Big Box - Crashing while in attract mode

[faulkkev]

After 13.1 update i thought issue was fixed.  I ran my arcade for 3 days straight worked like a champ. Today i turned it on and it lasted 10 min tops.  This issue seems to have been going on long enough that if it is not  a priority for the developers to resolve it should be.  Nothing is more aggravating than the arcade locking up all the time especially when nothing  loaded on the emulation PC arcade but windows and the associated software to run the games.  i have tried different themes and so on with same results it just locks up and when it does half the time i am forced to power down my windows device due to it not wanting to release and show a desktop or kb. I have seen suggestions for changing format types of videos, if they are suspect or flat out don't work with launchbox then why not remove them as supported file types?   I am a mild hobbyist regarding arcade/emulation. but none the less i paid for a product that has developed a serious issue going beyond what i would consider an acceptable grace/warranty period.  I appreciate all the suggestions i have seen provided and the community, but this issue needs to be resolved.   In my opinion the attract mode and lock down feature is the selling point of using bigbox over launchbox standard.  

With all that said what do you "contributors/development staff of launchbox" need from the community of users affected by this bug to make headway on a solution?  Do we need more debug logs?  Is there an advanced tracing  option we can enabled in a config to enable verbose log capturing, which may help identify why themes are having these issues?   

 

Observations of my lock ups:

1. can go for 5 min to 3 days no issues "since 13.1 update"

2. Always locks on a platform while auto scrolling or displaying a game.  Never seems to lock up during actual demo platform videos.  

3. Lock is almost always hard locked.  Even with my wireless kb it often won't let me kill or get out of the locked screen.  

4. I have tried a few different themes issue remains.  If there are known themes that do no ever exhibit this issue please share as a band-aid until full solutions are available.  

[faeran]

On 2/11/2023 at 4:45 PM, faulkkev said:

With all that said what do you "contributors/development staff of launchbox" need from the community of users affected by this bug to make headway on a solution?  Do we need more debug logs?  Is there an advanced tracing  option we can enabled in a config to enable verbose log capturing, which may help identify why themes are having these issues?   

 

It's important to know which themes you have tried, along with which views you used with those themes.

If you haven't already, I'd recommend trying the default theme and providing testing feedback. 

[faulkkev]

I have tried Unified 1.2 or higher i did run updates can't recall if 1.2 was after the update.  I have used retrofresh as well.   Ill try default see what happens. 

in past i used the below and am using that on retrofresh now.  Sometimes it stays running for awhile sometimes it doesn't very strange. 

 

platform list:

platform wheel 1 

 

Games List View

vertical wheel 1

[divetravis]

On 1/3/2023 at 10:50 AM, moudrost said:

I have mitigated this particular crash issue by changing the "wait time" to 30 minutes and the "time between movements" to 5 minutes in the attract mode settings. It hasn't crashed in a few weeks with these settings. Feels like a memory leak. If I reset it back to the original values I'm back to daily crashes so I'll stick with this for now until a permanent fix can be found.

My vertical cabinet has been rock solid until the latest Windows 11 update and now it has been crashing in attract mode. When it crashes it closes and leaves me back in Windows. Not sure exactly how long it takes to crash but around an hour. I changed my wait time to 5 minutes and my time between movements to 1 minute and the crashing appears to have stopped. It ran all night and when I got up this morning it was still running. Wanted to say thanks to Moudrost for taking the time to post this suggestion👍👍👍

 

[arcademode]

Experienced my first crash, a google search brought up this thread. Looks like it hasn't been touched in almost a year, how's everyone getting on these days?

I had the default attract mode wait times and movement times set to default, trying the @divetravis settings above as previously suggested and hoping that works. 

 

EDIT: Event viewer says I'm out of memory after crashing about 3 hours or so into attract mode. I'll try a longer wait setting I guess? I'm on Win10 with 16gb RAM btw. Attaching error logs which shows memory issue.

EDIT no 2: Still crashing with wait of 5, time between 2.  Now testing 10 and 5 AND switched to Windows Media.  Would more RAM help? Kind of a bummer that 16gb isn't cutting it. I'm pretty disappointed this isn't fixed actually.  Coming from Hyperspin where crashing is a problem due to a Flash memory leak, I was hoping to avoid a similar problem with BigBox. At this point BigBox crashes way faster than HS.

BigBox Error 2.txt BigBox Error.txt

Edited February 14 by arcademode
Adding updates and files

[arcademode]

Going from a 2 minute wait between to a 5 minute wait extended the life by about the same proportion as the ratio between 2 and 5. Similarly I decreased wait time to 2 seconds thinking it would proportionally make the crash occur faster, and it did. Crashed in under an hour with that setting.  Another interesting note is that on a single boot, by the 3rd crash BigBox refused to relaunch completely.  Attaching the error log for that. Tested with Slipstream and Default, same behaviour on both.

So... memory issue? What can I do about that? I'd like to keep attract mode enabled if possible.

 

BB wont open 1.txt

[divetravis]

Sorry to hear you are having troubles. I don't have any advice to offer. My machine has been running well and I have not updated LaunchBox/BigBox in a long time. I figure as long as it is running well why take the risk 😁. I hope you get it solved!!

[arcademode]

22 hours ago, divetravis said:

Sorry to hear you are having troubles. I don't have any advice to offer. My machine has been running well and I have not updated LaunchBox/BigBox in a long time. I figure as long as it is running well why take the risk 😁. I hope you get it solved!!

Yeah it's a bummer man. I'm starting to side with @faulkkev here, Bigbox is a paid product and the fact it's crashing while using attract mode isn't good since it's a pretty basic feature. This thread hasn't been updated in nearly a year so is this crash problem just not a priority or what? One would think such a crash would be high priority.

EDIT:

Good gracious, it appears to be some kind of ongoing issue and in some cases for several years. It seems there have been fixes along the way, no telling what or why though.

Here is another (older) thread reporting attract mode crash issues: 

 

Edited February 16 by arcademode

[MrSco]

On 2/15/2024 at 2:08 PM, arcademode said:

Yeah it's a bummer man. I'm starting to side with @faulkkev here, Bigbox is a paid product and the fact it's crashing while using attract mode isn't good since it's a pretty basic feature. This thread hasn't been updated in nearly a year so is this crash problem just not a priority or what? One would think such a crash would be high priority.

EDIT:

Good gracious, it appears to be some kind of ongoing issue and in some cases for several years. It seems there have been fixes along the way, no telling what or why though.

Here is another (older) thread reporting attract mode crash issues: 

 

Yep. It’s super lame that bigbox can even run attract mode for a day. It’s just playing videos. I even upgraded the entire computer to an amd 7840hs with 32gb of ram and an nvme 4TB ssd. Computer is a beast but bigbox dies trying to do attract mode for an extended period of time. It’s been like this for years. 6 years or more. @Jason Carr doesn’t seem interested in fixing it. 

[Retro808]

1 hour ago, MrSco said:

Yep. It’s super lame that bigbox can even run attract mode for a day. It’s just playing videos. I even upgraded the entire computer to an amd 7840hs with 32gb of ram and an nvme 4TB ssd. Computer is a beast but bigbox dies trying to do attract mode for an extended period of time. It’s been like this for years. 6 years or more. @Jason Carr doesn’t seem interested in fixing it. 

I highly doubt Jason or the team are not interested. Last I spoke to them about this he was not able to replicate it to be able to track down what might be an issue. This was something that plagued me for quite a few years. Between 6 total cabs/builds running BigBox it would affect each them differently or not at all. On 2 of my cabs it ended up being corrupt video files (took some testing but eventually I found which platforms had the culprit files). On one other it just stopped being an issue. Two of them never even experienced the issue. I have not had a single crash in any cabinet in well over a year. 

Have any of you tried removing your video folder and running BB to see if you get any crashes? Not saying this is the true issue, but it is one known to cause this for some users?

[MrSco]

On 2/15/2024 at 2:08 PM, arcademode said:

Yeah it's a bummer man. I'm starting to side with @faulkkev here, Bigbox is a paid product and the fact it's crashing while using attract mode isn't good since it's a pretty basic feature. This thread hasn't been updated in nearly a year so is this crash problem just not a priority or what? One would think such a crash would be high priority.

EDIT:

Good gracious, it appears to be some kind of ongoing issue and in some cases for several years. It seems there have been fixes along the way, no telling what or why though.

Here is another (older) thread reporting attract mode crash issues: 

 

 

18 minutes ago, Retro808 said:

I highly doubt Jason or the team are not interested. Last I spoke to them about this he was not able to replicate it to be able to track down what might be an issue. This was something that plagued me for quite a few years. Between 6 total cabs/builds running BigBox it would affect each them differently or not at all. On 2 of my cabs it ended up being corrupt video files (took some testing but eventually I found which platforms had the culprit files). On one other it just stopped being an issue. Two of them never even experienced the issue. I have not had a single crash in any cabinet in well over a year. 

Have any of you tried removing your video folder and running BB to see if you get any crashes? Not saying this is the true issue, but it is one known to cause this for some users?

I believe I tried images only years ago. Probably in the thread above somewhere. It’s almost definitely related to the videos playing. That’s the only reason I run attract mode is for the videos. I even tried deleting all the media and having launchbox redownload it all fresh. I even setup a webcam to watch the screen so I could capture when it was dying but it was always a different video/game. It shouldn’t be a mystery to get a bunch of videos to play continuously in shuffle. Wtf

[arcademode]

On 2/17/2024 at 6:06 AM, Retro808 said:

I highly doubt Jason or the team are not interested. Last I spoke to them about this he was not able to replicate it to be able to track down what might be an issue. This was something that plagued me for quite a few years. Between 6 total cabs/builds running BigBox it would affect each them differently or not at all. On 2 of my cabs it ended up being corrupt video files (took some testing but eventually I found which platforms had the culprit files). On one other it just stopped being an issue. Two of them never even experienced the issue. I have not had a single crash in any cabinet in well over a year. 

Have any of you tried removing your video folder and running BB to see if you get any crashes? Not saying this is the true issue, but it is one known to cause this for some users?

Just tried removing the video folder, still crashes in the same way. Are all of your various PCs running the same version of Windows? Sidebar I also tried updating net framework. Crashes with and without video folders, so no change basically.

@MrSco is the OP on the older thread which was started over 4 years ago now. It seems crazy to me that in 4 years none of the devs could replicate or remedy this fatal problem.

[arcademode]

Another thread and more users with this attract mode crash issue. Mentioning here because other users in this thread have mentioned removing the videos with no improvement. It would be good if we could all get on the same thread to aggregate the issues and testing. 

 

[arcademode]

Did more things, still crashing:

- Ran BB and LB as Admin
- Compatibility mode for BB and LB, Win8 and Win7
- Fresh installation
- .net framework repair tool
- manually doubled the default windows paging size
- sfc repair in command prompt

Googled up the dll error which brought the net framework repair and sfc scan ideas, didn't help of course.

 

EDIT: Here's a kicker - tried a fresh installation on a different Windows 10 computer using the default theme. Still throws the ntdll.dll error as before. I'm going to try a full delete and reinstall on this other Win10 machine, just to make sure I'm not missing something.

Edited February 20 by arcademode

[arcademode]

Ok so I deleted my Launchbox installation on the other Win10 machine (which has 48gb ram, so there's not ram bottleneck here) and did a completely fresh installation. Setting attract mode to the fastest settings (10 sec wait, 5 sec between) to force the fastest crash and bigbox crashed in <2 hours. Ntdll.dll error, same as before.  (EDIT: important detail excluded. This installation pulled my 30 windows games into the database and I didn't grab any additional media. So no videos, some gameplay screenshots, and maybe 20% of the list had a clear logo. So the issue doesn't seem to be media related)

So what are the odds of it being a Windows problem? In my estimation, low. Testing with my other Win10 machine (which has all the ram headroom and an up-to-date windows install) against the not-so-up-to-date original PC and experiencing the same error seems more like a bigbox problem, right?

Happy to provide any additional information to assist in getting this fixed.  I was able to replicate the bug at random on my only other Windows 10 machine, so the devs should be able to replicate this issue. Is there any hope of this getting fixed, seeing as how similar issues seem to have been plaguing bigbox for years in attract mode?

 

Another edit so I can stop blowing up this thread:

Testing a couple more things now;

1.) AHK script to manually scroll down a list. I'm curious if it's related to the Attract Mode programming, or if simply scrolling through the list causes a crash. Obviously if it's the latter that's a big problem because the crash could occur during normal browsing if you look at enough games

2.) Way back in page 2 or 3 of this thread Jason suggested upgrading to Desktop Runtime 3.1.8. and a user said that helped. I had a slightly older version installed (and 6.0 which I think was installed by a game? not sure but I'm checking into it). So after the AHK test (which seems to be going OK so far) I'll test with Runtime 3.1.8.

 

LATER THE SAME DAY (EDIT)...

So the AHK script successfully navigated my MAME list for way longer than Attract Mode would have worked, around 4 hours. The thinking behind testing in this manner was to rule out any memory errors in loading media. I can test it longer but after scrolling through about 1800 MAME titles (all with video, png, screenshots - the works) everything was smooth sailing.  This seems to indicate an error in the Attract Mode feature itself, no?

I then tested the system with Runtime 3.1.8 and Attract Mode enabled and we're back to crash city.

Edited February 23 by arcademode

[JimV]

I too have been struggling with this problem for the past 3-4 months.  I found a solution that worked for me and I suspect it may be a bug in BigBox.  I found that when I had selected Screen Transition: Random, my BigBox would lock up or some of the screens would be black.  No matter what else I did, as long as I left the screen transitions to random and let Attract Mode run, this would happen to me.  I tried all of these suggestions and none of them worked.  I'm guessing that as the Attract mode ran, it eventually hit the right combination of the transition that was causing problems.  That would explain the varying timeframes in which my machine would have this issue.  Sometimes it was within minutes of going into Attract mode and other times it would take hours.  This might explain why some people have had luck in changing the time between game changes in Attract mode as the fewer moves it makes the less chance you have to hit the bad transition.  But when I set the Screen Transition to a specific transition, the problem stopped immediately.  Hopefully that helps someone.

Edited March 7 by JimV

[JimV]

On 2/21/2024 at 11:33 AM, arcademode said:

Ok so I deleted my Launchbox installation on the other Win10 machine (which has 48gb ram, so there's not ram bottleneck here) and did a completely fresh installation. Setting attract mode to the fastest settings (10 sec wait, 5 sec between) to force the fastest crash and bigbox crashed in <2 hours. Ntdll.dll error, same as before.  (EDIT: important detail excluded. This installation pulled my 30 windows games into the database and I didn't grab any additional media. So no videos, some gameplay screenshots, and maybe 20% of the list had a clear logo. So the issue doesn't seem to be media related)

So what are the odds of it being a Windows problem? In my estimation, low. Testing with my other Win10 machine (which has all the ram headroom and an up-to-date windows install) against the not-so-up-to-date original PC and experiencing the same error seems more like a bigbox problem, right?

Happy to provide any additional information to assist in getting this fixed.  I was able to replicate the bug at random on my only other Windows 10 machine, so the devs should be able to replicate this issue. Is there any hope of this getting fixed, seeing as how similar issues seem to have been plaguing bigbox for years in attract mode?

 

Another edit so I can stop blowing up this thread:

Testing a couple more things now;

1.) AHK script to manually scroll down a list. I'm curious if it's related to the Attract Mode programming, or if simply scrolling through the list causes a crash. Obviously if it's the latter that's a big problem because the crash could occur during normal browsing if you look at enough games

2.) Way back in page 2 or 3 of this thread Jason suggested upgrading to Desktop Runtime 3.1.8. and a user said that helped. I had a slightly older version installed (and 6.0 which I think was installed by a game? not sure but I'm checking into it). So after the AHK test (which seems to be going OK so far) I'll test with Runtime 3.1.8.

 

LATER THE SAME DAY (EDIT)...

So the AHK script successfully navigated my MAME list for way longer than Attract Mode would have worked, around 4 hours. The thinking behind testing in this manner was to rule out any memory errors in loading media. I can test it longer but after scrolling through about 1800 MAME titles (all with video, png, screenshots - the works) everything was smooth sailing.  This seems to indicate an error in the Attract Mode feature itself, no?

I then tested the system with Runtime 3.1.8 and Attract Mode enabled and we're back to crash city.

See my post from yesterday.  I think it might be the Fade Quick screen transition that is causing this problem.  Try hard coding the screen transition to something  else and see if it fixes your problem.  I went through all of the ideas in this thread including what you tried to no avail.  Good luck!

[arcademode]

Super interesting stuff @jimv thanks for the insight. The them I'm mostly testing with (besides some testing with "default") only has "Fade" transitions, no quick fade. I can certainly make an attempt by turning all all transitions, that's something I have not yet attempted.

[arcademode]

On 3/7/2024 at 6:52 PM, JimV said:

See my post from yesterday.  I think it might be the Fade Quick screen transition that is causing this problem.  Try hard coding the screen transition to something  else and see if it fixes your problem.  I went through all of the ideas in this thread including what you tried to no avail.  Good luck!

Actually yeah, no dice. I set all my transitions to NONE and it still crashed. I should have known this would have no effect actually since running the ahk automated browsing with default transitions (various fade and slides or whatever) was stable. 

EDIT: Wait a dang minute - actually on my other PC with a perfectly fresh installation zero transition mode might be working. Previously this freshie installation was also crashing. 

2nd EDIT: This merits further testing. The fresh install is done on my desktop with 48gb ram, so memory wasn't really a bottleneck and there was still crashing before with lots of testing variables - last of which included a fresh installation with only 29 games on the list and ZERO media added of any kind, so no logos, no videos etc.  It was still crashing despite these restrictions! Turning off all transitions was stable for 12 hours with Default theme, and just now another 12 hours with Slipstream.  I'm going to keep testing, running it for longer and with other themes, then test on my full installation to see what happens.  Very interesting find @JimV! I'm curious if we can get some other users to test this out!

3rd EDIT: So far Default is the only stable theme. Tested with a couple others, both crashed. Also Default crashed when I added in more games and some art, so something isn't happy. Still testing...

Edited March 11 by arcademode

[arcademode]

Quick interjection, at least 4 times in the last two weeks I've had a NEW crash source in libvlc.dll. The error dll is the one included with Launchbox.  Anyone else having this issue?

I was chatting with Brian a bit on email about the attract crash. He seemed to think it might be related to some plugins or CTC themes or custom themes or whatever, but it was still crashing with a fresh installation.

So to recap the only long-term stable installation had the following characteristics;

• A completely fresh installation
• VERY small game list (29 games)
• No art assets added of any kind (no images or videos at all)
• All transitions set to NONE

Adding some art caused a crash, adding more games caused a crash, having transitions on caused a crash.  Not sure if this is helpful or leading to any progress but I figure it's useful to have more test scenarios and data.  I'll keep trying stuff, different combos of setups. In the meantime I hope Brian comes through with a discovery!