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Messages - YellowBirdAZ

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46
General / Re: AM no longer responds after exiting a MAME game
« on: January 23, 2018, 07:35:43 PM »
Sorry for delayed response Jimmer. Here is what I did. It has been a while since I looked at this, forgive clunky stuff like absolute paths and whatnot. It appears my solution was very specific to the I-Pac, but any USB keyboard encoder that supports macros should work. I just have mine configured so the pause/reset button sends a "P", then an "=".

MAME catches the P and pauses the game. Then this script catches the "=" and if it's depressed for 3 seconds it shuts whatever is running in the foreground down.

I just leave this script constantly running in the background.

Code: [Select]
; THE I-PAC 4 SENDS A MACRO WITH A "P" AND A "=" WHEN PAUSE/RESET BUTTON IS PRESSED
; MAME AND OTHER GAMES INTERPRET THE "P" AS THE PAUSE SIGNAL
; THIS SCRIPT IGNORES THE "P" AND INSTEAD TIMES HOW LONG THE "=" IS DEPRESSED
; IF "=" IS HELD DOWN FOR OVER 3 SECONDS, THIS SCRIPT EXECUTES A FRONT-END RESET

#WinActivateForce

^!3::Run, C:/CSR/ChangeScreenResolution.exe /d=\\.\DISPLAY1 /w=320 /h=240
^!6::Run, C:/CSR/ChangeScreenResolution.exe /d=\\.\DISPLAY1 /w=640 /h=480
^!8::Run, C:/CSR/ChangeScreenResolution.exe /d=\\.\DISPLAY1 /w=800 /h=600

$=::

; Get Title and ID of current window
WinGetTitle, wTitle, A
wId := WinExist("A")

if (wTitle != "Attract-Mode")
{
KeyWait `=, t3.0
if (errorlevel)
{

; CLOSE OR KILL THE WINDOW THAT WAS ACTIVE WHEN RESET INITIATED
WinClose, ahk_id %wId%,,1.5
IfWinExist, ahk_id %wId%
{
WinKill, ahk_id %wId%
}

; RESET SCREEN RESOLUTION
; USE RUNWAIT
RunWait, C:/CSR/ChangeScreenResolution.exe /d=\\.\DISPLAY1 /w=320 /h=240

; IF ATTRACT-MODE IS RUNNING, BRING IT TO THE FRONT
IfWinExist, Attract-Mode
{
WinActivate
}

                ; SEND KEYSTROKES TO RESET FOCUS
Send {ALT DOWN}{TAB}{ALT UP}

; IF ATTRACT-MODE IS NOT RUNNING, RESTART IT
IfWinNotExist, Attract-Mode
{
;Run C:\AttractMode\attract.exe
}

; CLOSE ALL AHK SCRIPTS EXCEPT THIS ONE
PID:=DllCall("GetCurrentProcessId")
for process in ComObjGet("winmgmts:").ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_Process where name = 'Autohotkey.exe' and processID  <> " PID )
    process, close, % process.ProcessId

}


}

Return

47
General / Any Custom Screensavers?
« on: January 23, 2018, 06:26:02 AM »
I was wondering if anyone made any custom screensavers they are happy with or would be willing to share?

I didn't see any existing thread on this topic, specifically.

My issue is my cab is very low res (I run a 320x240 layout). I don't like the split screen effects because the scaling looks ugly at that resolution, and even full screen snaps aren't ideal because I show those when the screensaver isn't active (so it muddies the distinction between modes).

I'm hoping I can borrow something instead of making something new, or at least get some ideas about alternatives.

48
General / Re: Sudden Emulator/Game Launch Failures?
« on: November 08, 2017, 11:56:02 AM »
So I did further testing...

1. There is no fixed number of launch attempts before it fails. I had a run of good luck where I started and quit maybe a dozen games. Then in another case I had one launch before it started failing. And everything in between.

2. After the case where it worked once and failed, I thought maybe it was something about that specific game, but when I tried it again it didn't cause the problem.

3. It has nothing to do with various custom Autohotkey stuff I have going on. I shut that all off and the problem still occurs.

I guess next step is to start with a clean AM install and them piece by piece rebuild my custom set-up until I can figure out what breaks it.

No one else ever ran into this issue?

49
General / Sudden Emulator/Game Launch Failures?
« on: November 06, 2017, 04:46:04 PM »
I recently ran into an unexpected issue I was hoping someone could help me with.

I am at the point where I am end-to-end testing all the games I put on my cabinet... making sure they launch properly from the front end, the controls are configured properly, and that the games exit back to the front end.

While I was doing this I repeatedly encountered a problem where -- after going through several games -- AM would suddenly stop launching any games. I could navigate the front end like normal, but every game -- no matter what emulator it relied on -- would fail. The console provided no clues, because it appeared the instructions it was sending were correct. (I have not yet tried issuing the commands from the command line, just to be sure the issue isn't deeper than AM.)

The only "fix" is to completely reboot the machine. I can't just close out of AM and restart.

Maybe there is some game or emulator that is triggering a bad attract.cfg change that resets on system restart? I have no idea.

Anyone else run into a problem like this?

It might have been a dormant issue I only noticed now because I'm systematically working through every game.

50
Scripting / Re: Display-Specific Music?
« on: October 28, 2017, 12:22:56 AM »
Here is a newer version. Relatively cleaned up. I could do more, just don't know when I will, and this seems pretty robust.

Only thing is I can't test of Raspberry Pi, so anyone who tries it there -- can you let me know if this works for you?

Works the same... create subfolders of Music folder, with names matching your Displays. So if you have a display for "Run & Gun" games, the music you want to go with that display should be in a "Run & Gun" subfolder of Music. And so on.

If your AM starts with an Intro, the music for the pending Display will play. So if AM is going to default to the "90s Shooters" Display, and that Display has it's own subfolder of music, the music from that subfolder will play on start-up through the Intro, and will continue after the Intro ends or is skipped.

Display changes triggered by filtering will not affect the music play. (So in "80s Games" Display, if you filter by 1987, the music will continue to play as normal even if the list changes to show only 1987 games.)

Copy the 1secsilence.mp3 file to the Music folder. The plug-in uses that file to pad silence when you specify a StartDelay parameter value over zero. (It defaults to 2 seconds.) You would use this padding if you have other audible events associated with Display changes, so that the music and these other audio files don't play over each other. An example might a be a voice announcing the name of the Display you transitioned to. You would add silence to force the Display playlist to wait for the specified amount of time before starting to play over the voice.

51
Scripting / Re: Display-Specific Music?
« on: October 24, 2017, 08:53:52 PM »
Hi, awesome! Can I stop the sound from looping? I'd like to have an announcement only

Calle, so you were using this plug-in just to play an announcement sound or message when you switch to different displays?

If so I have a better plug-in for that, but it is so cheeseball I didn't post it. It's called Announcer.nut and I use it to have a robot voice announce which display you are in. But you can use any sound file, could be a musical flourish, a voice, whatever.

It also announces filter changes within a display. So for example mine announces when you a filtering by 4-player, 3-player, 2-player or no filter.

If this sounds more like what you are looking for, I can send it to you. PM me.

52
Scripting / Re: Display-Specific Music?
« on: October 24, 2017, 08:48:28 PM »
I only have one minor issue and that is, in the theme I am using, it has the ability to add favorites and to switch between favorites or all. When doing any of these, the music starts all over again. Can you think of anything that I can do to keep the music playing while performing these actions? Thanks a bunch!
-Rob

Rob, I don't know that I have this issue fixed yet, but it might be. I narrowed down which specific transitions should trigger music changes and which shouldn't. This was because I wanted the plug-in to start playing music during any intro video or layout, and to continue when the intro ends rather than abruptly changing. I am thinking some of these changes might also have addressed your issue. I will clean it up some more and post the updated plug-in... we can see if it helps, and if not we can figure out a fix.

Ok, I feel stupid asking this, but this plugin worked perfectly in attract mode for windows, but once I put it on my raspberry pi, I cannot get the music to play. I am using the folder /home/pi/RetroPie/music/ and under the music folder is folders that match the display names with an .mp3 in each folder. plug in is enabled. I can get music to play using the audiomode plugin which I believe you said your plugin was based off of, so I'm at a total loss lol. Any suggestions?

OK, just comparing AudioMode.nut (which works with RPI) and DisplayMusic.nut (which doesn't, apparently), the only significant difference I see is how music directories are accessed. I am thinking the syntax I used might not play well with Raspian Linux or whatever those things run.

Go into the DisplayMusic.nut file and try replacing all the instances of double back-slashes (like "\\") with single forward-slashes ("/"). There should only be a few.

Please let me know if that fixes the problem! I hope so, because I have no idea what else it could be.

Maybe you have funky display names that RPI doesn't like as folder names?

53
General / Re: adding art to steam?
« on: October 18, 2017, 07:48:13 AM »
Here are also some other sources of Steam artwork...

http://steambanners.booru.org/

https://www.reddit.com/r/steamgrid/

54
General / Re: Games With Interstitial Screens/Pop-Ups
« on: October 17, 2017, 06:50:50 AM »
Turns out it was just a case where I was too tired to see the obvious.

Basically, all of the non-emulated games are launched with AHK scripts. I do this because I am using a CRT, and I want to run them in their "native" resolutions, so I include commands to change the screen resolution before the game launches, and to change it back before returning to AM.

(I could use batch files or Perl or anything else I suppose, but AHK is handy because I can also include key re-mapping when I need to customize the controls.)

So all of these scripts basically follow this recipe...

- Load the correct IPAC or VJoy profile
- Set the correct resolution
- Run the game (with the RunWait command)
- Reset the IPAC profile to default (or turn off VJoy)
- Reset the resolution to default (in my case, 320x240)

I use RunWait to run the game so that the last two steps don't happen until you actually close out of the game.

What happened with my Slain script was that I didn't use RunWait when I launched the game. (I think I thought I couldn't because the interstitial.)

It is worth nothing though... to get around the interstitial problem I had to spawn a second AHK script from the first one. The first one pretty much follows the recipe above, but adds a step just before the game launch where it runs the secondary script (literally Run, not RunWait). The secondary script just waits for the Slain configuration pop-up to appear (using WinWaitActive), and when it does it sends a left mouse click to the "Play!" button and then exits.

When I tried doing all this in a single script it didn't work. It hangs on the pop-up.

Anyhow, it works now, and maybe someone who runs into this issue later will find this helpful.






55
General / Re: Games With Interstitial Screens/Pop-Ups
« on: October 16, 2017, 08:49:08 AM »
That's clever too. I'd seen that setting but didn't make the connection.

Thanks guys!

I will report on results.

56
General / Re: Games With Interstitial Screens/Pop-Ups
« on: October 16, 2017, 08:01:35 AM »
Good suggestion, I will give that a shot tonight. Thanks!

AHK has definitely been a lifesaver.

57
General / Games With Interstitial Screens/Pop-Ups
« on: October 16, 2017, 07:03:05 AM »
So I have ONE game that is giving me this problem, but still I'd like to fix it. And others might have the same problem with other games that behave the same way.

I have the PC game Slain on my cabinet. Like many PC games, when you launch the executable it displays a configuration pop-up where you can select windowed/fullscreen and resolution. Basically you just click OK and move on to the game. There is, as far as I can tell, no way to side-step this interstitial.

I wrote an Autohotkey script to deal with the interstitial, so when you launch the same from AM the script runs, acknowledges the pop-up, and the game starts.

The only hang-up is AM thinks the game is closing at some point in this process. So the game launches, the pop-up is dealt with, and Slain runs... but AM comes back to life in the background. It is as though AM thinks you launched the game and quickly exited it, when in fact the game is running.

I don't think this is caused by the script EXIT command either. I have all sorts of scripts that exit and they don't bring AM back out of sleep mode.

There are three ways I can think of that could address this issue, and I'd appreciate any advice on how to make any of them work.

1. If I knew what triggers AM to wake up after going to sleep in the background, maybe I could intercept that trigger in this case? That way AM would keep sleeping until the player really exits the game.

2. I could kill AM in this case, run the game, and then relaunch AM upon exit. The only problem is I don't know how to prevent it from doing the whole intro all over again. If I could skip the intro, I assume it would just return to the last game played (which would be perfect).

3. I could add a step to force AM back into sleep mode during the game's start-up process, if there is a means to do so.

Thanks!

58
General / Re: AM no longer responds after exiting a MAME game
« on: October 10, 2017, 08:48:32 PM »
RetroArch exits nicely, eh?

You know, I thought I would save time by sticking with what I know best, but in retrospect getting more familiar with RetroArch might have actually ended up SAVING me time.

I have a couple games I run through the FB Alpha core of Retroarch. But otherwise I stuck with MAME. Once my cabinet is working I am not futzing with it anymore (or I hope I won't).


59
General / Re: AM no longer responds after exiting a MAME game
« on: October 07, 2017, 08:22:43 PM »
Well, Resfix is part of the problem but not all of it.

Shutting it off fixed everything on my office PC, but obviously that's not a perfect test of my actual cabinet.

When I tried it on my cabinet it didn't solve the issue, but got be closer.

I am using an Autohotkey script to listen for a PAUSE/RESET button on my cabinet. (Short press = pause, hold for 3 seconds exits back to AM.) I had to add a line in the AHK script to send a ALT+TAB key press combo to restore focus to AM after MAME closes.

So that works, but super clunky. I need to flash a black screen or something to conceal the hackery going on just to get back to the front-end.

It would be great to have a simple, clean solution to this, but I don't have one.

60
General / Re: AM no longer responds after exiting a MAME game
« on: October 07, 2017, 06:40:31 PM »
First, thank goodness the forum is back.

I was having the same problem. It was the last major issue I was having with my cabinet.

I think I fixed it in my case by messing with the Resfix plug-in. This has been mentioned elsewhere as a possible solution. When I turned it off completely, the problem went away.

Now, this may introduce new issues I haven't encountered yet. But so far, nothing.

You can set Resfix to only do its thing with specified emulators. I may go back and selectively turn it back on for some things. I am pretty sure the issue I was having was specific to MAME, so I may just turn it off for that.

It was a very frustrating problem, and I wasted a lot of time trying to figure it out on my own (without much success) while the forum was down.

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