Tom Speirs

i didn't Ziggy, I realise you were asking out of curiosity from your post, and not asking for my time. I was only replying to everyone just with an explanation. Happy days, springs here! Cheers. Tom

LOL To all: I don't always add release information for updates. A lot of commercial software doesn't you know at all in minor releases! When I dont add info its normally like a 2 second fix. For example in 5.82 I left an emulator turned on in the default config, which meant for anyone installing GameEx for the first time it would tell them that there was an error with the config with the emulator. Also, I really appreciate people posting news about GameEx releases, but some folks get sick of all the updates, so I live in the hope when I don't release information about what's new people won't post news on sites. Cheers, Tom.

To be honest sounds like your pretty much getting the most. As with the film with the same title, it's "As good as it gets". I've had two cabs with oldish monitors one was a hantarax, and the monitor just cant handle resolutions above 256 without stretching physically on the monitor. .This means most vertical games go off the screen. That's why I added the try to stretch to 256 option which makes the games fit on the screen, however means they don't run at the original resolution. I personally prefer now to have the games go off the screen a little. In regards to horizontal games there's no need to put up with that. Under Advanced MAME settings in GameEx config, go to MAME options and make sure you have -tripplebuffer in there. That should solve it. If not post back.

Sorry, no not for MAME, but for the emus you can just tell it NOT to use a database in there respective configs.

Normally whenever I've tried to setup MAME32, its normal that the settings set within the MAME32 GUI are not used when calling MAME32.exe from the command line (ie from GameEx). It's just normal. Therefore GameEx will either use the setting in mame/32.ini or the MAME options under Advanced MAME settings in GameEx config. The easiest way in my opinion is just to set them here. I realise it's a little complex and I hope to add a gui app soon that will mimic the MAME32 gui settings. Fortunatly all the command line options are in the MAME32 Help file under MAME Documents > Configuration and Usage. The ArcadeVGA settings in GameEx are added to the command line when calling MAME, so they should always be set regardless of MAME.ini or settings in MAME32. Not sure if your saying there not working but they should be, and if not try the command line version. To summarise it's a misconception (as far as I know) that you can set settings in MAME32 and they will stay when it is called from the command line (as GameEx and front ends do). Let me know if you need more help setting the commands or something else is up. Thanks, Tom

Hi, that's not the newest version, try the latest one.

Thanks sWampy, great ideas. You've given me some inspiration here, and I think I have a way (slightly different) now to improves the favorites system a little.

MAME32 works as I've tried it myself. Other front-ends might do it. Gamelauncher will probably do it too, it's a much lighter front end then GameEx. I highly recommend it, although your autostart on the cd will need to run a btach file to copy the frontend to the hard disk and run it from there. It wont work from a cd, ram drive or floppy. I believe GameLauncher is in the top 3 of best frontends. Give it a try, unlesss your happy with the windows look/feel and MAME32.

You could of course I would have thought create an autorunning cd with the GameEx install on it.

No, it's not possible, and likely never will be.

I don't consider it slow, I really don't know what's going on. All I know is the Alpha Blending is done is software and does require some horsepower. Let me know how it works out tonight.

This has been covered several times in the past, you need to tell MAME to use options to tell it to calm down in its sounds emulation a little. You should find the options in the MAME32 help file under usage. There's also probably some info on the forum if you search. You need to add the settings in MAME options in Advanced Mame settings in GameEx config. Basic turn down the sample rate, dont resample, and turn up the lag. In addition MAME32FX generally has better sound, so you can try that build.

Under "Tweaks/Performance" in the config app, can you try setting it to not wait for vsync, and ensure the sleep setting is at 0. How does that look? Maybe this feature needs a faster CPU, the alpha belnding more uses the CPU than the graphics card, but the graphics card needs to be fast also.

Sorry could you reexplain what the issue is. In version 5.80 and above, the 3d menus should Alpha Blend zoom in and out, if you have a fast enough PC and decent graphics card. Is it not doing this? In earlier versions of GameEx the 3d menus scroll left and right but also zoom in and out. If your using a V2 theme with an earlier version of GameEx 3d animations are automatically disabled to keep compatibility with V2 themes. Please explain exactly what the issue is. Thanks.

5.81 athough undocumented added support fo MNG videos for emulators. They should work in 5.81 and future releases. Please try with latest version of GameEx, see if they work, if not let me know. Thanks, Tom

hi, It's actually deliberatly coded that way. The reason being so that there is a lot more screen real estate to show snaps and artwork when using a database. So it's actually by design rather than an issue. To be honest the Create Snaps option is only needed for computer games and less popular consoles that don't have databases anyway. Most snaps have already been done by folks to a high quality and you can just download them. Theres even videos for a lot of systems now too. See my links and extras page for links to these files. Tom

13th March 2006 - GameEx 5.80 A ton of emulator databases are included with special thanks to Dave R. (AKA Incubus) I've also improved and fixed the parsing of the databases to fix where there's no date, and provided some built in formatting and cleaning of the description and category. See here for more information on database support, and how you can help: http://www.gameex.info/forums/index.php?showtopic=1228 I have fixed the play random videos option, and also improved it so it now does a shuffle, instead of just randomly select files, meaning videos wont be played again until the list has been parsed. Been wanting to do that for a while, making this feature pretty good now in my opinion. GameEx now attempts to download and show box art for Videos when enabled. Something very cool, for folks running on good hardware. The 3D Transition (selected under display settings), have been greatly enhanced to give a very slick alpha blended 3d effect when going between menus. Not many front ends do such things. Only one I know is Windows Media Centre. It makes GameEx look even more flash and very cool in my opinion, but don't even bother with it if you have less than P4 1.8GHZ and a Radeon 8000 (or equivalent). Fixes please wait animation still showing after GameEx start-up on unregistered versions. I've also upped the minimum requirements to a P3 700Mhz instead of 500Mhz. GameEx may run on less though, but I want people to know GameEx is really for newer systems. Improved loading speed of some menus including start page a lot.

To be honest, it should only be slow the first time it's run during a session, on first run it loads ALL emulators but then does cache them. The Random Video feature is fixed my end, an update should be released within the hour. Thanks for reporting. Cheers.

Thanks a lot Dave, and check your email. A GameEx release should follow Today. In order to offer a bit of motivation to people to update databases, that need a lot of week (SNES, N64 and a few others are fairly OK, but others need a lot of tidying of the Goodnames), I am prepared to offer some cash incentives or free licenses for each perfect full update of a database. $17.50 or a free license for each database (must be of a high quality). I'm not making a lot from donations, but this is a Scene project mostly, so get going!! Tom.

It has been mentioned and asked for a couple of times, it's not as simple as it sounds and to be honest not on the top of my list, or due anytime soon.

Try setting the Display On Secondary setting in GameEx configuration under Display Settings.

Found the problem, fixed. Will be in next release.

It does it one of my machines two that has a nvidia card. I assume the machine that's working does not have an nvidia card? Not sure what to do for the moment, but please confirm the video cards. Cheers. Tom.

Thanks for confirming. I'll check it ASAP. Can you confirm this is happening with unregistered versions of GameEx, ie with the nag screen (I think that has something to do with it)? Thanks, Tom

I'm always listening to anything that makes GameEx better, but to be honest you probably won't get much sympathy on these boards here. The majority of active members have given a donation, and from what I can tell don't regret it all. The time I spend on GameEx is crazy man, and it does not pay the bills. Just take a look at the feature requests and the completed feature requests. You do make an educated point, but no ones forcing you to use the software, although everyone's welcome to ask for requests, and as I said I listen to anything that's a good idea. Thanks, Tom