BigBox Failing to Take Focus of Exclusive Fullscreen Mode (Steam / Native Windows Games)

[DJ_GLiTCH]

As the title implies, I am having difficulties with BigBox failing to launch games that utilise Exclusive Fullscreen mode from Steam/Windows. For reference, I am using Windows 11 Pro (latest version as of today) and Launchbox 13.21.

The games themselves do launch ok from BigBox, but the issue is that BigBox takes the window focus back from the game. Even if I alt+tab to the game directly, BigBox will immediately after retake the window focus and completely prevent the game from being displayed (besides a temporary black screen).

I have tried everything from disabling startup messages and images, to disabling the pause screen and any other UI elements that could be interfering. If I close BigBox and open the game, the game works fine. If I open the game from BigBox, then close BigBox, the game then works fine. Only while BigBox is running am I unable to have any game open that uses Exclusive Fullscreen mode. Launching games from Launchbox works fine too. It is only BigBox that causes this issue.

As a minor workaround, I have modified an AHK script I found online and assigned it to a button on my Elgato Stream Deck, which will take whatever Windowed mode game is currently open and make it borderless. This is useful for games that I can force into windowed mode (but don't support borderless), but it's still clunky as it requires the player to know this button exists in the first place, and if they don't do anything there is an ugly windowed view of the game on the screen with borders and all.

Regarding the above AHK script, this is the code for those who are interested:

^+a::
WinSet, Style, -0xC00000,a ; remove the titlebar and border(s)
WinMove, a, , 0, 0, 3840, 2160 ; move the window to 0,0 and resize it to 3840x2160 return

So, I guess I'm wondering if anyone else had this issue and if you ever found a workaround/fix, as there are a lot of older native Windows games out there that only support Exclusive Fullscreen mode or Windowed mode, but not Borderless Windowed mode (which is what BigBox seems to prefer).

If you're wondering if this issue exists on your machine, many of the older fighting games do not support Borderless Windowed mode, like the Street Fighter series. I have been using SF4 and SF5 for my testing.

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions or tips you may have. 🙂

Edited Thursday at 04:00 AM by DJ_GLiTCH
Adding reference to Windows 11 Pro and Launchbox 13.21

[Suhrvivor]

What games are we talking about? Give us specific details so we can test ourselves.

For old games I use and recommend dgVoodoo 2 whenever is possible, it transforms DirectX8 and DX9 games into DirectX11 games, making it more friendly for recent Windows.

[DJ_GLiTCH]

6 minutes ago, Suhrvivor said:

What games are we talking about? Give us specific details so we can test ourselves.

For old games I use and recommend dgVoodoo 2 whenever is possible, it transforms DirectX8 and DX9 games into DirectX11 games, making it more friendly for recent Windows.

It's not super old games with older renderers I'm talking about, it's just any game that only supports exclusive fullscreen, which Bigbox isn't playing nicely with.

I mentioned semi-recent Street Fighter games as some examples, like 4 or 5. They only support windowed mode or exclusive fullscreen mode. Open it from your desktop, set it to fullscreen, save, close the game, then try to launch it from BigBox.