9.8-beta-1 Released

[wallmachine]

10 hours ago, Juzzotec said:

@Jason Carr did you fix something around button automation in the last few beta's.

Exiting Taito games that use exe are now exiting game with the button combo perfectly, I don't have to rely on R3 setup as escape.

Beta 16 is working great, good job buddy ??

no idea what I'm doing wrong I can't get keyboard automation working with TAITO or Daphne games using 1 keyboard press. I'm using a batch file to run both systems.

Is the only point of Keyboard/Controller automation to allow multiple button presses to do something?

Edited May 19, 2019 by wallmachine

[neil9000]

3 minutes ago, wallmachine said:

no idea what I'm doing wrong I can't get keyboard automation working with TAITO or Daphne games using 1 keyboard press. I'm using a batch file to run both systems.

Is the only point of Keyboard/Controller automation to allow multiple button presses to do something?

Yes, keyboard automation works the same way as controller automation, you need to use two keys, one as a hold and another as a exit.

[wallmachine]

4 minutes ago, neil9000 said:

Yes, keyboard automation works the same way as controller automation, you need to use two keys, one as a hold and another as a exit.

oh okay yeah I've got enough buttons on control panel for an exit key. How can just using an exit key and keyboard/controller automation be so different?

I guess just to note holding down the key and pressing the exit key still doesn't work.

Edited May 19, 2019 by wallmachine

[Juzzotec]

6 hours ago, wallmachine said:

oh okay yeah I've got enough buttons on control panel for an exit key. How can just using an exit key and keyboard/controller automation be so different?

I guess just to note holding down the key and pressing the exit key still doesn't work.

Why are you using a bat file to launch, aren’t you using Game Loader exe. I’m using JVS Loader and I configured the exit key as escape key keyboard in JConfig. When I use the exit button combination in LaunchBox, it works now... a clean exit but no game exit screen. Still it works perfectly... 

[wallmachine]

36 minutes ago, Juzzotec said:

Why are you using a bat file to launch, aren’t you using Game Loader exe. I’m using JVS Loader and I configured the exit key as escape key keyboard in JConfig. When I use the exit button combination in LaunchBox, it works now... a clean exit but no game exit screen. Still it works perfectly... 

So I don't have to import each Game Loader ALL RH.exe for each game and manually rename each entry then lose it when scraping metadata.

1) I create an emulator called Game Loader ALL RH.bat
2) I then create a .txt file with the name of the game in each directory
3) I then import those .txt files into LaunchBox
4) I then use the Game Loader ALL RH.bat as the emulator

Functions the same as using Game Loader ALL RH.exe from each directory and I don't need to rename each .exe at import and keep my game name.

I use that one Game Loader ALL RH.bat for all the systems below. I do a similar thing for American Laser Games, Daphne and WoW Action Max.

Arcade PC
beatmania IIDX
beatmania IIDX Omnimix
Dance Dance Revolution
eX-BOARD
EZ2DJ
Jubeat
Konami PC
Namco System ES1
Namco System ES3A
Namco System ES3B
Namco System ES3X
Namco System N2
NESiCAxLive
Pop'n Music
Pop'n Music Omnimix
REFLEC BEAT
Sega Europa-R
Sega Lindbergh Red
Sega Lindbergh Red EX
Sega Lindbergh Yellow
Sega RingEdge
Sega RingEdge 2
Sega RingWide
SOUND VOLTEX
TAITO Type X
TAITO Type X Zero
TAITO Type X+
TAITO Type X²
TAITO Type X³

Edited May 20, 2019 by wallmachine

[Juzzotec]

4 hours ago, wallmachine said:

So I don't have to import each Game Loader ALL RH.exe for each game and manually rename each entry then lose it when scraping metadata.

1) I create an emulator called Game Loader ALL RH.bat
2) I then create a .txt file with the name of the game in each directory
3) I then import those .txt files into LaunchBox
4) I then use the Game Loader ALL RH.bat as the emulator

Functions the same as using Game Loader ALL RH.exe from each directory and I don't need to rename each .exe at import and keep my game name.

I use that one Game Loader ALL RH.bat for all the systems below. I do a similar thing for American Laser Games, Daphne and WoW Action Max.

Arcade PC
beatmania IIDX
beatmania IIDX Omnimix
Dance Dance Revolution
eX-BOARD
EZ2DJ
Jubeat
Konami PC
Namco System ES1
Namco System ES3A
Namco System ES3B
Namco System ES3X
Namco System N2
NESiCAxLive
Pop'n Music
Pop'n Music Omnimix
REFLEC BEAT
Sega Europa-R
Sega Lindbergh Red
Sega Lindbergh Red EX
Sega Lindbergh Yellow
Sega RingEdge
Sega RingEdge 2
Sega RingWide
SOUND VOLTEX
TAITO Type X
TAITO Type X Zero
TAITO Type X+
TAITO Type X²
TAITO Type X³

@wallmachine What’s the script inside game loader all rh.bat? I wanna try it.

Also where do you place the bat file? Okay so you manually set it up with all the other emulators in its own directory. Just wanted to know whats inside that bat file, how does it know what to do with the empty text file?

Edited May 20, 2019 by Juzzotec

[Juzzotec]

13 hours ago, PanteraZombie said:

That's good to hear... I've also noticed that button automation is now closing FS-UAE for Commodore Amiga/CD32 when I used to have to manually exit. However, button automation is not closing a version of MAME I have set up for MESS...

It's best to setup exit inside MAME settings, you can setup the same button combo  

[Jason Carr]

On 5/17/2019 at 5:29 PM, wallmachine said:

When does the 'Minimum Startup Screen Display Time' start? I'm using Game Loader ALL RH as my Emulator and I've set the start to all different times however it seems to end at the same time every time. Also I'm using Game Loader ALL RH to display scan lines however the scan lines will load over the top of the startup. Also when I use BigBox the game window goes into not responding.

 

If you read the dialog with that setting, it notes that if the emulator uses exclusive fullscreen mode, then nothing can be done to delay the display of the game, so I'm guessing that's why the delay isn't doing anything. Per the scan lines, I'm almost positive there's nothing we can do about that either, unfortunately. All we do is launch the EXE; we can't really tell Game Loader to wait to display the scan lines.

I'm hoping to do some testing with Game Loader ALL RH before release, but it sounds like there are some aspects of it that will likely be out of our control.

On 5/17/2019 at 10:22 PM, ZeSystem said:

Loading screen for Steam games disappear too fast as soon as Steam's loading window closes to load the real game.

Every Steam game is different and thus getting game startup and shutdown screens to work well out of the box is difficult. You should be able to adjust the startup screen delay individually for each game (or using bulk edit). But not all games will work perfectly.

On 5/18/2019 at 12:27 PM, bbweiners said:

Yeah, that makes sense. Is there a way to have a black screen load when the pause screen closes for 0.1-1.0 seconds?

The black screen wouldn't be active, so the emulator would take the key strokes from the ahk script. I've done this before in ahk.

Obviously the black screen would be something people could choose to enable and adjust how long it's active.

This seems like an easy way to cover up the exit messiness as well as the load state messiness.

Thanks!

If the game/emulator uses exclusive fullscreen mode, then unfortunately this isn't possible. What "messiness" are you seeing with load state?

On 5/18/2019 at 12:49 PM, Mike Stewart said:

Hi Jason. Thanks very much for all the features you've packed into version 9.8 - the Pause screen in particular is fantastic and one I've been looking forward to for a long time. After 9.8 is officially released, likely next week, would it be possible to add into an early beta for version 9.9 the suggestion I posted earlier in this thread, to add an option to save PDF browsing location for next time? As another forum user noted, this wouldn't be specific to the Pause screen option. I know the major focus of the next few releases will be finishing up the small number of remaining big ticket items from the last poll, but if this could be put in at some point that would be great - thanks for considering anyway.

I actually already looked into tackling that, but there wasn't a straightforward solution. Considering that I spent 8 hours just trying to get zooming working properly with the Chrome PDF reader, unfortunately I'm hesitant to dive back into it. Hopefully I can attempt to get it in again eventually, but it's not likely something that will happen soon.

On 5/19/2019 at 4:12 AM, Juzzotec said:

@Jason Carr did you fix something around button automation in the last few beta's.

Exiting Taito games that use exe are now exiting game with the button combo perfectly, I don't have to rely on R3 setup as escape.

Beta 16 is working great, good job buddy ??

Yes, I did make the exiting automation slightly more robust in the last few betas. Glad to hear that it's paying off.

[Jason Carr]

21 hours ago, Hazuki said:

Hi all. Haven't tried the new beta, but just wanted to ask. Is the disc swap accessible from the pause screen? And if yes, can I select a disc that is in 7zip and have launchbox unpack before exiting the pause screen?

Disc swapping is available on the pause screen, but it is still dependent on the emulator supporting it, and being configured properly for it. I haven't added explicit support for unzipping multi-disc games, so I don't expect that would work. I'll probably put a better solution for all of that on the next community poll.

20 hours ago, PanteraZombie said:

That's good to hear... I've also noticed that button automation is now closing FS-UAE for Commodore Amiga/CD32 when I used to have to manually exit. However, button automation is not closing a version of MAME I have set up for MESS...

If you add "-keyboardprovider dinput" to the command-line parameters for the emulator, that will probably fix it.

18 hours ago, wallmachine said:

oh okay yeah I've got enough buttons on control panel for an exit key. How can just using an exit key and keyboard/controller automation be so different?

I guess just to note holding down the key and pressing the exit key still doesn't work.

If all you want to do is use a single key for exiting games, just bind that key to Escape. Escape works to close pretty much every emulator across the board already, out of the box.

[Line]

On 5/9/2019 at 8:37 AM, Jason Carr said:

Not a bad idea. I'll look to see if that's easy to pull off.

Hi Jason, with regards to the LEDBlinky pause screen button demos:

It looks like the best method would be to trigger the game start LEDBlinky command.

LEDBLinky.exe <rom> <emulator>

I have been able to add a custom AHK event on pause for each of my emulators to achieve this result. But for my Windows games there isn't an option for a global pause screen AHK override. So I've been going in one by one to add a Pause AHK script.

I see there is an option menu selection for Windows AHK on launch, perhaps that could be expanded to include Pause menu AHK options too? 

EDIT: Upon further research it looks like this would require passing along the title for the Windows game, but I don't think LaunchBox can pass a parameter like that to AHK yet.

Edited May 20, 2019 by Line

[bbweiners]

It's the same thing as when you select exit. It flashes to the game for about 0.5 seconds and then loads the state.

[neil9000]

1 minute ago, bbweiners said:

It's the same thing as when you select exit. It flashes to the game for about 0.5 seconds and then loads the state.

It needs to do so as its sending a key press to the emulator. That key press can not be sent if the emulator window does not have focus.

[bbweiners]

2 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

If you read the dialog with that setting, it notes that if the emulator uses exclusive fullscreen mode, then nothing can be done to delay the display of the game, so I'm guessing that's why the delay isn't doing anything. Per the scan lines, I'm almost positive there's nothing we can do about that either, unfortunately. All we do is launch the EXE; we can't really tell Game Loader to wait to display the scan lines.

I'm hoping to do some testing with Game Loader ALL RH before release, but it sounds like there are some aspects of it that will likely be out of our control.

Every Steam game is different and thus getting game startup and shutdown screens to work well out of the box is difficult. You should be able to adjust the startup screen delay individually for each game (or using bulk edit). But not all games will work perfectly.

If the game/emulator uses exclusive fullscreen mode, then unfortunately this isn't possible. What "messiness" are you seeing with load state?

I actually already looked into tackling that, but there wasn't a straightforward solution. Considering that I spent 8 hours just trying to get zooming working properly with the Chrome PDF reader, unfortunately I'm hesitant to dive back into it. Hopefully I can attempt to get it in again eventually, but it's not likely something that will happen soon.

Yes, I did make the exiting automation slightly more robust in the last few betas. Glad to hear that it's paying off.

 

1 minute ago, neil9000 said:

It needs to do so as its sending a key press to the emulator. That key press can not be sent if the emulator window does not have focus.

Right, but you can draw a window over the running emulator that doesn't have focus. That's why I suggested something simple like a black screen.

[Jason Carr]

10 minutes ago, bbweiners said:

Right, but you can draw a window over the running emulator that doesn't have focus. That's why I suggested something simple like a black screen.

No you can't; not when the emulator is running in exclusive fullscreen mode, which is most often the case. Rocket Launcher gets around this by running everything in windowed mode. This has previously been discussed to the moon and back though; you can find the previous discussion in a prior beta thread.

50 minutes ago, Line said:

Hi Jason, with regards to the LEDBlinky pause screen button demos:

It looks like the best method would be to trigger the game start LEDBlinky command.

LEDBLinky.exe <rom> <emulator>

I have been able to add a custom AHK event on pause for each of my emulators to achieve this result. But for my Windows games there isn't an option for a global pause screen AHK override. So I've been going in one by one to add a Pause AHK script.

I see there is an option menu selection for Windows AHK on launch, perhaps that could be expanded to include Pause menu AHK options too? 

EDIT: Upon further research it looks like this would require passing along the title for the Windows game, but I don't think LaunchBox can pass a parameter like that to AHK yet.

Yeah, at this point, unfortunately we may come back to it but it won't make it in before the official release.

[bbweiners]

I realized that the 3 emulators that I run do all run in windowed mode. I see now where the confusion on my end came from.

[Mr.Laor]

What can I do about accessing default pause scripts if i don't use default emulator names (because I use multiple versions of RetroArch or Mame for example)

 

edit - I just saw Jason's reply for this in the other thread -basically copy and paste them- unfortunately that seems like a lot of work, especially when updates or changes come along

Edited May 20, 2019 by Mr.Laor

[Jason Carr]

Beta 17 is here with just some minor updates:

• Updated translations
• Emulators no longer require the exact name for scripts to populate (now uses a Contains search)

[Retro808]

2 hours ago, Mr.Laor said:

edit - I just saw Jason's reply for this in the other thread -basically copy and paste them- unfortunately that seems like a lot of work, especially when updates or changes come along

Updates probably will not be too big an issue since the scripts are simply an AHK command to press the keys mapped in the emulator for save/load states. It uses the default from the emulator. So as long as the emulator creators do not change the default keys in their updates than Launchbox updates likely will not affect much. What would be a bigger issue is if you use different key/button maps.

 

[Mr.Laor]

Moot, Jason our hero took care of it!

[Drodrik]

4 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

Emulators no longer require the exact name for scripts to populate (now uses a Contains search)

Somebody can explain me please