A better attract mode would actually launch a random game!

[jacobpederson]

A better attract mode would actually launch a random game! Then it could use taskkill on the emulator to switch to another one after a user selected time limit. Most games have their own awesome built-in attract modes, it would be totally awesome to cycle through them all! Thanks!

[jacobpederson]

I made a mockup of what this could look like with autohotkey :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAni6umWQtM

[Sverre Svenningsen]

Since there is a keybinding to directly launch a game from bigbox I managed to create a autohotkey script that is pretty robust and does a basic form of this on my cabinet, it's hopefully short enough to attach here:

Loop {
if A_TimeIdle > 300000
{
   if WinActive("LaunchBox Big Box")
   {
      SetKeyDelay, 50
      Send, {a down}{a up}
      Sleep, 5000 
      Send, {a down}{a up}
      Sleep, 5000
      Send, {a down}{a up}
   }
   else
   {
      if WinActive("ahk_class RetroArch")
    {
            SetKeyDelay, 50
            Send, {esc down}{esc up} 
    }
      if WinActive("ahk_class MAME")
    {
        Send, {a down}{a up}
        Sleep, 1000
            WinClose
    }
      if WinActive("ahk_exe Explorer.EXE")
    {
        Send, {tab down}{tab up}
            Run C:\Users\user\LaunchBox\BigBox.exe
    }
      if WinActive("ahk_exe Steam.exe")
    {
        Send, {tab down}{tab up}
        Sleep, 1000
            WinClose
    }
   }  
}
Sleep, 1000
}

The main principle is that it it looks at which window is active and acts as a very simple state machine. If bigbox is active and there has been no keyboard input for a while, hit the key that directly loads a game (multiple times just in case bigbox is doing the random animation) Since it sends keypresses to bigbox, it resets the idle timer by itself. A_TimeIdle is in ms so this script toggles back and forth between the bigbox menu and a game every 5 minutes. You have to adapt it to the set of emulators you are using for it to time out the emulators and quit back to bigbox, I mostly use retroarch and mame. It would certainly be nice if launchbox could take care of the launching by itself to avoid the timing issues in the menu :)