Frequently Asked Questions
Yeah, Bizhawk's Lua bindings suck, huh? That blows, sorry. First, make sure you have followed the setup instructions regarding setting the correct Lua Core. Once you've done that, try re-running the script a few times (open Bizhawk, run the script, if you get an error, close Bizhawk and repeat). As soon as I find a technical explanation for why this solution works, I'll be sure to add it here so that this answer sounds less stupid.
Delete the entire bizhawk-shuffler-2 folder and start from scratch. For real. I know that maybe isn't what you want to hear, but I promise you're gonna save yourself so many headaches. Different files change all the time, and even config files may not be compatible across versions. Just delete the folder and follow the setup instructions again. It's an easy process.
I'm playing Ocarina of Time Randomizer [or another N64 game] and the game crashes when the game swaps! Help me!
Make sure you have followed the instructions for setting up Bizhawk for Ocarina of Time Randomizer. The specific step that seems to be the culprit in most cases is enabling "Use Expansion Slot" under the N64 menu (only available when an N64 game is loaded). If this doesn't solve the problem, or you experience any other unexpected behavior, please open an issue in the issue tracker.
Yes! You can safely close Bizhawk at any time and the state of your session will be saved for you to resume at a later date (all of the info is saved in a file called config.lua). When you want to resume your session, just check the box that says "Resume a session?" in the bottom left of the setup window, and then press the "Resume Previous Session" button to continue. The values in the setup window will be ignored in this situation, and your previous settings will be loaded.
Yes! To do this, you can add (or if needed, remove) some games from the games/ folder, but you must delete the auto-generated .games-list.txt (located in the games/ folder) file for the changes to take effect. If you fail to delete this file, your changes will not take effect. Do not try to edit this file manually. Just delete it and it will be regenerated automatically.
Some game data formats come in multiple files. Many of them are handled carefully by the shuffler to ensure that it recognizes them as one single game, such as bin/cue files being automatically paired by the shuffler so you don't need to do anything funny to make them work, they just work, please just put them all in the games folder and let it run, I promise it works. If you are playing on an obscure platform and the Bizhawk Shuffler doesn't behave in the way you expect it to, open an issue on the issue tracker.
First, check to see if the game will load correctly without the shuffler script. Just try to load it directly in Bizhawk. If Bizhawk loads the file but the shuffler does not, open an issue on the issue tracker letting me know about what game didn't work. If Bizhawk is unable to run the game at all, you might simply just be missing the firmware files necessary for that console to run in Bizhawk (this is likely the case with less common platforms). This is an archive of firmware files specifically packaged for Bizhawk, but this document may be one day out of date, so try just searching google for "bizhawk firmware archive" and including the version number for something more up-to-date.
Yes! The Bizhawk Shuffler supports any game on any platform that Bizhawk supports. If you are trying to capture the footage for a broadcast, games from different consoles will likely resize the Bizhawk window to different sizes. If you cannot come up with a better way to account for this, your best option might just be making the Bizhawk window fullscreen and then capture it at its consistent fullscreen size.