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I really like that Pinball X lets you have video media for attract mode and automatically uses static images during gameplay. What am I talking about? For MAME, if I provide a video file for backglass, DMD, and playfield, it will use those for attract mode. If I provide nothing else, it will re-use them during gameplay also (unless you turn it off in Game Manager). But, if you also provide static images for the same game, Pinball X will automatically display them INSTEAD of the attract mode video. I love this, since I don't like distractions during gameplay, AND, I can do things like displaying controls on the DMD during gameplay. This feature may not actually be intentional, since it's not documented, and I fear it may disappear at some point. Its really only useful for multi-display MAME setups which is usually a hybrid pincade type setup. I thought I would share some of my latest explorations with MAME that will ensure this functionality can be maintained. MAME uses layout files (.lay) to control rendering of information on screens. MAME also supports up to 4 separate displays ("windows" in MAME parlance). In mame.ini I set up the number of screens to 3 (backglass, DMD, playfield). I then assigned a screen to each physical display (0, 1, 2) in the OSD Per-View Display settings. Note that the "address" of each display can be determined by running MAME from the command line with "-verbose". It will look something like "\\.\DisplayX" where 'X' is a number for each physical display in your system. For each screen, I tell it to only display a view that I define (marquee_only, controls_only). The definition for those views will be provided in a layout file (.lay) in MAME. The images below show the relevant MAME config settings and an example .lay file for Armor Attack (armora). Note the use of pre-defined parameter values? (~deviceshortname~). This allows me to automatically search for the artwork for any ROM without having to create a new .lay file for each. The only time a new file is needed is for special cases like Armor Attack, which uses overlays as part of the game field. A few others have similar issues. For the most part though, all of my games use 1 .lay file, which is vertical.lay and horiz.lay, depending on the orientation of the game. Just put the artwork in the appropriate folder and MAME will find them.

Finally found out I did wrong! I found a set of instructions on the net from a fellow gameex user. It was origionally a .pdf file, but I will post what the instructions said below. Big thanks to JUSTINCASE!!! "For those of you who are running the Daphne 1.0 beta and have the 20th Anniversary DVD set (or other Digital Leisure DVD's) This is how you set it up to work with Gameex. 1. Start DaphneLoader 2. Highlight Dragon's Lair 3. Hit the configure button 4. Choose the Advanced tab 5. Next to Display Command Line choose Enable 6. Hit Apply then OK 7. Now hit the start button and a command line box will pop up 8. Copy what is in the box 9. Now exit Daphne 10. Make sure that you also Exit DaphneLoader from the bottom right of your screen by the computer clock 11. If you do not exit the DaphneLoader it WILL NOT RUN USING GAMEEX 12. Open Gameex Configuration Menu 13. Choose Daphne 14. Under Game 1 Rom type in dle21 which I believe plays all new scenes 15. Under Game 1 Options paste what you copied from the Command Line Box 16. Make sure Game 1 ROM is Enabled Please note: This guide assumes you have the daphne.exe setup in the path according to your filestructure.. Enjoy! The credit for this instruction sheet belongs to JUSTINCASE."