bkenobi

I wasn't sure if you were trying to merge a goodmerged set is all. Playstation was only released as TOSEC anyway (well, of the big 3 groups anyway), right? If so, then goodmerging is a moot point.

Just to be clear, as I understand it, the new merge feature makes a non-Goodmerged set act like a real Goodmerged set. If you have a Goodmerged set as is and turn on the feature, it will likely not work as expected.

I agree. Grayed out menus in GameEx can't be selected at all, so it seems like that would be a good way to go. The only thing about having them grayed out is with my theme of choice (BlueEx), the gray is hard to differentiate from the regular items. Still, that seems like the right way to go if this is incorporated.

That was something I suggested a couple days ago for MAME (for a different purpose), but it sounds like it won't work there (due to filters from what I understand). However, I don't see why a dummy file couldn't work with other systems that don't validate roms like MAME does. The down side to that is there will be no indication in GameEx that the game isn't valid. As a result, you will have a list of games that for some reason just don't work. This could be complicated for you to explain to your guests let alone you figuring out which is which.

Not currently possible...

Hey, Flash is back! Yeah, I checked out your DS project recently and it looks really cool! I don't have one, so I guess I would be limited to using an emulator to fire it up though. Btw, I hope none of my comments sounded negative about the DB project? I know they've basically become your project with help from HK in making the app to do the work. I simply don't know any of the systems that are left to work on and thus they really wouldn't hold my interest so I wouldn't likely do a quality job (primarily due to lack of knowledge, but possibly due to plain shoddy work as well ). Oh, and since you mentioned it, where's my damn theme!?

I'm using a GP-Wiz and 2 Logitech Rumble Pads for input on my system. Since GameEx can't see all the inputs on my GP-Wiz, I have things set up to use a custom keyboard input and XPadder to do the conversion. Everything works fine except for attract mode. When I press a coin button, the game starts the demo mode and looks like things should work fine. When I start playing, things work. However, after the time limit expires (3 minutes on my system), GameEx moves on to the next item in the sequence. I just tried turning on game pad support and setting all keys to use custom settings (everything is currently set to joystick button 6 since I don't use it in GameEx). But, that doesn't seem to make it better. I can enter a coin, but when I hit P1B1, it exits to the FE. I'm just wondering what GameEx is looking for so I can see if there's a way to configure my system to make that work. It seems like a good overall/ideal solution would be to update the FE so that GameEx can see more buttons (there's a new GP-Wiz 40 that has 40 inputs, so 16 is obviously somewhat less). However, I know that will take some effort (maybe a lot of effort depending on how things were originally coded), so I just was curious if there was something I could do in the interim. If not, then I will just accept that I can't play games directly from attract mode. I'm just trying to close this issue one way or another. Thanks!

The tool that HK put together grabs data from Moby Games (among other places) and fills it in the database automatically. The problem is that someone has to manually go through each game and verify that things are correct and then fill in any blanks that weren't scraped from anywhere else. The process is much easier than doing it by hand, but like you said there are over 20k entries!

Lightgun: Topgun and Wiimote are currently your only options. There are a couple of other products that are getting some discussion over at BYOAC forums, but so far nothing firm (Andy at Ultimarc is also tossing the rumor out there that he may be developing something). However, today you only have the two options I mentioned. Topgun works ok, but it requires you to stand pretty far back. Wiimote apparently doesn't work quite as well if you want to play with the crosshairs off, but it does work (apparently it responds more like a mouse than a gun). I have no experience with either product. I personally have a pair of GunCon2's running on my CRT based cab. Tempest has at least one Topgun, so he might have more insight in them, but since you already use them it might not be that helpful anyway. As for GunCon3...there's currently no drivers that I'm aware of. As such, they aren't an option. Go to BYOAC to get a much better idea of what's available and coming down the pipe.

So, if I understand correctly, the new method requires 2 buttons to bring up CPWizard (1 to pause MAME, 1 to show CPW). There is no way to have a single pause press both pause and bring up CPW with the new system, correct?

I said 3/4 because there were a lot that had work on them, but weren't complete and the ones that were done were what most people seemed to care about (NES, SNES, N64, Genesis, etc.). In reality, there's a lot that needs work on, but many of those systems are more obscure IMO. Also, some of those systems had so many games and apps that I'm not sure they can ever be completed (C64 for example). But yeah, there is some stuff that will work for some stuff.

Yes, you can launch XPadder with the command line and even have it load up profiles for multiple controllers (if you have more than one). I can't remember the command line structure exactly, but if you go to a command prompt and type "xpadder /?" I think it lists all the available options. There's probably a way to find this info in the main program as well, but I don't recall how to get to it. I do remember that /m starts things minimized, but that doesn't really help you

I didn't realize there were 14 actions in poker. Perhaps these are like the touch screen style games (perhaps without the touch screen) where you can hold any of the 5 cards. That would mean you need 5 + a few others for betting and such. Still seems like a lot, but I guess these are probably dedicated machines that didn't look like standard arcades with a joystick and such. Hmmm, are they really arcade games if they don't have a control panel?! Anyway, all I can say is....SMART ARSE!

Verify that your roms use one of the big 3 naming formats (NoIntro, GoodNames, TOSEC). If they don't match one of those systems, you will need to use a tool like RomCenter or clrMAMEpro to rename your sets. Also, if you have snaps, titles, boxes, etc for your systems, those need to match the rom names as well. If they don't, search this forum for a tool called FatMatch. It should help renaming stuff. Oh yeah, one more thing. The databases are not all complete. There was a major effort at the end of last year to rebuild all of the databases, but it appears to have stalled about 3/4 of the way through. There were several people who were helping initially, but it eventually fell on one person to do ALL of the work (basically), so I think he may have gotten burned out. Hopefully someone will help knock the rest of them out at some point.

Metal Slug should display correctly out of the box for MAME. If you want the name to include things like the version number and location, you should turn off the option to remove parenthesis. As for other emulators that use MAME roms, the best thing to do there is to point your emulator to the "[Arcade] MAME" database. This is created each time you update your list so it should keep accurate. One note of warning though. The MAME database only includes games that GameEx lists. Meaning, if you have any filters set up to remove some games, then the database will not include them. If your emulator can play these games, those entries will remain the rom name. The solution I have come up with is to disable all filters, run the update, copy the database to another location (I call it "[Arcade] MAME All"), turn filters back on, then update your list again. This does take some extra time, but it's only required when you update your rom set and/or MAME version. Hope that helps.

What kind of insane game would require a person to use 14 buttons!? Well, other than Mahjong of course...

I think Invincer was saying that once the DVD was ripped to the HDD, he can't play it in GameEx because the native DVD format isn't supported. It's certainly possible to rip a DVD to the drive with DVD Decrypter (or another similar app) and then convert that to an ISO for GameEx, but it's a bit of extra work that might be avoided with a small change from Tom (potentially).

Ahhh, well in that case you are correct that it isn't currently supported. This is obviously a new feature request, so I would highly recommend adding it to the features request thread in the stickies.

Registered users can run DVD's directly from the hard drive. I presume these are the vob files, but I have never used the feature, so I can't say for sure.

Many people have looked into ways of globally setting Model2 controls, but as of yet, I know of no way to do it. Fortunately, the list of Model2 games isn't too long, so it's at least manageable in a session or two.

One quick question: Is it possible to set up gamepad inputs in GameEx such that no button does anything? I'm thinking of turning on the gamepad support so that GameEx can detect input during attract mode but I don't want Gameex to actually respond to any inputs (I'll stick with keyboard input to actually use GameEx).

Either disable windows hotkeys (AHK is one way to do that) or remap your XArcade stick so that it doesn't use alt, ctrl, shift, etc. This link might help disable hotkeys, but I haven't tried it so I can't confirm. http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2006/12/d...ws-hotkeys.html Here's one thread posted at the AHK forums: http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/misc/Override.htm

That looks much better than I thought a rotating screen would look! I don't know what I was expecting, but nice stuff! Also, I didn't think it would be able to switch so quickly. If I build another cab, this is something I will definitely have to consider since I won't likely use another CRT (based on availability).

There are 3 options here: 1) Write a plugin that will perform this copy each time a game is launched. This is the best solution, but requires knowing how to write plugins in C# or VB.NET. 2) Place this script in one of the launch before/after/also fields for each emulator/application. This is the easiest thing to do, but you might not have blank launch commands for every emulator/application. If not, you would probably need to use a batch file or something in order to run multiple processes. 3) Have the script watch for your emulator/application processes and run the script when it detects one. For this to work, you would need a list of all the processes (emulators/applications) you will be running, then have some logic set up to run the script when it sees the process for the first time (otherwise it will continually run while the process is active). In short, there are a few ways to do it with varying levels of complexity.

Ok, don't want to take over reflex's topic. But since the topic is similar.... I have gamepad disabled in GameEx. So I guess that means that GameEx won't watch for gamepad input in emulators either? The reason I don't use gamepad support in GameEx and resort to XPadder is that GameEx can only use the first 16 buttons for a gamepad. BUT, the GP-Wiz has 32 inputs (and newer units have up to 40 inputs). For player 1 this is fine, but for player 2 GameEx won't see all of my inputs. Ah well, I've gotten used to exiting the game and finding it in the list when I want to play it.