LEDBlinky Lighting Issues with Switching Games on LaunchBox/BigBox

[jroeser637]

I am having an issue with LEDBlinky when it comes to BigBox. When navigating the games in my BigBox menu for Mame, I have LEDBlinky configured so it will briefly light up that game's controls for 5 seconds, then revert back to lighting up only the front end controls. Then when the game starts, it lights up the corresponding profile. One of the issues I am having is when scrolling through games, if I select a game before the lighting can be updated, then the wrong lighting profile is applied to the game.

For example, in Missile Command I have 3 buttons and a trackball that gets lit up red. For Puyo Puyo, I only have 1 button that is lit up white. Let's say I navigate the menu and hover over Missile Command long enough for the buttons to flash red. Then, rather than selecting Missile Command, I immediately select and play Puyo Puyo while those buttons are still lit up red. That Missile Command "lighting profile" gets carried over to my Puyo Puyo game, lighting up the buttons and trackball red when in reality, only 1 button should be lit up white.

Is there a way I can force the profile for each game to be hard refreshed in LaunchBox/BigBox? That way, even if I select a game while a different profile is still being rendered, it will force the correct lighting profile associated with that game to be rendered?

I know I can do something via commandline like ".\LEDBlinky.exe [romname]. The problem is that I can't get the romname in my running script from LaunchBox. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[Fursphere]

Are you using the latest version of LEDBlinky and the latest version of Launchbox / BigBox?

Earlier version of LB/BB would try and send every single game it ran across to LEDBlinky, basically overloading the buffering system.   I don't remember which version LB/BB fixed this, but they did, so you have to land on a game, and then after a second or so, it'll light up those game controls.  Basically it adds a little delay, so it doesn't try and send so many LEDBlinky requests and blow up the buffer. 

Its been 'fixed' for awhile now though. 

[jroeser637]

Thank you for your reply! I am using the latest version of both BigBox (13.18) and LEDBlinky (8.2.2.0).

I did come up with somewhat of a band-aid fix, however I am hoping there is a more appropriate way to resolve this issue.

For my band-aid fix, I basically just extract the ROM name from the window title in the running script and then pass it to LEDBlinky, forcing a reset:

Code: [Select]

;Get the window title of the MAME process
WinGetTitle, winTitle, ahk_exe mame.exe

; Extract the ROM name from the window title
romName := ""
if (RegExMatch(winTitle, "\[(.*?)\]", match))  ; Look for text inside square brackets
{
    romName := match1
}

if (romName != "")
{
    Run, "C:\Users\Arcade\LaunchBox\Tools\LEDBlinky\LEDBlinky.exe" "%romName%" "MAME"
}

Of course, the problem with this is that it may not work with other emulators. Additionally, it adds to the startup time for all games.