New Install - Games don't launch

[patientFool]

Hi All,

I'm stuck. When I try to launch a game, nothing at all seems to happen.

• I installed Launchbox.
• I imported my MAME full arcade set with all the defaults using "Automatically Install and Configure MAME (Recommended).
• This all went well. I see the games. But when I try to run one, nothing happens.
• I start googling and fine some threads telling folks to check how the emulator is setup for a game. click game and edit. Check what emulator it's using. MAME. Ok, go to tools->manage->emulators->edit and check the platform associations and cmdline. It all looks fine to my noob eye. Hmm..
• OK I think. Launchbox is just launching mame. Must be something wrong with Mame. So to troubleshoot, I opened a command prompt to run the mame that launchbox installed so that i can see what it's returning.
• When I run it without any parameters, I get "Unable to create Direct3D device (8876086C)" and "Unable to initialize Direct3D 9" and "Fatal error: Unable to complete window creation".
• OK I think. Lets google that. After reading a bunch of threads, I try installing DirectX and my latest Geforce drives. Still nothing. This is on a fairly vanilla windows 10 computer with a Geforce 1080 card.
• I find one thread that leads me to trying the -video bgfx -bgfx_backend d3d12 and mame suddenly loads fine. Interesting I think.
• So I go back to Launchbox and add these flags to the cmdline under tools->manage->emulators->edit figuring that was the problem.
• It was not. Is still doesn't launch within Launchbox.
• So I'm stuck not knowing what to do or why it doesn't just work after the import. Any ideas? Happy to post screenshots and answer any questions.

Thanks!

[neil9000]

16 minutes ago, patientFool said:

Hi All,

I'm stuck. When I try to launch a game, nothing at all seems to happen.

• I installed Launchbox.
• I imported my MAME full arcade set with all the defaults using "Automatically Install and Configure MAME (Recommended).
• This all went well. I see the games. But when I try to run one, nothing happens.
• I start googling and fine some threads telling folks to check how the emulator is setup for a game. click game and edit. Check what emulator it's using. MAME. Ok, go to tools->manage->emulators->edit and check the platform associations and cmdline. It all looks fine to my noob eye. Hmm..
• OK I think. Launchbox is just launching mame. Must be something wrong with Mame. So to troubleshoot, I opened a command prompt to run the mame that launchbox installed so that i can see what it's returning.
• When I run it without any parameters, I get "Unable to create Direct3D device (8876086C)" and "Unable to initialize Direct3D 9" and "Fatal error: Unable to complete window creation".
• OK I think. Lets google that. After reading a bunch of threads, I try installing DirectX and my latest Geforce drives. Still nothing. This is on a fairly vanilla windows 10 computer with a Geforce 1080 card.
• I find one thread that leads me to trying the -video bgfx -bgfx_backend d3d12 and mame suddenly loads fine. Interesting I think.
• So I go back to Launchbox and add these flags to the cmdline under tools->manage->emulators->edit figuring that was the problem.
• It was not. Is still doesn't launch within Launchbox.
• So I'm stuck not knowing what to do or why it doesn't just work after the import. Any ideas? Happy to post screenshots and answer any questions.

Thanks!

OK thats quite thorough troubleshooting there, but its missing one very important step which is always the first thing we ask, and that is "Do your roms actually load in your chosen emulator when just using the rom and emulator without involving Launchbox at all?" This should always be the first step for any platform as there is no point troubleshooting Launchbox if your roms are simply bad and do not work. What MAME romset did you download, and what version of the MAME emulator are you using?

[patientFool]

I think you're on to something. When I run mame by itself with the -video option mentioned previously (using cmdline from "c:\users\<me>\LaunchBox\Emulatores\MAME 0.243\"), it loads but when I try to run a game within mame I get "Required ROM/disk images for the selected system are missing or incorrect. Please acquire the correct files or select a different system.".

This is MAME 0.243 and the 0.243 rom set (merged). Appears to be complete. 71GB, over 13k files. I see a folder called mame-merged full of zip files.

Does MAME not just know where to find the ROM's perhaps?

[neil9000]

3 minutes ago, patientFool said:

I think you're on to something. When I run mame by itself with the -video option mentioned previously (using cmdline from "c:\users\<me>\LaunchBox\Emulatores\MAME 0.243\"), it loads but when I try to run a game within mame I get "Required ROM/disk images for the selected system are missing or incorrect. Please acquire the correct files or select a different system.".

This is MAME 0.243 and the 0.243 rom set (merged). Appears to be complete. 71GB, over 13k files. I see a folder called mame-merged full of zip files.

Does MAME not just know where to find the ROM's perhaps?

By default Mame will look inside its own roms folder for the roms, so simply mame/roms. If that is not where you have them then you need to give mame the path, either via its UI or adding it to the mame.ini which is in the root mame folder after opening the emu and saving a config at least once.

[Retro808]

1 minute ago, patientFool said:

Does MAME not just know where to find the ROM's perhaps?

It does if you put the roms in the default folder Mame looks. The default location would be a \roms folder located in the folder where your Mame.exe is located.

If you have it somewhere else you need to either launch just the Mame.exe (without a game) then click on Configure Options menu the "Configure Directories" and point Mame to the folder you have the roms  or you can open the Mame.ini file with notepad and manually edit the folder location there.

[patientFool]

OK, I managed to get mame to run the games. I had to run it with "-video bgfx -bgfx_backend d3d12" and with the -rompath flag specifying the folder where the zip files were.

But I'm not sure how to fix LaunchBox. Under tools->manage->emulators->edit i see that %romlocation% is specified, but I'm not seeing a way to set romlocation. Plus, wouldn't that have been set properly when i imported using the automatic method mentioned above? Weird.. Should I hardcode it? Where do I check what it's set to?

Also, it doesn't feel right to have to add the -video flag for such a vanilla computer/setup. Should I do that? Watching ETA Prime's youtube video for him it just worked right out of the box..?

 

Edited May 12, 2022 by patientFool

[JoeViking245]

11 hours ago, patientFool said:

i see that %romlocation% is specified, but I'm not seeing a way to set romlocation.

When you launch a game through LaunchBox using this emulator ("MAME 0.243"), %romlocation% will be replaced with the full_path of where that rom [game] is located.  So if the game/rom you're launching is "c:\users\<me>\LaunchBox\Games\Arcade\1942.zip", that segment of the command line that will be sent will look like

-rompath "C:\users\<me>\LaunchBox\Games\Arcade\"

In other words, LaunchBox will set the "rompath" for you each time you launch a game.

 

11 hours ago, patientFool said:

Also, it doesn't feel right to have to add the -video flag for such a vanilla computer/setup.

This [video] part is beyond me.  But it sounds like from the Windows command prompt you were able to launch a game using:

"c:\users\<me>\LaunchBox\Emulators\MAME 0.243\mame.exe" -video bgfx -bgfx_backend d3d12 -rompath "c:\users\<me>\LaunchBox\Games\Arcade\" 1942

(this assumes your roms are in "c:\users\<me>\LaunchBox\Games\Arcade\" and the game/rom you are launching is "1942".  Also I changed "Emulatores" (from your previous post) to "Emulators", based on the Application Path in your screenshot)

So for your Default Command-Line Parameters:, (where your red arrow is pointing to) you could change it to

-video bgfx -bgfx_backend d3d12 -rompath %romlocation%

...and it will work.

But you probably should keep [at least] some of the other parameters in there and have it be:

-skip_gameinfo -keyboardprovider dinput -video bgfx -bgfx_backend d3d12 -rompath %romlocation%

 

[patientFool]

1 hour ago, JoeViking245 said:

So for your Default Command-Line Parameters:, (where your red arrow is pointing to) you could change it to

-video bgfx -bgfx_backend d3d12 -rompath %romlocation%

...and it will work.

But you probably should keep [at least] some of the other parameters in there and have it be:

-skip_gameinfo -keyboardprovider dinput -video bgfx -bgfx_backend d3d12 -rompath %romlocation%

Thanks this worked. I left the rompath alone but added the -video and -bgfx_backend flags and games launch now. Awesome!

New Question :). When I load Big Box, Every game seems to be grouped under "MAME" which is what I entered as a name when importing earlier (instead of the default "Arcade"). Why doesn't Big Box break out the games by platform like i've seen in the theme examples? Mine just repeatedly says MAME and is the only option. Thanks!

[C-Beats]

Requires you to have used the fullset importer to import your games and allowed the importer to make the playlists for those collections. It also requires you to use Platform Category view instead of the default Platform view

[patientFool]

Maybe my confusion is that I only have the MAME rom set and those are all arcade. Lol. I don't have any other platform. I would separately need other platform rom sets.

[Retro808]

15 hours ago, patientFool said:

Maybe my confusion is that I only have the MAME rom set and those are all arcade. Lol. I don't have any other platform. I would separately need other platform rom sets.

If you are talking about the other Arcade platforms like Cave, SNK Neo Geo, Konami Classics, and such that the full mame rom set importer makes those are actually playlists. @C-Beats post tells you that you need to have your BigBox view set to "Platform Category" for all those numerous other playlists to show.