bkenobi

Controls.dat files are small since they are just text files. Extracted they are ~500kb.

I don't remember what the [no]switchres switch does. You currently have it set to 1 in your MAME32.ini and Tempest is suggesting setting it to 0. It looks like you are also running MAME windowed. I would probably set it to be full screen instead of windowed, too.

Sorry dude. I try to avoid holding hands with other guys whenever possible.

When GameEx is in full screen, it will automatically be set to always on top. I don't know if that's the case for windowed mode since I don't run it that way. I don't recall seeing an "always on top" selection in either config tool.

That's what I'm trying to say. There's no such thing as an installer or a version with/without x and y. If you get the official build of Mugen from the project's homepage, it includes NOTHING. You can search around and find characters, stages, etc., but you will have to install them manually by editing the ini files within the Mugen directory structure. The other option is to find a setup that someone else has already tweaked and decided to share. There was a thread here a while back where one person gracefully shared his setup with the community. It was a nice small set that was pretty well balanced. If you search, there's a chance the files are still available. It's up to you if you want to have a single version of Mugen that covers all characters or a few different ones that have specific sets. The beauty of Mugen is it's ability to be FULLY customizable. You can literally do anything you want with it. The only down side is that you must have a bit of talent if you are creating it from scratch.

That's basically what the new V4 themes can do.

If you run it from MAME32 directly and it works but does not work correctly from GameEx, then it must be a problem with the command line arguments you are using in GameEx. I don't see anything that would be a problem, but you could try deleting the arguments in GameEx just to make sure.

That one looks like it only has 2 characters installed and 3 stages. I wouldn't bother with it. There are sets that include hundreds of characters too. Those tend to be overwhelming to pick a player IMO. If you grab the official Mugen release and a character set, you will have to figure out how to set it up and get it looking good. It's definitely possible, but you would have to put in the effort. This is not a commercial, polished product, so it's not going to be via a GUI (there is a 3rd party one, but that's another story). You will be editing text files manually. If it were me, I would just grab someone else's set that matches what you want. I personally never found exactly what I wanted, so I don't have it installed ATM. I wanted characters from the following: Street Fighter SNK Marvel Mortal Kombat I wanted them broken up into blocks for each so they would be easy to find. I wanted just a few nicely put together stages. I wanted a few decent audio tracks. But I didn't want all variations of Ken. Just one version that was nice and representative of the series. It seemed to me like everyone that did a Mugen set was either all or none. This is really just my opinion though. If you want to give it a try, maybe you can find something better!

Not necessarily. The project homepage provides both formats for the current release. Actually, now that I think about it, there must have been a .dat format in the first place. That means that the xml format is at least the 3rd format that they have released. They do not support the .dat format anymore though. Check out the controls.dat homepage.

The Mugen community doesn't seem as open and giving as some other ones online. I didn't put a bunch of time in, but it looked like the people who spend the time to create the characters and stages tend to be interested in trading their work for other Mugen things. If you search around, you can find different Mugen setups that are already complete. I think I found several on P2P sites and various torrent trackers. They do tend to be large though. I think the ones I found were between 600Mb and 2Gb. While these aren't typically tracked on the same torrent sites that you will find romsets, I can't list any of the locations I found because last I checked they did have some roms there. I don't know if it would break the rules, so I'll err on the side of caution and not list anything. They are common places though, so Google should help you out just fine.

@ECHO OFF start "C:\PROGRAM FILES (X86)\IRFANVIEW2\MARQUEE.BAT 88games" C: CD "C:\Emulators\Mame64.127" vmame64.exe 88games -rompath "C:\Extras\CHD;C:\Extras\Mame 0.127 roms" Try moving the location of the double quote to outside [romname]. Also, it looks like your batch files don't have the %1 to catch the [romname] field. Is that intentional?

That depends. If you get someone else's Mugen setup, then you don't have to mess with anything other than the controller setup. If you are starting from scratch, there's a lengthy learning curve that you will have to climb (unless you find some decent guides). I found that unless you are very careful with what characters and stages you use, you will end up with a mish mash of strange match ups. I have several setups that I found here and there, but none are currently installed in GameEx. If you just have one version of Mugen installed, you can set it up as an emulator and check the "treat as a single pc game" option. That way it should just load the game when you load the emulator. I personally had a problem with it returning to the emulator game selection screen when I had it set up, but I didn't do too much trouble shooting to figure it out. If you opt to install multiple versions of Mugen, you could create a Mugen emulator. That emulator would then point to a directory with .lnk files to each mugen exe. You would probably want a map file to give these games a nice name (or you could just give the .lnk file a nice name). It's really up to you and what you want though.

Yes

The "run on launch" command waits till the command is complete prior to launching MAME. If you run something that needs to stay resident, you should use the "start" command prior to your command. If you do that, you will probably need to use a "run on exit" command as well to kill the process. You should be able to do something like "tskill.exe i_view32.exe" for instance without needing to create a batch file. So I think you would have this: @ECHO OFF start "C:\PROGRAM FILES (X86)\IRFANVIEW2\MARQUEE.BAT" 88games C: CD "C:\Emulators\Mame64.127" vmame64.exe 88games -rompath "C:\Extras\CHD;C:\Extras\Mame 0.127 roms"

The only options you are setting for MAME via GameEx are: "-nowindow -joy -skip_gameinfo". This means that you must be setting other things in MAME32. You need to either check there or provide the mame32.ini file so we can take a look.

It's the same data but in a different format. The data used to be provided in a .ini format, but in recent years there has been a push to use xml style files for whatever reason.

There is somewhere to edit it in the Advanced Configuration tool, I just don't remember what menu it's under. I don't think it's available in the Setup Wizard. You can edit it manually in the GameEx.ini as you found. I was just saying if you can't find it, you can do it there. BUT, I know it's in the setup somewhere as I've done it there before. Whatever works for you though.

I don't remember exactly where the settings are. You can go to either the advanced configuration app or the setup wizard and look in the different MAME setting menus. You should be able to find it there, but if not then you can always go to "C:\Program Files\CONFIG\GameEx.ini" and search for "catver.ini". As I recall, all of the files are in the same area of the GameEx.ini file, so you should be able to manually edit the paths there. Just be careful when messing inside the ini file cause there's obviously no error check if you F it up. I recommend making a backup of the file prior to modifying it unless you are confident in your capabilities.

Yeah, I saw that new control. I enabled it, but it didn't act like I thought it would. Since I don't have the new databases (as it turns out) might explain that though.

So all Neo Geo roms will not work, or is it just a selection? I guess just updating my set will take care of this (when I move up to 0.128+ that is).

Yup, it's back!

Why did they do that? It's not like combining them into a single bios file saved that much space relative to the size of the whole set. I suppose it's more for maintainability. If so, then I guess it makes sense. No worries.

Wow, Tom will let anyone become a mod these days

Ok, so I do need to grab them then since they are not in the automatic update? I guess I'll grab them this evening then.

I'm a little confused now. I thought these new databases would be named differently than the ones that we did last time. Since they have the same name, how do we know which ones are updated in the released version of GameEx? Does it matter as far as the config goes? Do I have to do anything to get these new databases other than keep up to date with GameEx? Since there's no download links in this thread and Tom is being kept up to date, I assume the answer is "just sit tight and we'll take care of it". Correct?