How to set up Big Blue front-end

So you want a front-end for your arcade machine and you want it to be simple. No HyperSpin, no steep learning curve, you just want to be able to add games to your setup easily, without learning 50 different programs. Well lucky for you I have just the front-end just for you (hey that rhymes). Big Blue is a front-end which I discovered not too long ago and I fell in love with it. In this article we’re going to be breaking down how to use this for your system with minimal road bumps.

I’ve previously written about Big Blue front-end before so head over to there to see why it rocks so much, but the short version is, Big Blue can create lists for anything. You’re not tied down to a certain emulator, nor do you need to keep it limited to lists or wheels per systems; it’s completely program agnostic. If you can run it from a command line, then its pretty much good to go for Big Blue.

With that out of the way, let’s get started.

Head over to the Big Blue home page, download the Bleeding Edge version (make sure you download it’s other requirements as well) and extract to somewhere on your PC.

For the sake of this tutorial I’m going to be putting Big Blue on root of my I: drive in I:\BigBlue\. Your emulators and relevant media (such as snapshots, videos etc) can live anywhere on your computer, but again I like to be a bit organised so they’re going to be located inside my BigBlue folder. If you’re following me 1-for-1, then your current directory structure will look something like this:

In your Big Blue folder you will see BigBlueConfig.exe, run that. This is the configuration utility for Big Blue itself.

Before we start making game lists we need to define our program templates. These are the emulators that you will be using with your front-end. Big Blue requires that you define these first, so when you add games later on, you pick a template, drop the ROMs in and those ROMS will run against the parameters you’ve defined. In all honestly, bulk of the work is done here. Once you have your programs good to go, you can just forget about it.

There are templates already in there but they probably won’t work due to their pre existing .exe and folder locations. Double click into each entry and hit Delete till there are none left. We’ll be setting up 4 emulators or templates, regular MAME, Mega Drive on MAME, Naomi DEMUL, and Mega Drive (using Kega Fusion).

You’ll now see a bunch of fields. Within this section the variable {0} is used to represent the ROM name. For Big Blue to work, your ROM name, snapshot (or boxart) and video all need to be the same in filename (without the extension).

Below is quick break down of what each one is:

The key thing to note here is command line parameters – you’ll need to put in the exact commands and its relevant parameters in this section. If you’re unsure about what commands to run either hit up the emulators website for documentation or use this handy link over at the Launch Box forums. They’ve managed to collate a bunch of documentation for all the popular emulators and their relevant commands that you need to use to get them to run from the command line.

For example MAME, to run Street Fighter II in MAME, I need to run the follow command:

So in the program template for MAME I would use the following settings:

Since {0} represent sf2, that’s the only command I need to run my game. This will change from emulator to emulator. Some require that you define the ROM path, others need special switches to enable different options. No matter what you setup here, I’d advise to always test your commands manually via cmd.exe and running it yourself. If that works, then you know Big Blue will handle it fine.

Here’s my 4 templates that I have just setup.

Once all your emulators are setup close this window.

The main difference between Big Blue and other front-ends is the way lists work. In a traditional front end, your list or wheel is usually defined by what console you’re running. Big Blue allows you to define whatever you want in the wheel. Probably the best way to show how this works is we’ll be doing genres, then going a little bit further and putting game series in also.

There’s a few ways to add games to Big Blue – using the MAME interface or adding a file/s. We’ll be doing one of each.

What we’ve just done is a genre list, and then a games series. Remember these can be whatever you want.

This screen is pretty straightforward, it’s just a matter of searching for games and adding them to the list. Aside from the genre, company and player filters, there are a few options to note in this section:

Once the game list has loaded, first ensure you select your MAME template you defined earlier. This ensures that any ROMs you select in this window, will run against the parameters you’ve defined in your template. Now it’s time to start adding games.

You now have your first set of game lists. We have a list of Fighting games, which consists of a sub-list of Street Fighter games, and then some Mortal Kombat ones, sitting outside in the Fighting list. If you double click on a title here, it will bring up the entry and all the parameters that you defined in your program template. If you want to change the label of the game that appears in Big Blue, you can double click it and change it here.

If you’ve been following me, your games list will currently look something like the below (Bold means a sub-menu)

Now that we’ve sorted out the MAME stuff, time to move onto other emulators. I’m going to be adding some Mega Drive games manually to my Run and Gun section.

That’s literally it. You’ve just made a list that consists of both MAME and Mega Drive games with little to no frustration. Amazing right? This process is exactly the same for anything that isn’t MAME related, as long as you have your program templates set up.

Close all the windows till you get back to the main screen.

Hit Launch Big Blue. It should launch with the Street Fighter 2 theme and presto your game list that you defined is right there. (Enter to go into a list, Shift to go back a list and ESC to quit.) Congratulations you’ve successfully setup Big Blue!

From here, it should be clear the potential of Big Blue’s list system. The flexibility of allowing you to do all of the above from an easy to use GUI I think is something that probably no front-ends allow you to do. This is applicable to pretty much the rest of your emulators. You can re-order games anyway you want in Big Blue, move them to another list and not have to worry about things not working or being buggy. Once your entry works, it can live anywhere.

As I mentioned earlier a lot of work is just setting up the program templates and making sure that all your parameters are working nicely. Your ROM collection also has to be fairly neat as well, with all your roms, pictures and video previews having perfect filenames. But if you’ve put in all that hard work already, working with Big Blue is quick easy and painless.

If you’re having troubles getting something to run or not playing ball, hit me up in the comments and I’ll try my best to help you out!