RetroFE forums

I did a bit of searching; I've seen other reports that implicate DS4Windows in unusual game crashes. Can you use it without DS4Windows?  There are apparently two ways to install DS4Windows, and switching to the non-%appdata% way apparently solved problems for some people.  Might be worth a try investigating this angle, but I don't really know for sure.

You should be able to take from the RetroFE log exactly what command it executes and what directory it does it in.  Can you tell me what happens if you open a CMD prompt, cd to that directory, and execute the same command that RetroFE does?

That seems incorrect?
From what I can see, maybe it should be:

Code: [Select]

executable = C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe
arguments = -executionpolicy bypass -file F:\Jeux\TTX Games\pslauncher.ps1 "%ITEM_FILEPATH%"
You may need to use %ITEM_FILENAME% or %ITEM_NAME% rather than %ITEM_FILEPATH%

That's probably closer to what it needs to be; you'll have to verify the pathname of powershell on your machine and also, the powershell script takes two arguments, which (assuming the game itself is named so that it matches what's in RetroFE) will be %ITEM_FILEPATH% followed by %ITEM_NAME%.  The second one is supposed to be the name that shows up in the process list if you open up the task manager tool while the game is running, so it can wait for the real game exe to exit.

When you launch an item in your collection, the launcher will execute the .bat pointing to your link. The .bat launches the application, and retroFE waits until its finished. Tell me if you still have trouble, as there are plenty .bat code variations in case you still have the problem.

The problem is that these exe files require a specific launcher to do some sort of fixup on them before they'll run, but the launcher itself doesn't keep running once the game starts. RetroFE (or whatever batch file you launch with RetroFE) detects that the launcher has died, but does not realize that there is a new process to wait for.

We need a way to tell the program RetroFE launches directly to keep running until a process other than the one that it starts itself stops running. My PowerShell script shows a way to do this by knowing both the exe/bat/lnk file that launches the game and the process name that represents the game process itself, which will be different from the launcher.  The trick is to devise a PowerShell script and a means of launching it from RetroFE with both the pathname of the item that launches the game and the string that will show up in the process list as the name of the game process itself.  I don't run RetroFE in Windows myself typically, aside from testing builds, so I'm hoping someone who does can experiment with this technique a bit to get it working right.

I have modified the PowerShell script to take parameters:
param (
  [string]$exename,
  [string]$procname
)
Write-Host Launching $exename
Invoke-Item $exename
Write-Host It was launched
$proc_id = (Get-Process $procname).id
Wait-Process -id $proc_id
Write-Host It was closed

If you name that pslauncher.ps1 you should be able to call it with parameters like this: powershell -executionpolicy bypass -file C:\RetroFE\pslauncher.ps1 C:\Games\GameDir\FunGameLauncher.lnk FunGame assuming you replace the pathnames with real ones and use the right name for the game's process name. If the process name of the final game exe ends up being related to the game item name from RetroFE, it should be pretty straightforward to get a launcher configuration set up to use this technique.

The script you pass in the $exename parameter doesn't have to be an exe; it can be anything that will launch a program when you double-click on it, but it has to have the full path.  It will probably help if both the $exename and $procname can be derived from something from RetroFE like %ITEM_NAME%, but I have no idea how the Windows process names are actually determined.

I've got another idea for you to try:

Instead of launching with a batch script, try a PowerShell script.  You should be able to run whatever command necessary to launch the game, then use cmdlets to find the process id of the actual game process and wait for it.  Here's documentation on the relevant cmdlets, with some examples: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/reference/4.0/microsoft.powershell.management/wait-process

I put the following in a file called calc.ps1:
Write-Host Launching calc.exe
Invoke-Item C:\Windows\System32\calc.exe
Write-Host It was launched
$proc_id = (Get-Process calc).id
Wait-Process -id $proc_id
Write-Host It was closed

I then ran it with powershell -file calc.ps1; it printed "It was launched" immediately but then paused until I closed the calculator app, after which it printed "It was closed" and exited back to the prompt.

When RetroFE launches another program, it gets a "handle" from the OS that it can use to wait for that program to exit. While it's waiting for the program to exit, it doesn't do much, but when it detects the exit it logs that it's "Finished" and goes on doing its front-end stuff. From your log.txt, it's apparent that it detects an immediate exit of the program that it launched; the "Finished" log timestamp is the same as the one where it launched the program. As far as it knows, your game is over and it is doing what it's supposed to do. The crash is definitely not what it's supposed to do, but we'll have to figure out how to reproduce that in order to fix it.

Meanwhile, it may be possible to bypass the batch files and links altogether and just have RetroFE run the "typex_loader game.exe" line by itself. In your launcher config, try using typex_loader as the executable and the game.exe as the argument. You may need to experiment a bit with the command line and directory settings to make the loader happy, but I think there's likely to be a combination of settings that will work.

There are a few ways you might set this up; I can't guarantee any or all of them will work for you though:

1. Assuming all your emulators can be configured to read from the gamepad and assign an "exit program" command to a gamepad event, configure them all to do so.

2. Use an emulator framework like RetroArch; this unifies the input/output so you only have to set up the gamepad configuration once.

3. Use a program for your OS like JoyToKey, which can generate keyboard/mouse events from configurable gamepad events. You'll still have to do some extra config in your emulators, but you'll have keyboard events to work with instead of just gamepad events.