bkenobi

I use the wireless for administration. If I need to update roms or anything large, I open the back of the cab and plug in the gigabit connection for better throughput.

Are you sure you can't call the Resident Evil 5 executable directly? Sometimes you don't really need to call the launcher which simplifies things. If that doesn't work, Tempest created a thread a couple weeks back for wrapper requests. If he doesn't step in on this thread, maybe you could find that one and post the request there?

Yup. Whatever the emulator number is in GameEx, that's what you put in the mameemumap.ini file. So, if you have a lightgun version of MAME set up in emulator slot 10 for instance, you would use 10. There are a number of lists out there already, but if you want to create your own (those others might be outdated anyway), try using Rom Lister. It's an awesome little app that gives you the ability to generate many different kinds of list outputs with a wide variety of input criteria. Remember that there are 2 kinds of gun games though...true light gun and positional (joystick) guns. You will likely need to treat them differently in the emu (or at least make different configs for them in MAME).

Add a wireless card to the cab? I use wireless USB dongles so I can put the antenna where I want it.

I have a setup on my driving cab that uses GlovePIE. Check it out and see if that helps: http://www.gameex.info/forums/index.php?showtopic=7403

I was mostly posting so there would be a link to the project home (primarily for others). I didn't mean to imply that you should go away

FWIW... http://lf2.net/

The real problem is that this program doesn't give you any idea which controller is which if you have 2 of the same. It's possible that windows could switch the two and you wouldn't be able to fix it because this program isn't capable of knowing which is which AFAIK. One way around this is to use the good old 2 controller method. That is, plug one joystick in each of 2 controllers...or one in a hub and the other somewhere else. It should never switch if it's done that way. Obviously, the best solution is a way to assign an ID to the joystick, but very few have that capability.

I've used the JoyID utility and it not only works great manually, it is scriptable! I have 3 usb joysticks that get screwed up very rarely. When this happens, MAME don't work no more. I simply run the script I've set up and everything gets straightened out.

Last I checked, the built-in remapping software can't handle game controllers with more than 16 buttons. Has that changed? The GP-Wiz line of encoders has 32 or 40 depending on when you bought it. As a result, it's rather difficult to use the GameEx remapping.

Get a gamepad for console emulators IMO.

I'm not exactly sure what you want to do here. If you want to remove the game from the list in GameEx, you can press the delete key and it will add it to the filter list so you won't see it any more. This will not delete the rom from your drive, it will just keep it from showing up in the list. If this is your desired result, you can map a key to delete using JoyToKey or XPadder. It's also possible to use AHK since this is a simple thing (which would also make button combos a bit easier). If you want the game physically deleted from the drive, you will need to use a script (AHK or otherwise) or a GameEx plugin that will detect you key combo and somehow delete the game you are selecting. This is a bit more difficult because you will need to either read the gameex.ini file for the last game added to the filter or develop a plugin that will run when that delete button is pressed. There is no easy way currently to remove the game from the drive. There is currently a method available to remove the game from your list. Btw, this has been requested and discussed in the past. You might want to check the forum for older posts on this topic to get more details and perhaps some already available code snippets.

Have you tried running it with roms on a local drive? If it runs at reasonable speed, then it's obviously the network (somehow). If it's still slow, then it's got to be the configuration of GameEx (or something else local to that machine). My guess is that it has to do with latency of the network, but I'm not an IT expert.

I didn't check, but I thought the credit info was stored in a different file than the cfg stuff. I know a lot of the configuration stuff is there though, so I certainly could be wrong.

That thread provides the only current solution. There have been requests for this feature for a while, but as of yet, nothing has been implemented.

There was one recently that was HUGE (tunnel vision I think). It had a ton of videos for every little thing. From what I recall, it was really cool, but it didn't fit what I wanted/needed for my cab. Most themes are much less than 100mb, so you shouldn't have a problem grabbing a few to try assuming you are on a broadband connection. If you are on dial-up, then this might be the wrong hobby anyway.

There is no preview for every screen of every theme. You would need to download each theme you are interested in to see what everything looks like. However, the main GameEx home page does have a number of themes available for download. The vast majority of these themes have 3 thumbnail images for you to see what they generally look like. It won't give you all screens, but it should give you an idea of what it looks like generally. http://www.gameex.com/Download/Themes/tabid/94/Default.aspx

You probably need to check out your MAME/ini/<romname>.ini file. You can safely delete it if you want, but it's ASCII so you can take a look at it first.

GameEx will try to override the location of your roms. GameEx thinks both emulators use the same romset, so it will physically change the ini (of both zinc and model2) to the same directory as your regular MAME roms. If you don't want to use the same rom set, you need to set up Model2 as a separate emulator. The only alternative is to make your ini read only. NOTE: I know GameEx overwrites the zinc ini. I can't remember if it will just send the rom path for Model2 or if it also overwrites the ini. In either case, the solution is the same.

It's definitely hard to tell what's the bottleneck...which is why I suggested testing. I did a TON of testing and found that, in my setup, the bottleneck wasn't the drive speed, it was the network. That doesn't mean that's a universal though. I'm not an IT expert, so I don't have a solution other than testing and trying different things. Actually, my gigabit speeds are a bit slower than I had hoped for to this date. I got things fast enough that I was happy with them and moved on (since I didn't want to become an IT expert).

The first step is getting Model2 working outside GameEx. Once you get that going, we can help with the command line so it will work with GameEx.

Be careful with MBps and Mbps. There is a big difference. When manufacturers list the throughput speed, they list "gigabit" or "1000 mbps" which is not what you think. In reality, you will see ~10% of what you expect due to marketing and such. I found that I can achieve ~50 MB/s on my gigabit network by transferring from one device to another with short cables and a gigabit switch (no other devices). I tried MANY configurations and some were much slower. I thought I had deleted all of my testing, but I guess not. I still have the results, so I can post what I used and you can try it yourself. Read this page first: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=24310&Itemid=77 Then, use iozone (www.iozone.com) with the following command: iozone -Rab Results.wks -i 0 -i 1 -+u -f e:\tmp.tmp -q 64k -n 32M -g 1G -z where, "Results.wks" is an output file where iozone puts the results in M$ Works format "e:\tmp.tmp" is the location of a test file iozone will create The command is described in the article nicely.

There was a site I used that I can't remember now. It was something like "network peripherals", but that's not it. Anyway, I always recommend Tom's Hardware. I just checked their forums and found over 60,000 threads in the general networking discussion area. I had a problem with my PC last week and I was able to get help VERY quickly (a USB device had locked up and kept my system from POSTing...didn't know USB could do that). Anyway, they would be my first stop.

I can't say for sure where the problem in the setup lies. However, there are a few places bottlenecks can occur in general. First, make sure your router is actually gigabit. I have not seen many routers that are, so I actually use a gigabit switch to split out my connection between all my computers. The wireless router is connected to the cable modem and then on to the switch so that I can share my connection to laptops on the network. Also, your router might not be capable of dealing with the number or type of packets that are being sent. Some network devices can support "jumbo" packets. I don't really understand all the details with them, but lets just say if your router doesn't support these, the connection can get bogged down. Be aware that the newtork itself can only support a total throughput (meaning, each device can't transfer gbps all at the same time). I can't say a damn thing about the computer as I'm not familiar with Mac's hardware and software at this point. BUT, the connection to the router could be a big bottleneck. If so, you can add more network cards to the server to allow higher throughput. If you do that, you may need multiple routers/switches (I haven't had this issue, so I haven't looked into it). The final bottleneck could be the firewire drives. I would look into this last, but it can be tested easily since you can just transfer the same file from one drive to another and time it. When I was building my server, I spent a lot of time testing different bottlenecks and found that all local drives (including USB and Firewire) were faster than the network (even up to GB). Hope that helps. If not, there are a TON of resources available to help with this problem! Just check out google for a few.

You know Tempest, now that you are a mod, you could sticky that thread...