bkenobi

1) Your TV can only run at ~500 lines of resolution so 640x480 is essentially the native resolution (This is sometimes called 540i, but that's neither here nor there). If you set your resolution to higher than that, the output to the svideo will be converted such that 1024x768 maps to the TV resolution. As a result, you will see things sized smaller, but you won't gain any detail. I have my cab set to 800x600 because windows doesn't display things correctly at 640x480 (config boxes get sized outside of the screen, text is the wrong size, etc.), but it wouldn't matter if you attach a monitor or log in remotely to configure things. 2) I'm not sure what you mean, but I'm guessing you are referring to the fact that if you turn on bezels, some games have a very small screen to play in (e.g., 1942). Well, that's pretty much going to happen depending on your settings in MAME. There are some options you have though: you could turn off bezels for all games; you could turn off bezels for each game you don't want to use it on (tab->video options->hide bezel); you could crop artwork for all games; you could crop artwork for specific games; other options exist too... I think you would be best suited to crop or disable the artwork for those games that cut off most of the screen. I personally don't like the NeoGeo artwork displaying because it looks boring and it shrinks the screen by ~40%. 3) Make sure you have the same roms as you do version of MAME (e.g., 0.122 for both). If not, MAME could be seeing a bad checksum. You can technically use any version of MAME you want, but the one most people use is the vanilla release, so you would have a better chance of getting help (here anyway).

Sorry, my cab uses a control panel and I don't have wireless controllers (yet). I would be interested in responses since I will be getting a couple at some point. I've never heard anything bad about the Logitech wireless controllers and was leaning towards a pair of them. I remember people complaining about the Saitek ones a while back in a similar thread here. I can't say if either of those exhibit the same problem you are reporting, though.

GoodTools will check the roms checksums as well as the naming. If there is a bad checksum (a corrupt file, wrong version, etc), it will let you know and you can correct the problem.

This has to do with the video card supporting the monitor more than GameEx supporting it. As long as you can output the correct resolutions so things show up on the TV, you can get GameEx to work with it.

For clarification, is this just an issue when running GameEx, or do you have this issue when running MAME from the command line? Also, what version of MAME are you using (vanilla, MAME32/MAMEgui, MAME Plus!, MAMEFX, etc.)? If you are running a derivative build, have you tried a vanilla build? I typically run vanilla or MAME32 and have not had these issues so I'm curious if it could be something to do with the version you run.

No, not currently. Perhaps a good feature request though.

I was wondering if it was a path thing. I noticed GameEx crashed right after going through the path stuff, but didn't know for sure. Oh well, good catch Brian!

Are you using a PSX emulator? Emulator 6 appears to have nothing configured for it, so if that's the case I suggest you turn it off.

Well, you have a video card, it's just built into the motherboard. And yes, it's true that you don't need a powerful video card for MAME since there are no optimizations with the video drivers. BUT, you need to have enough CPU power to run both MAME and GameEx. When MAME is running, you GameEx isn't doing anything other than sitting in the background, so it's more of a memory requirement, actually. Anyway, if you have a bunch of features turned on in GameEx, you could experience slowdowns on a lower end system, but that won't affect MAME performance like you are experiencing. So to answer your question, no, you don't need to buy anything. MAME needs to be set up correctly for your system and you should be good to go. Btw, how much ram do you have installed? And how much is allocated to the video card?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but configFile=nes is probably an advanced config file that does a few things. Among other things, it can be used to have a multi-key quit sequence in emulators. So for instance, if you want to press up+left+button1+button4+button7 for whatever reason, you could do that. As I recall, the file is located in the c:\Program Files\GameEx\Config\Emulator directory.

That's a new feature of the screen saver that HK created. Basically it's an overlay that gives you a way to see what game is being played so you can check it out at some point. GameEx creates this on the fly and saves it in that directory.

If you have a 32" LCD in a cabinet, I would assume your system has plenty of memory, correct? If you are running with a relatively small amount of memory and you have an onboard video card, you could be running short especially if you have set the bios to use a bunch (e.g., you have 512mb memory and you select 128mb or 256mb for your video card). I'm running 1GB of memory with -triplebuffer and -d3d and don't have tearing problems of sound problems.

That's funny. You need a powerful 2008 computer to run a vintage 1970's no cpu game.

Set the screen saver to less than the time out time for the controllers? That's a smart ass remark, but it might actually work.

Cheapest option is a pair of GunCon2 compatible guns (check ebay, Game Stop, Game Crazy, Craigslist, etc.). The better option for eliminating monitor compatibility issues is the LCD Top Guns. I have Scorpion3 guns and they are ok, but I would look at others first (they are highly rated on arcadecontrols.com, but are a little small and have plastic trigger components). I would get Top Guns when these fail except that I don't have an easy way to mount the LED strips.

There have been scripts written to help do this with other systems that use actual CD images using Daemon Tools and Alcohol 120%, but I don't recall a good resolution on how to do this automatically. I don't emulate C64 or other systems that have multi-disk/disc games, so it's never been an issue I've looked into. Nologic has written a few of these script (as have others), so it might be something that could be revisited if it's truly unresolved.

I may be misunderstanding your question, but if I understand correctly: You need to create a directory somewhere (e.g., c:\emu\PC_Games). Then, put a link to each PC game you want to have access to in that folder (e.g., c:\program files\tiger woods 2008\tw2k8.exe => c:\emu\PC_Games\tw2k8.lnk link file...right click and select create shortcut). You may want to add a map file to rename your shortcut to a meaningful name in GameEx, or you could just name "tw2k8.lnk" to "Tiger Woods Golf 2008.lnk". If you need help with map files, FIRST search the forum (there's lots of threads on it), and SECOND, if you still need help, ask

Interesting. So how fast does it run?

Sorry you didn't like my suggestion. I only threw it out there because I had this EXACT same problem with my cabinet and ran through the other likely causes first. It wasn't heat, it wasn't PSU, it didn't seem to be the motherboard or CPU. The video card was brand new, so since everything else was built in and working, I tried different ram and guess what...IT WORKED!!! I thought I would share a solution that seemed to fix my setup with another person...my bad. Now, to be fair, I have had a lock up recently that will cause me to look into other things again, but I still believe this is hardware related.

My guess is you had bad ram on the other box.

Is the game messed up when run without GameEx? 1) Run the game from GameEx 2) Exit GameEx 3) Run the "Run Last Game.bat" file from the start menu Give that a try and let us know...

That's what I was trying to say. I don't think there is anywhere to put the avi path in for external apps. Emulators are exactly the same as external apps except that they have a few more options (the ability to send the rom name and path to a command line, artwork and videos, etc.).

My bad Actually, I never looked as I don't have LED's yet. I only get so much time to play with this stuff, so I don't keep up with features I can't implement. Either way, that's a pretty cool feature! Now if I had some LED's...

I don't have and thus don't use the UltraStik plugin, so I won't be much help. I suggest you ask this question in the UltraStick Plugin thread since it appears that Ogg (the author of the plugin) reads that thread. Perhaps one of the mods could move your question directly into that thread to keep things clean.

Bezels are just a combination of a png and xml file. The png contains an image of what you want displayed and the xml tells mame where to put it. If you just want to change what the bezel looks like, you can simply use paint or any other graphics editor and copy the image from one side of the bezel that you like (say the "MAME" side for instance) to the other side. The file is located in the bezel directory of GameEx (I think it's actually a bezel v2 directory if I remember correctly). Just go to Program Files\GameEx and look around at the directories. It shouldn't take more than a couple minutes to find the file you need to modify (I did it way back when, but don't use them, so it's been abandoned on my machine.