I'm trying to effectively create a sub-menu on my H659, since I have three video game consoles hooked up to my TV and want like to have a button for "Play Game" that presents me with the options for which device to use.

The problem is that my TV (a Westinghouse LVM-42W2) doesn't have direct input controls from the remote -- I can switch between types of inputs (DVI/VGA/Component/AV), but sometimes will have to hit that same button more than once to toggle, for example, between Component 1 and Component 2.

When each device is set up as its own activity, the remote is smart enough to figure this out, and it knows how many times to send the signal. But when I try to program the soft buttons, I only have the options of sending a signal once, with no flexibility of "Make sure you're set to Component 2."

Any thoughts on the best way to do this? Is my remote just too underpowered for my current setup?

The Harmony does not support sub-menu. Just create 3 "Play Game" activities (each selecting the appropriate TV input), and rename them. Let the activities control the TV input switching. Any other way - it will go out of sync and you will have to press the "Help" button to re-sync it.

I agree: three game activities and let the remote figure out the switching. This is assuming that switching is reliable for you, though.

I got an LVM-37W1 a few days ago. When I set up my Harmony (H768), it was very clever about using state variables to decide whether it had to hit DVI (for example) to jump to the right input. If the TV missed an input switch, though, the Help menu was completely ineffective, as it never attempted to fix the input when I said "No, the TV is not on the right input". This was not satisfactory for my family.

I don't know what the 42w2's inputs look like, but fortunately for me, the 37w1's remote has buttons for "next input" and "previous input", and I determined experimentally that I could get to any input in one keypress (VGA, AV, S-VIDEO) or two keypresses (VGA+NEXT INPUT, AV+PREV INPUT, etc.). So I just programmed the video switching with sequences of AV/S-VIDEO/VGA followed by NEXT/PREV INPUT. After getting the delays (2000/200/1200/2200) and repeats (2) set correctly, it now switches quite reliably. If not, Help always does the right thing, because it effectively has discrete key sequences to choose the inputs.