djrobx

Ah, perfect! That's actually even better. I can just set the networked machines to look at the server's cache file, and leave the main one looking at the regular list. -- Rob

Thanks for this. Is there any way you can persist this cache to disk and add the ability to initiate an update? While it works great after the first load, we frequently go in an out of GameEx to watch TV or otherwise mess with the computer. I know GameEx will evenually surpass Media Center Edition in terms of functionality, but in the meantime, back to my map file. As far as a wizard goes... what would be cool if there was some way to make it easy for users to exchange "wizard templates" for various emulators, sort of like how we're exchanging entries of our GameEx.ini now. -- Rob

NICE! You are DA MAN!! When you do it with the real remote, it leaves MCE out of focus with the task bar over it, but that can be fixed by pressing the MCE button again. Great work! -- Rob

Thanks Tom, you rock!

Hey that's a great solution! I didn't really know what the map file did.Here's a quick way to create the map file without excel. Go to a command prompt, go into your roms dir and do for %s in (*.zip) do echo %s@%s* >> gamelist.map Now notepad gamelist.map and do a find and replace .zip@ with .zip| Then replace: .zip* with (nothing) Save it and you've got a map file that works. You can even keep it on the share and it's fast as lightning. Thanks for this tip.

Didn't really make a difference with the new exe. You can test it without the MCE remote by assigning a hotkey to the ehshell shortcut. Go to the start menu, and right click on the Media Center shotcut, go to Properties. Click on the shortcut key and assign it to something like ctrl-alt-M. Here's my suggestion on how GameEx can deal with it: Monitor the task list for ehshell (or, monitor for that video card error dialog). If found, kill ehshell, then close down directx. Have GameEx load ehshell again (which will now succeed because DirectX isn't locking the display), then exit GameEx. Not pretty, but far superior to having to dig for a keyboard.

Yeah ... and now you've got me going off on the same tangent. Nice! Great rundown.Suggestion: Try uoSnes9x y15. They finally fixed the frameskip. Set the value a high number (3 or more) and turn auto on. It renders as many frames as it can at a stable pace, no more music speed ups and slowdowns. Tends to do about 30fps on average with 22khz sound. Very ncie. I haven't tried Doom yet, but I don't want to touch it because I've just gotten back into playing the updated OpenGL Doom, and I know it would be a pitiful experience in comparison. I can't wait for them to figure out how to get the 3d aspects of the PSP working, so they can do proper Doom and Descent ports! Mmm, PSPDescent.... It's funny because on my 50" setup, the HQ2X filter with NES looks fantastic, probably better than even the SNES. NES has just as much resolution as SNES, just with fewer colors. HQ2X was designed for cartoon-ish graphics so it works better on games with smaller palettes. HQ2X is not like 2xSAI or the others. If you haven't tried an emulator with that particular filter, you should give it a shot. LOL, on a projector setup I imagine some Atari 2600 sprites have pixels bigger than some people's television sets.

If you have BIOS 1.50, don't you need to do the memory card swap trick? How is the quality of the emulators? *Edit* Scratch that, I see the new hack. I tried the NES emulator and it works fantastic! That so rocks! Have you tried FCEU with the HQ2X mode enabled? It really works wonders for big displays.-- Rob

Tom, In a similar vein, do you have any suggestions on what to do about Media Center and its menu key? If someone presses the media center button while GameEx is up in full screen mode, Media Center tries to open and fails with a "Your video card or drivers are not compatible with Media Center" and runs it in a limited mode. When this happens GameEx looses focus, and will not re-focus itself if you try and open GameEx again from the MCE interface. You have to grab a keyboard to get out from this state.

Another feature request: Game list caching for the rom lists in the emulators section. I want to keep only one copy of the emulator ROMs on a network share. While it works great locally, it takes GameEx a very long time (up to 5 seconds every time you move in and out of the ROM list in the NES section) to cue up the list of ROMs over the network. The MAME games already work great because it keeps a local copy of that list. Maybe it could be an option, and if enabled, it updates the emulator ROM list when doing the MAME Roms or something? -- Rob

Enable keyboard mapping in the config. That causes GamEx to monitor and override the behavior of ESC and the media center back button. On the negative side this means you may have trouble using the menu in the emulator if you need to for some reason. -- Rob

Post your config. The best way to do this is to open C:\program files\gameex\config\gameex.ini and find the relevant section. Then cut and paste here. If you enable debug mode you can see what command line GameEx is about to use to launch RockNes. The best thing to do is figure out how to launch RockNes yourself from a cmd prompt and then get GameEx to conform to what you know works. Since RockNes is giving you an error, it sounds like you either need to add [ROMPath]\ to the file, or perhaps you need to add quotation marks. It'll be easier for us to spot what's wrong if we see your confg.

I had this problem too, with the regular Mame (before I started using GameEx). I think I just deleted everything in the cfg and nvram dirs to fix it. Service mode seems to be a savable toggle or something.

If you're just trying to prove a point, wouldn't it be easier to release an unofficial binary with the purported "bloat" features comented out, and let users see for themselves that it makes no difference. But why even do that; just leave things as-is and let people choose something else if GameEx isn't meeting their needs. I just don't think the issue is worth that much work and frustration. There's two threads that seem to be about bloat, the one you've pinned and the "petition". Out of those two threads I see only two people complaining and a lot of people countering with a lot of support for you to leave things the way they are. And I think David's issue regarding CPU usage is solved by changing config option anyway! I've stated my observations that yeah, it does seem like there's some room for speed improvement at boot-time, so I can sort of see why people have concerns about bloat, but as far as I'm concerned I'm totally thrilled with the program the way that it is, and I think I've made that pretty clear. If I haven't, then I'm repeating it for good measure! Just keep doing what makes you happy. -- Rob

One feature I would like *really* badly is the ability to selectively enable Map Keys for the ESC key and MCE Remote "back" key separately. I normally use the MCE remote to exit a game. It's nice to have a uniform way to do this. A LOT of games and emulators want to use the ESC key for various tasks, but I absolutely hate to give up the ability to exit games with the remote so the ESC key is usable. It would be very helpful for these sorts of games. It would be nice even for emulators, since the UIs often need ESC (in Zsnes, for example, that's how you bring up the menu) ** EDIT ** While it would still be nice to have this built into GameEx I ended up just writing my own remote monitoring and key mapping app in C++. I let GameEx run my monitor without keymapping and it all seems to work. Now I have save states on my MCE remote as well as the ability to get out of games that use the ESC key! Hoorah! -- Rob

And yes, the new version does indeed fix it, it saves instantly now. Thanks! -- Rob

Thank you CJ7. I could not have put that into better words. Speaking of people being "used to" open source-ness, if you port to Linux, you will find find this "frustration" phenomenon that he refers to grow exponentially. As much as I may wish this project was open-source, I am thoroughly pleased to have it just the way it is. Tom is exceptionally active and helpful and I wouldn't to change anything that might deflate some of his enthusiasm for the project. -- Rob

The best way to go about implementing this would be to integrate support for WinAmp (or WinAmp plugins). I think there's a WinAmp plugin for almost all of the console formats. Alternatively, the end user could use WinAmp to convert these files to WAVs (and perhaps encode to MP3), then it would be compatile with GameEx. -- Rob

Primarily the initial startup time ("GamEx is loading..."), and the time to return back to the UI after a game exits. The UI itself is very snappy and responsive once it's up. It's not something I would consider unacceptably slow, but most other programs fly on this machine comparitively. I'm not using icons, nor the Jukebox. Another example of slowness, is not in GameEx itslef, but the config applet. Changing pages is laborious (to get up to Emulator #9 for instance). It's just a screen with a few text boxes, I can't help but think that it really shouldn't be that slow. I don't need it that often so I wouldn't normally complain about it, but you asked. We did a lot of work with C# .NET. While we very much enjoyed the language and framework features, for most things the end result was extremely slow compared to doing things the traditional way in C. That was just our experience, it didn't stop us from using it. Maybe things have improved some with newer frameworks and/or VS.NET 2003. We stuck with the original .NET. -- Rob

(forum does not want to accept this as one post for some reason). Anyway, you can then put rungame /c [batfile] as the command line. In the batfile, you change dirs and call rungame.exe. GameEx kills it thinking it was the original program it launched.

The OP states that it's slow even with a gig of RAM and a fast processor. I agree to a certain extent, it's fairly slow on my p4 3.0ghz w/ 1gb RAM. I don't, however, think the recent DVD. media functions and other "feature bloat" items are the culprit. GameEx has actually gotten faster due to other optimizations since those features were added. "Petition" has such an angry, confrontive connotation to it. Politely request a feature if you want it, but this is free software, take it or leave it. There are lots of other front ends out there. I haven't seen sources, but it's clearly been developed using .NET components which focus on ease of and speed of development, rather than fast, lean and mean end user code. If that's what makes Tom happy and keeps the features and updates coming, more power to him.

What does CVS not do that you want it to do? There are web based management/viewers for CVS. CVS served our project very well, even for our Windows projects.

Tom's position on going open source is posted here: http://www.gameex.info/forums/index.php?showtopic=299

I ended up needing to do this again, for a different purpose. This time I wanted to organize a list of classic PC games and run .BAT files as if they were Roms. I came up with a REALLY sleazy trick, but it works. Copy \windows\system32\cmd.exe to "rungame.exe". Also rename the target program (in a different folder) to "rungame.exe". -- Rob

I've set up a vectrex emulator. The vectrex has a game built into the unit with no corresponding ROM. So I tried to make a dummy .GAM file and a batch file to launch the emulator with no cartridge when it sees the dummy file. It works perfectly, except when I use the back button on the MCE remote, GameEx doesn't kill MESS. How does GameEx determine which app is to be killed? Is there a better way to launch batch files or otherwise do what I want?