Performance optimizations and game auditing

[sharp3d]

Ok, so I think I am getting close to my "final" setup in LaunchBox/Big Box. I'm running into some performance issues and I was hoping you all can help me trouble shoot.

I came across this thread and for the most part, did everything suggested.

I'm using LaunchBox/Big Box inside my MAME cabinet:

Neo Geo MVS Mini-13 for scale     MAME cab is a little rough around the edges, but once I'm happy with the software setup I'm going to do some dressup to the outside.

 

Anyway, I am running Big Box on my old work laptop. Full specs can be found here.

Windows 7 Home Premium

Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.5GHz

NVIDIA Quadro FX 1600M - 256 MB, Core: 625 MHz, Memory: 800 MHz, GDDR3, 512MB with TurboCache

4096MB DDR2 PC6400 800MHz (I upgraded from stock)

Because I'm using an arcade CRT monitor, the max resolution is set to 800x600 @60Hz

LB/BB and ROMS are setup on a 5TB external Seagate drive using USB 3.0 ( I added an express card with two USB 3.0 ports on my laptop hoping it would help) 

 

So again, like the performance thread suggested, I have the bare minimum system processes running. Disabled Windows Aero, HDD defragged, default BB theme, no videos, clear logos for both platforms and ROMS(preference), 25 systems, 11213 ROMs, turned off all background images and reduced image quality to medium. When I scroll for a bit the wheel keeps making the scroll sound but the clear logos disappear and can take 5-20 seconds to reappear sometimes. I saw that changing the logos to just display the list was one of the performance suggestions but I'm hoping to be able to make a few more tweaks where I can leave the clear logos on, because I think this looks so much better. When I Force populate all game wheel images does that stay cached even after a reboot or does that have to be run each session? Here are some screenshots of my settings windows, please let me know if there is anything else I can turn on/off to help performance.

 

 

Also, I have a few questions about some of BB capabilities. When viewing a massive list of games is there a way to scroll/skip from letter to letter? Hyperspin allowed you to press left or right on the joystick to bring up the alphabet and that was super handy. I did notice the search feature where you can bring up the keyboard in BB, which is cool, but this doesn't seem to really be navigable by arcade joystick and buttons. Would be great if I could joystick around the keyboard and press the same "enter" button that I have mapped to an arcade button press. Then, lets say I am browsing my SNES games and I go to select one, in order to start you have to go to another menu and press "play" is there anyway to skip this second menu? I just want to launch the game from the previous screen to streamline the game launch process. 

 

That's about it for my current LB/BB questions. my last few are about game auditing.

 

As you'd expect, when you have so many games a fair amount of them end up not working. I'm not really familiar with the audit process in general, but is there a way for launchbox or retroarch or MAME to "test" the games to see which ones are working and which aren't? I imagine this would take a long time. When I audit in LB I just get a list of games, it doesn't really tell me much about their status, if they're working or not etc. 

 

Thanks for the help.  

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 4, 2019 by sharp3d

[Lordmonkus]

Your system specs are very low end, BigBox does require higher system specs to run smoothly. A better graphics card would help but since you are using a laptop that is highly unlikely to be upgradeable.

7 hours ago, sharp3d said:

When viewing a massive list of games is there a way to scroll/skip from letter to letter?

BigBox has this feature as well.

7 hours ago, sharp3d said:

is there a way for launchbox or retroarch or MAME to "test" the games to see which ones are working and which aren't?

No.

7 hours ago, sharp3d said:

When I audit in LB I just get a list of games, it doesn't really tell me much about their status, if they're working or not etc.

This is not what the audit tool is for.

7 hours ago, sharp3d said:

in order to start you have to go to another menu and press "play" is there anyway to skip this second menu? I just want to launch the game from the previous screen to streamline the game launch process.

Yes there is another button you can press, check your controller mapping settings in BigBox to see which button it is exactly, by default on an XBox controller I believe it is the X button but I am unsure off the top of my head.

[neil9000]

6 minutes ago, Lordmonkus said:

Yes there is another button you can press, check your controller mapping settings in BigBox to see which button it is exactly, by default on an XBox controller I believe it is the X button but I am unsure off the top of my head.

You can turn this "Game Details Screen" off in the options. I believe the option is "Skip Game Details Screen" so it just launches into the game with your A button.

[sharp3d]

It's an older laptop sure, but it could run games like Skyrim and similar games that came out around the same time at near max settings at native resolution. Not sure why scrolling some PNGs would be so demanding?  

 

You say that Big Box has this feature, but you don't mention how to use it? I did notice that in keyboard mapping there was "Page up" and Page down" but this doesn't seem to do what I was asking. It just skips a chunk of games, not jump from A >B etc. If this alphabet feature doest exist, what is it called? Does an onscreen "letter" popup similar to hyperspin or?

Thanks

[Retro808]

31 minutes ago, sharp3d said:

It's an older laptop sure, but it could run games like Skyrim and similar games that came out around the same time at near max settings at native resolution. Not sure why scrolling some PNGs would be so demanding?  

 

You say that Big Box has this feature, but you don't mention how to use it? I did notice that in keyboard mapping there was "Page up" and Page down" but this doesn't seem to do what I was asking. It just skips a chunk of games, not jump from A >B etc. If this alphabet feature doest exist, what is it called? Does an onscreen "letter" popup similar to hyperspin or?

Thanks

Depending on the theme's view you are in (vertical wheel versus horizontal wheel) you will either move left or right (vertical wheel), up or down (horizontal wheel). In this image when I pushed left it popped up the letter grid on the bottom. I can select the letter to jump to. 

[sharp3d]

Hmm weird. I’m using default theme. Perhaps I messed up when I was initially setting up my controls. In “keyboard mapping” I set page up and page down to joystick left and right thinking this would be the alphabet skip setting. So I might need to set that back to default. Which reminds me, having a “reset to default” on each options screen sure would come in handy. 

 

[fromlostdays]

You can try turning off all the transitions as well. Having all of them set to "none" may help with scrolling. I have a higher end PC and I still keep them at none because it doesn't look any worse to me that way. 

Oh, and I seem to recall there is a way to slow down the scroll speed? If so, that might also help. 

 

Edited April 4, 2019 by fromlostdays

[sharp3d]

1 minute ago, fromlostdays said:

You can try turning off all the transitions as well. Having all of them set to "none" may help with scrolling. I have a higher end PC and I still keep them at none because it doesn't look any worse to me that way. 

Thanks, I'll set this up as well.

Here are my current keyboard mapping settings.

Is Page Up and Page down supposed to trigger the alphabet search? Also, how would you set a mapping to "none"?

[Lordmonkus]

40 minutes ago, sharp3d said:

It's an older laptop sure, but it could run games like Skyrim and similar games that came out around the same time at near max settings at native resolution. Not sure why scrolling some PNGs would be so demanding? 

Your ram and low end graphics chip is the bottle neck for BigBox.

BigBox caches the images into memory and like I said previously a more modern video card would help but because this is a laptop you cannot upgrade it.

You linked to my performance guide and in that guide I show a very low end PC that I run with BigBox on it with reasonable results with tweaks like lowering image quality and disabling transition effects but that PC also has a much better graphics card than your laptop, it has 1 gig of gddr5 vram in it which helps a lot.

[fromlostdays]

Sorry, I don't want to confuse you. I wasn't talking about keyboard mappings. In the last screen shot of the original post, those settings are ... image transitions.. kinda. Like does the box art just disappear, or does it fade or does it shoot off the side of the screen etc. You can turn all of those off, and it might help with the scrolling through games.

In bigbox, in order to clear a button mapping you would select the mapping and instead of mapping it, press "Esc" on the keyboard. That will set the button mapping to none.

[sharp3d]

Hmm I currently have the esc key set to exit game and close LaunchBox. I’ll have to reconfigure that I guess. Haha

any ideas how my keyboard mapping should be setup to allow for alphabet scrolling? 

[Lordmonkus]

You just need to press left or right arrows for a vertical wheel view or up or down for a horizontal view.

[neil9000]

1 hour ago, sharp3d said:

Which reminds me, having a “reset to default” on each options screen sure would come in handy. 

Deleting the bigboxsettings.xml in the Launchbox/Data folder will set everything in Bigbox back to defaults at next launch.

[DOS76]

Yeah I have a Dell Inspiron 1525 with a Core 2 Duo T8300 and 4GB of RAM and it is choppy while running BigBox but always worked fine with LB (although I don't think I've tried it since the Engine Switch). I wouldn't expect that PC to run BB smoothly unfortunately

[jophran]

Hi, as a personal experience I noticed some improvement in performance when I switched to a SSD hard drive, no need to put everything there, just the program and the media. 

[sharp3d]

Oh I might try moving the apps and media to the PCs HDD and leaving the roms on the external. 

[sharp3d]

Ok, guys I'm still struggling with performance a bit here. What I failed to mention earlier was yes, I intend to run Laucnbox/Big Box on an older workstation laptop, but... everything is on an external HDD connected using USB 3 and when I connect this drive to my new primary desktop where I have a Core i7 6800, a GTX 1080ti and 32GB of RAM it runs just about the same. Very choppy navigating through the game wheel. I guess the USB connection could be the bottleneck but sounds like lots of other are using this method of having everything installed on a external and after all launchbox does advertise itself as being "mobile" for this very reason. Shouldnt be having performace issues, since earlier the blame was on my laptops GPU and what little memory it had.

Lastly, as I pointed out before, I turned off just about all features in the default theme except for clear logos. I have background images turned off, but check it out. I still have them showing up. Either I'm not following and background images are something different or there's a bug. 

settings showing where I have background images turned off:

 and when I hover over a game I still get background images behind everything, whats the deal?

Thanks