How to customize game selections in playlists based on different users? Possible?

[kritvichu]

I'm new to BigBox. I need a guidance, please.
I created many playlists. Many games in those playlists are easy to break if messing around too much like games on Teknoparrot/Taito/jConfig/Game Loader, while many are content not appropriate for the kids.
Sometimes, kids and my friends want to play games on my arcade cabinet. 

What I am doing now is to go to each playlist, right-click to hide all games first, then unhide those selected games for kids. I have to do this process on every playlist and lock BigBox to show only Playlist view. This seems to work fine.
When I want to play it, I just enter the passcode and click to show hide game to see all the game content. However, the problem is many times I have my friends come to play games. I want them to see more contents than kids do, but not want to shown all those games that are too easy to mess up. I ended up having to unhide some games for my friends to play, but I need to remember which one and make sure to hide them back again for the kids not see them next time. It is quite a hassle and so easy to forget.  

How can I create 3 separate custom playlists; one for myself showing every games, one for my friends showing less game selections to choose from, and the last one for young kids showing only very restricted content?

I'm not sure if there is a better way to do this to allow Bigbox to show games available on each playlist based on the user profile or something? Does anyone have this issue? any suggestion?

 

Also, I think I run into a glitch very often that the startup video has only sound but no picture. It happens almost every times when I open BigBox from a cold boot. Is this normal?

Edited April 8, 2021 by kritvichu

[Johnny T]

7 hours ago, kritvichu said:

I'm new to BigBox. I need a guidance, please.
I created many playlists. Many games in those playlists are easy to break if messing around too much like games on Teknoparrot/Taito/jConfig/Game Loader, while many are content not appropriate for the kids.
Sometimes, kids and my friends want to play games on my arcade cabinet. 

What I am doing now is to go to each playlist, right-click to hide all games first, then unhide those selected games for kids. I have to do this process on every playlist and lock BigBox to show only Playlist view. This seems to work fine.
When I want to play it, I just enter the passcode and click to show hide game to see all the game content. However, the problem is many times I have my friends come to play games. I want them to see more contents than kids do, but not want to shown all those games that are too easy to mess up. I ended up having to unhide some games for my friends to play, but I need to remember which one and make sure to hide them back again for the kids not see them next time. It is quite a hassle and so easy to forget.  

How can I create 3 separate custom playlists; one for myself showing every games, one for my friends showing less game selections to choose from, and the last one for young kids showing only very restricted content?

I'm not sure if there is a better way to do this to allow Bigbox to show games available on each playlist based on the user profile or something? Does anyone have this issue? any suggestion?

 

Also, I think I run into a glitch very often that the startup video has only sound but no picture. It happens almost every times when I open BigBox from a cold boot. Is this normal?

Maybe one idea would be to create your 3 playlists - Kids / Friends / All 

And then you could run BigBox via 3 different .bat scripts called kids.bat / friends.bat / all.bat.

If you run kids.bat it will move the Friends.xml and All.xml to another location and then start bigbox.exe ??

So all you would need to do is run the relevant batch file?

(the actual script would initially copy all three xml's from their temp location to the Playlist folder - and then move the two that weren't needed back to the temp location)

[kritvichu]

6 hours ago, Johnny T said:

Maybe one idea would be to create your 3 playlists - Kids / Friends / All 

And then you could run BigBox via 3 different .bat scripts called kids.bat / friends.bat / all.bat.

If you run kids.bat it will move the Friends.xml and All.xml to another location and then start bigbox.exe ??

So all you would need to do is run the relevant batch file?

(the actual script would initially copy all three xml's from their temp location to the Playlist folder - and then move the two that weren't needed back to the temp location)

Thank you very much, Johnny T 

I am appreciated on your input. That's exactly what I need.  I never thought about this route but it really makes sense because Bigbox read xml too. Where is that xml located? and what is the file named?

[Johnny T]

It should be in LaunchBox/Data/Playlists/ once you've made your playlists. Or maybe LB/Data/Platform/ if it's a platform.