bkenobi

That would be awesome! I've tried a bunch of things, but the dialog I described above seems to keep anything from working. I'm going to keep looking into this for a bit just in case the forced shutdown doesn't fix this one instance.

The same guys who brought you Zinc also have an emu called Modeler. I don't know much about it, but it's supposed to do Model 1 games. That may fall into your category of old news, but it's the best I can offer. Perhaps someone else has better info though.

Also, make sure you have joystick input turned on for MAME.

I was pretty sure the Orange Namco guns had 3 plugs (1xUSB, 1xPS/PS2, 1xYellow RCA). In order to use on a PC, AFAIK you just plug the USB into the PC and the RCA into the video from the PC. If you are using a TV via S-Video, you can get a splitter and an S-Video -> RCA adapter to make it work. It is possible to build a VGA -> RCA adapter, but it's really not necessary.

For those that might be interested in setting up their systems to do concurrent sessions like I have set up (I received a few requests for more info), here's some help. I originally set this up using Win XP Pro SP2. When I just google searched for "concurrent xp session" I found that SP3 breaks the original patch/hack. There is another version that should work on SP3 here. The version I installed actually had an installer, but since I suspect most people won't be installing SP2 any more, I won't try to track down the exact version I used (there's many guides though, so it shouldn't be needed).

There's some good discussions on these points at BYOAC forums, but to summarize: * Two guns should work fine in Windows. * Two guns should work fine in MAME, but it may take a little time to get them configured just right. * Two guns only require one light bar. Both guns will use the same bars. * The light bars can be mounted in any orientation technically, but vertical or horizontal would be typical. * If you have a very large display where the screen is much larger then the bars, you might need to get the longer set. The bars are there to emit IR light so the gun(s) can figure out where they are pointed relative to those points of light. You will need to configure the guns in Windows, but then they should work just like a mouse for any game you need. Since they use the light bar for position, you don't need to worry about the display type like you do with other guns. You can project the gameplay on a wall/screen and you will still be able to play. AFAIK, this is the only gun that can do that! On the down side, you do need to have the light bars visible in order to use the guns. So, you won't have quite as clean a cabinet if you use TopGuns. However, if you have a bezel, you might be able to punch 3 holes in each side for the LEDs to show through and hide the bar itself. I've seen pics of someone who actually disassembled the bars and just put the LEDs sticking through the bezel. I guess it works fine!

No, I'm running WinXP Pro with the concurrent login hack to allow multiple logins at the same time. I can then turn on the arcade and it looks like normal, then go upstairs and admin via a remote desktop session (with it's own session, not the one running on the arcade's display). The problem is that if I forget that I'm logged on upstairs and I go to shut it down, it just sits there indefinitely. I hit Ctl-Alt-Del and it pops up the task manager screen with a warning dialog in front stating that someone else is logged on, so do I want to continue shutting down. I think I've come up with a work around, but it's not super clean. For launch before exit don't wait, I put: shutdown.exe -f -t 15 -c "system is goin' down!"This should shut the machine down if it's sitting there holding for the dialog. I still have to run a few more tests to say that it works for certain though. I was initially hoping there was a registry entry for that dialog that could be set to have it time-out after a couple seconds. Unfortunately, I haven't found anything that will do that (probably because XP doesn't support multiple logins natively, so a hack would be required there too...

I don't know what hardware circuit people are required to build. I guess it depends on what gun you get though. I chose guns that had USB plugs, so all I had to do was plug it into the PC and install the drivers. The only problem was that my guns had laser sights (which I never use) but required the gun be plugged into the PS anyway. I had to build a power adapter for them, but it wasn't "impossible". Had I been smarter I would have bought original Namco guns which are USB and don't require power (other than that provided by USB). They probably wouldn't have broken either

No worries. Great work!

AdvancedMAME or Advanced MAME Settings? They are different. You shouldn't really be using AdvancedMAME at this point IMO.

A lower reaction time would be the same as improved reaction time. A higher reaction time would be a worse reaction time. Right?

Sounds good! My only concern with 800x600 is loss of quality for those using 1024x768. Is it possible to have the images saved as 1024x768 in the png files and then have the theme scale them to the right background size? That way the background info wouldn't suffer and the fonts would be right also. I don't know what quality issue this would turn into (maybe imperceivable), just thought I would suggest it in case it is possible.

Tom killed the project since the built in support provided with Vista is apparently far superior to anything he would have built (his words, not mine). There's no reason to build an inferior product just to have a check mark...

LCD TopGun's are supposed to be really nice. Tempest has one but probably hasn't pulled it out of the box yet I went with a pair of PS2 GunCon2 compatible guns. Unfortunately, one of them died and I've yet to replace it (or them). When they worked, they were pretty awesome though! Yes, there are games that use guns that are not light guns. The games like Terminator 2 or Mechanized Attack used guns that were essentially gun shaped analog sticks with triggers built in. I believe all of these games have been set up to work with a light gun control in MAME though.

If you have a wooden CP and you use sticks that have a short shaft, then your only solutions are top mounting or routing the material. The problem with routing is that you lose a lot of the strength of the material and aggressive play could break the stick off! The solution I came up with was to cut a hole through the CP that the sticks would fit through. Then I routed a pad on the top of the panel for a metal plate that would sit flush with the CP. I used Liquid Nail to adhere the plate down and then bottom mounted the joysticks. I was nervous about the strength of the adhesive, but after ~3 years of decent abuse there's been no issues.

Actually, I said that MAME was moving towards 64-bit optimized code, so you will probably do better with a 64-bit OS and 64-bit compile of MAME. However, I have no idea what that turns into in terms of a performance boost over 32-bit. If I were building my cab today, I might consider going with a 64-bit OS since all the cheap PC equipment is 64-bit anyway. The problem is that there are issues with codecs and some emulators running on 64-bit vista (from what I understand) and XP64 doesn't have the driver support of either XP32 or Vista (also from what I've heard/read). Ehhh, what are you going to do...

Alt-F4... I thought you could change the key that GameEx sends.

I checked it out last night on a 800x600 them and it looked pretty good. The text in the upper right is slightly blurry, but it's a TV, so what do you expect. I wouldn't make it any smaller, but it's probably ok in the size it's in. Everything else looked good. I haven't had any problem with scaling, after playing around with things, so I'm thinking that 1024x768 might be good enough as a single theme (smaller resolutions would just let GameEx scale down). The only question would be how GameEx would scale fonts...hmmm. In any case, the NES image looked good!

You can't ask where you get the roms (that's in the rules), but you can ask about what sets people use, how they use them, etc.

Right, I get it!

I don't have U360's and have never tried one. Everyone here that has them raves about them, so I assume the are good. They aren't rotary though, so I'm not interested

Adultery: The Setup Wizard is great and it makes it easy to find where some settings are. HOWEVER, it doesn't have everything listed since it's supposed to be newbie friendly. As a result, you still will need to either use the Advanced Config utility or edit the ini/other files manually. But, that's only for more advanced stuff, so I don't personally consider it a problem.

NOOOOOOO!!!!! Well, what I mean is... Don't use Joy2Key. It's ok, but the author long ago abandoned development. You should look at XPadder. It's simply awesome and there is active development going on. It's also much easier to set up and switch profiles with.

Is it really a submitted theme if you only post 2 pictures?

MAME is easy to install and get running, but it takes a while to get it exactly right (configure controls, video settings, etc.). Basically, you get the exe from http://mamedev.org/release.html. Then, unzip the archive to a directory (c:\emu\MAME for example). Put your roms in the rom directory (don't ask, we don't know where to get them and won't help in any way with obtaining them...see the rules). Make sure you can run games from the command line (e.g., "mame.exe 1941" would launch 1941 in MAME). Next, install GameEx and run the setup utility (setup wizard or advanced config tool) and put in the correct paths. Good to go! Well, that's overly simplified, but you get the basic idea. Once you have that going, there's tons of other stuff that can be done. Enjoy!