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SHELL STARTER - VERSION 1.0 I created a program that can easily change your Windows Shell to GameEx, or any other program you choose, and will also re-enable the Windows Shell temporarily so you can reload Windows instantly and reset the shell to the previous state after loading Windows. I have GameEx as my Windows Shell right now, but it was not very easy to exit GameEx and access Windows if I needed to, and so this program was made to do everything automatically for me. I set up GameEx to launch this program on exit. The "Shell To Start" is the shell you want to temporarily start. I suppose you could start another shell besides the Windows explorer shell, but this is what I use it for. The "Shell To Use" is the shell you want to become active after you reboot the computer. The program can set this value without actually starting a new shell by clicking the "Only Set As New Shell" button. This is the button you can use to set the shell to GameEx the first time. If you click the Submit button, then the temporary shell will start, and the new shell will be set. If you click the Exit without Submitting Changes button, then nothing will happen. I was wondering how I could submit the program to you to let people use, as I no longer have a website for my creations, and would like this to be available on your site for everyone to use if they wish. Thanks for making this great frontend, and if anybody has any programming request and would like more helpful tools like this made, just let me know.

Alright, so after my post yesterday, I discovered that another feature outside of GameEx that I wanted to get working was not possible in Windows 8... I had windows 8 Pro installed, so it was easier than not to downgrade to Windows 7 without touching anything, except that I had to reinstall GameEx over itseld in order to re-register... And suddenly: Mame roms are once again not showing up.... I realized that the only major difference between my arcade cabinet, where I was hooked up during this work, and at my in-laws where i got gameex to find all of my roms: my cabinet has a touch screen. I just turned off touch features in GameEx config, and it seems like the rom detection is taking the longer amount of time that I experienced when it started working correctly yesterday... May be somethign to add to the obvious list of culprits as the number of touch screen laptops increases.

I got it working. The key was to enable the Global snaps and disable the mame options. I tried lots of things but never tried that combo of options. I'm using compiled mame without direct input. I'm also using CPWizard with different options than shown on the CPWizard website. Here's my setups. Thanks Adultery!

The database error has been resolved. Thank you Adultery for your help Updated OP, DB, RSS, LB

Came across this gem - Old vs. New Spock for Audi http://youtu.be/WPkByAkAdZs

Update: 1. Using PinballX to exit would often cause VP to throw out memory exception errors. I copied over the CloseVP subroutine from FPLaunch and assigned it as a hotkey to by exit button. Now everything exits cleanly. 2. Sometimes one or the other stream playback windows would activate but would not get moved to the apron. I moved the checkwindow and move subroutine within a loop. Takes a little longer to load the table but the playback windows now appear much more reliably where I instructed. 3. There are some examples of customization added to the script. There are a set of tables, those with secondary playfield displays like Ripley's Believe or Not, Simpson's Pinball Party, and World Poker Tour, where the DMD is squashed a bit because VPinMAME is taking up some of the usual space to render the secondary playfield display. For these I wind up turning on DirectDraw and increasing the height of the display manually to at least make it look less squashed and more like the correct aspect ratio. I allow some overscanning of the image in order to retain an edge-to-edge width on my third monitor. The problem is that because of the overscanning the registry values are out of range for the desktop and causes ffmpeg to crash. For these tables, I just hard-coded the position and dimensions that I want ffmpeg to capture. Again, the script has two streaming algorithms that you can try: 1. The default mpeg4 codec doesn't produce compression artifacts. 2. The xlib264 is faster and may reduce latency and it may be able to successfully stream a larger image where the buffer for the default mpeg4 fills up too fast and causes ffmpeg to crash. Try both and go with which ever one works. Frankenstein has one of the SEGA supersize displays and it is just large enough to crash under the mpeg4 codec but works just fine and without compression artifacts with xlib264. Latest script: Here's some crappy phone videos showing the streaming in action on my P2k style cab - Monster Bash, a DMD: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/45430846/PinXPost20150306/mb.mp4 Funhouse, a B2S: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/45430846/PinXPost20150306/fh.mp4 and The Addams Family, a combination of DMD and B2S (for the THING lights): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/45430846/taf.mp4

Update: A couple of fairly minor tweaks: 1. I've switched the filters so that ffmpeg, the streamer, now does the scaling and ffplay, the player, now just does the rotation. ffplay has the reputation of producing artifacts when it is scaling, so in theory this should produce better quality. I've found having ffmpeg do the scaling does slightly affect the size of the playback window. I've had to make an adjustment to the border that I draw and lay on top of the playback window. 2. Made the script a little more portable. Enter the path to ffmpeg at the top of the script 3. I'm now running a loop that checks for the ffplay window prior to moving it rather than having ahk wait a hard coded period of time. I've started using this subroutine in all my scripts where I am mirroring the DMD. The user no longer has to set their own delays and it works great with the latest versions of the ffmpeg static build rather than being forced to use an older build. Can just grab the latest build at the zeranoe front page. 4. Cleaned up code a little for readability Note: I'm currently experiencing sporadic crashes with the game which I believe is caused by the latest NVidia drivers. It crashes with the old script and the new. Older versions of ffmpeg and newer versions. I'm using 347.52. I didn't experience any issues with the previous public version. Hopefully the next update will work better. Or else I'll have to try using a different resolution.