djrobx

I donated to the project a long time ago. GameEx was worth donating to even back when there were no registered features or nag screens. Development has been strong and consistent and Tom has been ever helpful and dedicated to his community. I readily admit to being on the stingy side when it comes to registering software, but Tom Speirs and GameEx are absolutely "cream of the crop" and worth every cent of your registration dollars.

Overlays need to be in \mess\artwork\vectrex\.

DOSBox works great. In the folder where your game is, you'll want to put a dosbox.conf file. Inside the file you can tell it what graphics and sound cards to simulate. There is an autoexec section: [autoexec] # Lines in this section will be run at startup. mount c . mount b save c: play The mount is important, it tells it what folder the C: drive should represent. As for integrating with GameEx, what I did for my PC games is make a folder where the "roms" are .BAT files. For each .BAT file there is a corresponding folder. E.g. Robot Odyssey.bat : cd "Robot Odyssey" ..\DosBox\DosBox I just have GameEx look for .BAT files for its list of "Roms".

I've been having SO much fun playing certain games I haven't been able to play well in so long, I just had to share this with my fellow classic gaming fans! Turns out the WII remote is a bluetooth device. And per the usual, some smart folks floating around the internet have figured out how to make it useful as an input device on a computer! The best part is, since I already had a Wii and a bluetooth adapter, I got an exciting "new toy" without having to spend any additional money! Firstly, the Wiimote can be used with the IR emitting sensor bar to be a highly accurate pointing device, like a lightgun that works on ANY type of TV. That's huge for me, I've had an HDTV set since December of 98 so lightguns have been a no-go for a very long time. I tried some guns like the RGT-G1 but the accuracy was horrible. Couple the Wiimote with Nestopia, and you can play the NES zapper games on your bigscreen. I've found Nestopia to work by far the best of the NES emulators with regards to lightgun emulation. Fceu for some reason has trouble keeping the crosshairs on screen and its difficult to get it smooth. With Nestopia, the experience is so fluid and playable. I've been playing Gumshoe, I've forgotten how much fun that game is. The wiimote can be used with MAME but unfortunately not nearly as easily as the NES. You must use PPJoy to emulate a joystick since Mame does not accept absolute coordinates from mouse devices. But once you get it going it works pretty well. Which brings me to....Atari 2600 paddle games! The wiimote also has motion sensors. You could continue to use the Wiimote in lightgun mode and "point" to track the 2600 paddle controller (which works reasonably well), but I've found its more fun, and more intuitive to rotate the controller and hold it in two hands like some Wii driving games. Instead of twisting a dial, you "steer" like you would a car. I do about as well with Kaboom as I used to with the real controller. Great stuff. The big disappointment, is, once again, MAME's weak analog input device mapping support. In "paddle" controller mode, you can play Arkanoid very well and it's a lot of fun. But Arkanoid 2 and Arkanoid Returns have problems due to MAME not dealing with the "Extremities" well since a real encoder-dial can spin indefinitely. But there's so many different ways you can configure the Wii remote thanks to GlovePie's scripting, that you can do almost anything you can thnk of with a little elbow grease. If you're interested in checking it out, there's a bit of a howto here, http://www.wiili.org/index.php/HowTo:BlueSoleil and a discussion forum here with loads of script examples http://www.wiili.org/forum/ I highly suggest going with BlueSoleil bluetooth drivers, since BlueSoleil + GlovePie will auto-connect a wii remote, which is a big pain in the booty without it.

With vpinball/vpinmame the tables are of varying resolutions, but will scale to specific resolutions just fine.

I downloaded the latest GameEx but I still have this problem.

Ok, good, cause this started happening on my own system too! Came here to grab the debug build but I guess I'll just wait for the release. Thanks Tom!

This doesn't seem to work any longer for me. If I invoke Media Center I get the video card error, which just remains on the screen indefinitely. If I click it to close it, I'm left at the desktop. If I then click on the GameEx icon (which is now minimized), GameEx comes up, shuts down, and starts media center again on its own. It's like it's falling alseep on the job in the background or something.

Ok thanks. I will give this a shot when I go to his place next.

I can't replicate it on my own systems either. It's gotta be one of those "timing just right" things. The MAME games launched fine. Certain emulators with very few ROMs seemed to also work. But most of the emus would not launch. I tried reinstalling from scratch and it didn't change anything. I also installed .net framework 2.0 with no change. It's very strange.

I installed GameEx on a friend's system today. It's an Athlon 64 3200+ eMachine. Same config I use. On his system, when I select an emulator game with either the joypad or the keyboard, the menu items shift slightly to the right and back again, I get the "ding" confirming a selection, but the game does not start. Nothing is shown in the log at all (it's as if I have not tried to pick something). However, if I use the mouse, the game laucnhes just fine. I finally came up with a workaround of enabling "Show Game Information", from the secondary menu the games start up just fine.

Heh, yeah. I thought it must be something with just my setup because surely someone would have said something by now. Glad to know I haven't gone totally insane. Yeah I'm still alive. Sorry I went AWOL; my life got crazy. I got sucked back into working that home theater related job. Not only did that kill ALL of my free time, but it also meant running linux on my main gaming/HTPC machine. I recently quit that job which has put Windows back on the box and is giving me time to get back into the gaming thing again.

Almost every time I run GameEx, it wants to update the list of MAME roms. I have the menu item to update the list turned off. What could cause this? Once updated it looks fine.

There are some settings you can tweak in order to reduce the CPU usage while in the GameEx UI. Go under Tweaks/Performance and increase the "Reduce CPU utilization" value. I use 7. You can also edit the theme and change "AniBak" to false. That will prevent the background from doing a slow animation which uses up some CPU time. Unfortunately neither of those things affect my start-up time or should affect anything while GameEx is in the background. -- Rob

Hi Tom, It'd been a while since I updated to a newer version of GameEx since the older versions were working great. I finally decided I really wanted the "My games" icon in Media Center so I went ahead and did the install. 5.25 through 5.30 loads *painfully* slow compared to the old version on my system. It seems to hang up for a while on this line in the log: 13:35:24.2 12/18/2005: Loading last used Game List 13:35:51.5 12/18/2005: Creating DirectSound Device What the heck is it doing for 25 seconds? What's worse though is that GameEx is affecting the performance of things that run under it. I play StepMania for example. I can no longer use it under GameEx. It stutters and jerks and is completely unplayable. I went ahead and copied a set of 4.65 set of binaries from another machine, and now it loads fast and StepMania is back to being usable. Is there something in the game history I need to flush or something? I know you hate complaints about "bloat", but I just wanted to alert you to my exxperience with the current version... I can't use it. System spec is 3ghz P4 HT, 1gb RAM. SANDRA tested and it's performing properly. - Rob 530log.txt

I'm sorry, I don't understand the problem? -- Rob

Works fine for me, have you updated your MCE to the latest patches?

And of course don't forget to save the activation key that Tom gave you in email.

Sorry I never made that assignable since I use GameEx's quit feature. I can probably add it easily enough. -P85 aligns the paddle so the center of the XBox stick is the center of the 2600 paddle controller. Z26's default is off-center. Not that the analog stick is great for playing paddle games, but it's better than nothing. -r makes Z26 use Windows' refresh rate. I needed it in order to run at 60hz. -u38 has to do with the vertical display centering. Seemed to work best for the games I play most.

I posted a similar utility a while back (SnapRenamer). The Visual Pinball ones are the most difficult to match up, because each author uses their own naming conventions, and they're all over the place. The "version" numbes usually are somtimes alphanumeric, so it's harder to determine what information is relevant when trying match. I got into the habit of renaming the tables to something clean looking for GameEx, and downloading the screenshots at the same time. -- Rob

The bluetooth ones work great across a room. It's just the generic RF ones that don't cut it. Not sure how great they are with FPS though. The original Microsoft bluetooth keyboard + mouse I tried was a little latent. The bluetooth keyboard comes with a USB bluetooth adapter and software. It will have everything you need.

Enable flat menus. -- Rob

640x480 is a good res for TV. -- Rob

As far as I know the official MAME saves high scores. That's what the HISCORES.DAT file does, tells it where the high score data is so it can save it. I know it's something the dev team finds against the principles of the project, but the feature is there. It may not work for all games though.

At this point you've pretty much identified that the i815 video drivers are crap. I'd be looking at finding another video card (PCI even if you have no AGP slots).