use photoshop...  but I try ha ha. 

I did not know how to use Photoshop either, and refused to buy it. So I went with a free product called Gimp. It is basically a shareware version of Photoshop. Give it a try. It has a bit of a learning curve, but I figured it out through youtube videos. I also use the built in Windows Paint 3D for quick crops and image edits before bringing into Gimp. I can share my templates if you decide to go the Gimp route.

https://www.gimp.org/

 

[sirgubster9]

1 minute ago, ItchyRobot said:

I did not know how to use Photoshop either, and refused to buy it. So I went with a free product called Gimp. It is basically a shareware version of Photoshop. Give it a try. It has a bit of a learning curve, but I figured it out through youtube videos. I also use the built in Windows Paint 3D for quick crops and image edits before bringing into Gimp. I can share my templates if you decide to go the Gimp route.

https://www.gimp.org/

 

Oh dude! I used gimp as well! I learned enough to get by but there where several times that I just said ok I cant figure that out let's do something different. But ya I liked it a lot. And it was free so that's always nice

[Retro808]

3 hours ago, sirgubster9 said:

Oh dude this is amazing! For arcades I haven't really gotten started yet since they are all different ish.  For platform, let's say dreamcast I was trying to use your dreamcast remote just by itself in the top right. And then an altered version of your generic arcade arcade in the bottom right (I probably would have used your sweeter joystick setup that you have in this photo at the bottom right but I couldnt find a photo shop version of it)

 

But ya in theory top right would be real system controller and then bottom right would be custom system controller. But then in theory you could over right one or both with game specific stuff. Almost exactly how you have your pause screen but for 2 images instead of just one.

OK. I will mess around with it a bit more. Should be simple enough to do what you want. So you want the top right to show what each platform's actual controller looks like. Thank the bottom right will show the game specific mapping and if a game specific one does not exist than a general platform mapping. Correct?

[sirgubster9]

8 minutes ago, Retro808 said:

OK. I will mess around with it a bit more. Should be simple enough to do what you want. So you want the top right to show what each platform's actual controller looks like. Thank the bottom right will show the game specific mapping and if a game specific one does not exist than a general platform mapping. Correct?

Correct sir. That's exactly right!  I think with arcade games it'll be a little more wonky the different amount of buttons and what they do and what not, but for consoles that setup would work perfectly. 

With arcades maybe the only difference would be that the top right would have a generic arcade controller as the fallback but you could also have a game specific controller. And then the bottom right would be the same as for the consoles setup. Now that I think about it, the top right could use the meta scrape because i believe arcade controls or control panel is one of the photos that launchbox scrapes. 

 

[Retro808]

18 hours ago, sirgubster9 said:

Correct sir. That's exactly right!  I think with arcade games it'll be a little more wonky the different amount of buttons and what they do and what not, but for consoles that setup would work perfectly. 

With arcades maybe the only difference would be that the top right would have a generic arcade controller as the fallback but you could also have a game specific controller. And then the bottom right would be the same as for the consoles setup. Now that I think about it, the top right could use the meta scrape because i believe arcade controls or control panel is one of the photos that launchbox scrapes. 

 

Messed around a bit more this morning before work. Had to redo the layout as making the game control images large enough to be best viewed was not working in the original layout. So I tweaked it some. So the top right will show the original controller or the handheld of each system. The bottom middle image will show a game specific control if one exists (such as arcade controls) and if not will show a general platform control (like in consoles). The Game Boy is showing the console specific and Mortal Kombat is showing the game specific. If MK did not have an image for game specific it would show a standard arcade fallback.

[sirgubster9]

31 minutes ago, Retro808 said:

Messed around a bit more this morning before work. Had to redo the layout as making the game control images large enough to be best viewed was not working in the original layout. So I tweaked it some. So the top right will show the original controller or the handheld of each system. The bottom middle image will show a game specific control if one exists (such as arcade controls) and if not will show a general platform control (like in consoles). The Game Boy is showing the console specific and Mortal Kombat is showing the game specific. If MK did not have an image for game specific it would show a standard arcade fallback.

Dude! This is amazing!  How do I do this on my end? Did you upload this start up theme on launchbox somewhere? Or do you have the script or whatever that i can cut and paste into the multi picture theme?