bkenobi

I use Firefox. I haven't tried Chrome. My wife works advertising for M$ and is intimately aware of Chrome, but apparently it's more for netbooks than for standard PC's...at this point. I think we scared him off. Was it something I said, or was it you?

Firefox has spell check built in so I don't have to worry about misspelling words as much as someone who doesn't have a spell checker installed for whatever reason I think it's better having one than not having one and so I keep using an application such as Firefox rather than IE for that very reason even though IE now has tabbed browsing which I really liked when Firefox was the only one who could do it but I never checked any other browser so it's possible that others had it too so IE might be the only one without it and anyway I like Firefox better because it's quicker and not a M$ product which even though I live near Redmond I don't like some M$ products all that much. Oh, Firefox doesn't seem to have an issue with run on sentences.

MAME is essentially 100% CPU performance based since it has no graphics acceleration. If you use ZiNc, Model2, or one of the other emus that run MAME roms, then you will see some benefit from an upgraded video card (over an onboard one), but I'm not sure how to quantify the difference. I suppose it depends on your CPU whether you will notice the GPU difference. As for console emulators, you will definitely benefit from a better graphics card depending on the system you are emulating (also assuming your CPU is fast enough so as not to be the bottle neck).

Core 2 are 64-bit though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_2 But, that does bring up a good point. If you want to play the newer 3D games, you need to run a 64-bit CPU and OS. I think most people would opt for WinXP 64 over Vista 64, but I'm sure either would work fine.

Except for those 2 MASSIVE ground wire bundles, everything looks very tidy. I don't know of a better way other than having a non-CAT5 cable chain for ground, though. Nice work!

Most people recommend a core 2 duo. I haven't checked of late, but I don't think they would "break the bank" with current prices. You can use onboard video for most things, but if you want Saturn or newer games, you will probably want a decent video card. 1+ gb ram and a good sized hard drive and you should be on your way for <$400 I would think.

Yeah, it looked like there were too many to correct.

You might be able to use romlister for finding the games that you want, but if you want to do custom categories/genres that's another story. I went through this same effort a while back and put together a little Python script that would help with this. Check out the following thread for all the details! http://www.gameex.info/forums/index.php?showtopic=5889 EDIT: After re-reading your post, I think you were looking for just a stripped down list rather than recategorizing things like I initially thought. RomLister could have helped you do this in a few clicks, but manually works too. The script in the linked thread will help if you want to recategorize all of your roms into different groups (e.g., grouping all casino, gambling, mahjong, etc games into a single "CRAP" category for easy filtering in GameEx).

When you're the pimp, they pay you!

Well, perhaps. We had units of different ages in the same cases though. I don't know how long Dell produced that specific case form factor, so it's possible.

That thing is OLD! We had those at my office 6 years ago and they were old then! But, it should work for all non-3D games which should provide a bunch of fun. Oh, and as you know, they are super quiet.

I've never seen a PSU that shape before. All the PSU's in that configuration that I've seen don't have a case. This must have been some kind of small desktop unit rather than a larger unit designed to sit on the floor?

I'm guessing this is a problem with the version of MAME you are running. Version 0.129 or so broke all Neo Geo games due to a change in the storage location of a file in all roms. If that's what's going on, you either need to disable "Verify Roms" or update to 0.130 or newer.

There are half a dozen different filters that each need to be disabled in order to get EVERY game to show up. The one that I didn't see you mention that is pretty important is "Verify Roms". If you don't disable this, then GameEx has MAME check the rom and report if it's valid or not. If you don't have the same version of MAME and roms, you will probably lose quite a few games right there. Also, you need to update your list after changing any filter settings.

No, you have to download the new database when it's updated. You can do that by manually downloading the GameEx installer as far as I know.

That's what I was trying to say in my first post. If you run a game in full screen, the game has full control. It depends on how the game is displayed (D3D, DirectDraw, etc) whether you can have another window pop up over it or not. If the game is displayed in a windowed format, then the keyboard would be displayed without a problem. But, you would need to configure the game so that it opened the window in a specific size and specific location in order not to see the boarder. That's what I meant when I said it's not something that the FE can really do... I'm not currently sure of a workaround other than setting the game up in windowed mode.

Is this a problem when you play the emulator outside GameEx, or just when launched from GameEx? Is the game actually crashing, or is it closing and returning to the FE? If both of these are true, then perhaps you have a key combo that you don't realize is set up to exit the emulator.

I'd say empire needs to verify that's what the problem is first. It's possible that he's got something else that might be causing his issues but we won't know until he responds. If that's the issue, then it would be fairly simple to do this via romlister or clrmame, wouldn't it (generating the list of roms with parents)? But, I would think a quick and dirty script to parse that list would be useful. Either way, I'd wait till empire gets back first.

Looks great! Are you putting the faux drawer plates on the top (or maybe it's just a wood panel), or is it staying open like in the pictures?

I created the directory structure you specified for testing. I moved the test.exe in there and renamed it to your exe to make sure it would work. Everything *should* work now. As for how to start this...well, that's up to you! You can opt to: put it in the startup menu of Windows call it as a script in the registry have GameEx launch it on startup etc Click_N_Type.zip

ABSOLUTELY! Check out the file mameemumap.ini in the GameEx directory. This file will allow you to configure different emulators (MAME or not) to run MAME roms. You can do a LOT of things with it, so the possibilities are close to limitless!

GameEx will only display a flyer option (or any media for that matter) in MAME if there is an exact match for the rom. So, if you are looking at ffight.zip, then you must have ffight.jpg or ffight.png in the flyers folder. If you are using a different version of the rom like ffightu.zip, then you need ffightu.jpg. Basically, since there are so many versions of each game, you will need to make sure you have the content for each version and not just each title. That's about all I can think of right now. Good luck!

There are preconfigured setups for each of these emulators. All you need to do is import them and modify the paths to your roms, images, etc.

If you use the exe, then you just run it and verify that it will run the test.exe file. Once you know that works, you can modify the source and change the call: Run, Test.exe to Run, C:\Program Files\keyboard software directory\keyboard.exeObviously you will need to enter the correct location for the exe and any command line parameters that may be needed. Then you can compile it with AHK into an exe and you'll be done! If you don't want to install AHK for whatever reason, post the code and I can up the exe for you.

You've probably noticed this, but if you 7zip those images then it will take several seconds to a few minutes to load a game. If that doesn't bother you and the space saved is important to you, then no problem.