Tom Speirs

Yes, I guess I could have GameEx pick a device by its name and have a configuration setting to choose one. On the back burner though for the moment, unless others pipe up

Not too sure. Maybe its missing some other files. It sounds like its only the logos you want anyway. Try creating a copy of Default - Default as someting like Default - Reuben then just replace the logos directory in this theme with the one from video fun.

Hi Erik, To make this easy for me. Could you post a simple list of the 8 modes with a corresponding P1Controls Controls.ini setting? In three columns - The number, the control type and how P1Controls shows this. I will use this as my reference for calculting the control types programmatically in GameEx and then assigning a number 1-8. Make it easy for me Thanks, Tom.

Just wanted to quickly say, I am using the MNG videos. Its a 4GB download, but on a good pc these are like watching the 'actual' game. Basically superior quality. There is also a few more of them than the AVI's.

Make sure bak.bmp is in the dir. If not copy it from the default theme.

In the \Default - Video Fun\Media directory\ rename or delete bak.mpg

Here is another movie of just my cab running some software program called gamiey or something like that You can see the whole cab a lot better in this one. Thats why I put it up. Its about 10MB again: http://tomspeirs.com/xenon1.avi

OK. put the videos anywhere you like. I have mine off my mame directory. Then use the Video Snap Path setting in the Configuration tool to tell gameex the directory their in. This is under basic settings. The first one. To make the videos display as a background image (like my cab in the video), you need to set Background mode under display settings, to use game images as the background. If the videos play in the background slowly then turn off the Alpha blending (also under display settings). Let us know how you get on. Tom

Michael and hieule91. Can you please replace GameEx.exe with the one in the attachment. Then post the log. You may need to zip it as it will be big. This is a debug version of 3.48 that will run slow, but should hopefully log enough info to tell me where its going wrong. Thanks, Tom GameEx.zip

Tom, I've downloaded and played around with 3.48 and have a few questions / problems. I have my cabinet, control panel, marquees, and title images all saved as zip files. The help text in the ini file says the program can still recognize these as zip files (only icons must be unzipped). When I specify these as zip files in the config they do not show up in the program. When I unzip all of these artwork files they do show up. Is the help text wrong? Do these need to be unzipped in order to work properly? If so then is there any way you can fix this so the program can still recognize the images in the zip file. The snaps.zip file still seems to work properly however. [ive remove this feature temporarily unil I get a chance to 'optimize' and improve performance of the zip code. The ini file is out of date in that respect, although as I said its just been removed temporarily] Also, can you explain to me how the alpha paging is supposed to work? I have it enabled but it doesn't seem to do anything. When I use the page up / page down arrows it's not jumping to the next alphabetic letter. I'm not sure how this is supposed to function. [it does not affect normal page up/down, but adds new features for keyboard and GamePad, where if you hold down CTRL or Button 1 and then left or right it will Alpha page] Finally, when clicking on the marquee, title, etc. to make the image go full screen it'd be nice to be able to exit back to the previous screen via a left mouse click. I navigate GameEX with a mouse and I left click to make the image larger, but in order to go back to the previous screen it looks like I have to use either space bar or backspace on the keyboard. I think clicking the mouse should have the same effect. Can that be added? [Yes, I take your point deffinitly. I have already looked at this. What i was thinking was making the 'Right' Mouse button do a Navigate 'Back' in GameEx. This would be of benefit anyway i think, and will address this] Thanks! Jeff

Thanks for doing some research Erik. I appreciate this and i do plan to look at the joytokey type app you posted before. I think that would be something Id like to look into more than this kind of thing. Although this could open GameEx to the home automation folks possibly. Please be patient wating for me to implement the new features. I am a busy man Thanks, Tom.

Yes, Toonces is correct. There is no delay. Your PC is doing it as fast as it can. The Thread does the work of opening/processing the image/video. The purpose of this is two things, to make use of newer cpu's such as dual core and hyper threading, and at the same time improve 'responsivness'. In other words you should be able to select another game without the app freezing up waiting for the video or image to open. I have a dual processor machine, and dont notice a huge difference, but do notice a little. On my single core athlon XP, it was pretty rapid before, I dont notice an improvement, but theres certainly no delay. I find it hard to believe it is taking 5 seconds, but as I said there is no delay going on, and a timer is deffinitly not the correct approach for this. I would be interested to hear from Dave, and see how it works on his 800Mhz machine. If its really adverse for him. Ill look at it some more. Thanks, Tom

1. Change the Vector res x an y resolution in the AVGA settings to something else. There is some help there also. Tempest is a vector game, and not like the other (raster games). Perhaps someone else can give you some more detailed info on what the AVGA does? 2. You need to turn off Alpha blending for videos. This is under display settings.

4th April 2005 - Version 3.48 of GameEx available Should fix MAME game list corruption All available MAME lists can now be enabled or disabled Alpha paging for the game lists has been implemented Loading and creating a game image/video is now handled on a thread. This should improve responsiveness in most cases. It works great with dual, HT or dual core systems/processors. Can now navigate the music play list queue with a Game Pad. See the docs page for the updated controls. Cabinet, Panel, Marquee and Title images can now be selected and shown full screen. GameEx is now a bit more aggressive when closing the MAME processes in attract mode. http://gameex.net/

Hi All. Three things. 1. I really dont see what the issue is with unzipping the files, there compressed anyway, and it take seconds. If your worried about hard disk performance in explorer, just split up your top level mame folders. Even if there is a slow down, it will only be when you try to navigate to the files in explorer or a brwoser dialog. 2. Yourll get much better performance. 3. In addition this feature will be coming back once I optimise it.

Hi Wrench. I think it is turned off. It sounds like it might be some other app on your PC causing a conflict. If your using 3.47 can you tell me what happens when you alt tab to some other window or press the windows key? When you do this can you also check if any MAME processes are running in Task Manager? Or anything else? Thanks, Tom

I understand where your coming from now but am still not sure what's going on. I did however need to point out you should use a new official supported build. I still dont know how that insulted you, but it obviously got your back up. GameEx is already set to close the MAME process when it detects most keys but Excluding escape. It also checks for MAME to exit and just returns to GameEx if it thinks that has happened. I've made the killing of the process a bit more aggresive with the next release, that might help I dont know. Other than that, unless your using some unnoficial build, a dos version, or ADVMAME I dont have any ideas at the moment. What is your KEY Combo set to do? It should be mapped to 'Escape'. Are you mapping to ALT-F4 or something else?

Hi, I think your right, and that MAME is crashing. I'm working on an update now, as I stated a few days ago. This update makes Attract Mode a little more aggressive with MAME, and attempts to 'KILL' (as opposed to close) the process after about 2.5 seconds. This has no affect if the process exited as it should. One other thing I would say is that you may have some bad/corrupt roms. I have had my cab on for three-four days with a 97% Rom set running attract mode quite happily. Windows was complaining it was running a little low on resources by that time, but not a single crash. I have known certain games crash, but GameEx and MAME recovered fine. I did find one game, a version of Darius of that made me have to reboot.

1. Have you tried Arcade Mode? 2. Its happening 3. TBC 4. It should allow you to browse for all paths and the CMD. Does it not? In addition, have you tried pressing ALT-TAB in windows. It was a critical key combination in windows prior to version 95. No offence but 5. I've been running PinMAME in GameEx since I added emu support. I think I covered this in another post. If you still need help reply to that one. 6. Your follow up reply covered it and I understand now. Just had no time to really look at it yet. Thanks, Tom

Posting that log file will certainly help

Not entirely without your log and config (and much more info) In addition is gameex actually slow OR are the buttons just not responsive? Im also assuming you have.net framework 1.1 SP 1? Have you completly disabled music in GameEx? That means turn off the Juekbox and also make sure the playlist does not point to anything. Does disabling sound fix the issue? I've had these kind of issues myself a little, and it seems to be caused by audio, at least in my case. What is your sound card, and what driver did you use, and where from? Is it possible when installing WMP10 from windows update you installed some other stuff too, such as an updated driver?

Here it is: I thought I'd do something a little different. I took a video with my cheap digital camera. It shows my living room (batchelor pad), complete with 70" front projected TV and Arcade Cabinet running MCE/GameEx and GameEx shell. Its 10mb here is the link: http://tomspeirs.com/gameex/download/Tom_Home_GameEx.AVI [it's not great quality but you may find it fun to see, as it shows GameEx setup for Cabinet and also Home Entertainment]

Hi Steve, many thanks for the feedback. I get this same issue on my laptop, its deffinitly not by design or a feature! I need to research to be sure, but I think the issue was caused when I upgraded the sound driver to one windows update recommended, and not one from the Sony site. You might want to check audio (and other) drivers. Specific from the manufacturer for your hardware. Spend some time on this, and let me know how you get on. That's unless youve already done this. Then I'll make it more of priority to try and figure out why its happening on my laptop.

Hi, no it does the upgrade for you, its very simple. Just run the setup.exe its as simple as that.

Yes, but how would this be used? Just need a top level overview of when this would be used (called from GameEx) and the benefits of it. Thanks, Tom.