aldub516

It also gets confusing as I was, because of all the options.. I was like "damn Do u set steam to start automatically through steam settings? Do U set it as a windows startup, do u use gameex to launch it or a plugin to launch it?" U can get lost in the options

I think there's like 2-3 different threads I had dealing with this issue so I'll try to link those all as well. I did infact end with a seamless steam install. There was one big factor which I currently can't remember. It was like the make or break factor to fix this and I had an aha moment when I fixed it. Sadly I'm a burnout and forget my own solutions. I believe it had to so with either a run as administrator setting or something on those lines. But it was one simple change that fixed everything. I'll Help you when I'm by my pc

Ahhhhhh yes haha. Basically follow that thread ^ and follow my endless journey of seamless Steam and gameex use. I had your issue and went through hell to fix it. When I get home today I'll try to direct you through it with any questions.

Ahh yes. I'll get on that ASAP. Somehow that's the one part I over looked lol

The speaker hole you're inquiring about is not infact a speaker hole.. Just some mind boggling hole karate punched out by whatever crackhead made the original conversion. This cabinets original condition is just like... wtf happened here??

Thanks for always having good things to say. Again it's crazy what I've achieved with how novice I feel and how little I know compared to you guys. Flywheel what?

Yea man, I got super geeked after cutting the lexan and laying that artwork out. Best part is you achieve maximum effect with minimal labor. No sanding, no priming. Those aluminum edges cover every mistake u can make. It really hides everything and saves a lot of painstaking effort. Draco and thurmann thank you both for always being the most out spoken towards me with both help and compliments /support. It's all in the name of the mame...... << just came up with that.. Currently copywriting

thank you very much.. I can promise you personally had a large hand at some point in this build...

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AND THEN THE TRANSFORMATION. Not many pics of the change because it was basically just paint and new artwork/buttons.. Looking at it now, im pretty proud of the end result. I wish i know half of what i know now, then. But here ya go guys! My 2nd build.. The others are to come soon pic host

The cp with art, and basically done. I was SHOCKED at not only how clear and beautiful the print came out using high res images, but using my ridiculous methods of measuring buttons, the artwork layout came out pretty damn close to what I wanted.. Completely winged all of this with minimal experience. how do i print screen post img And thats it kids! My first every attempt at a custom arcade cabinet. This rehab will be a fun process and i have INCREDIBLE ideas for this. For anyone suggesting i ditch the crap cabinet and just start new ( basically on the sides are usable), i also have a little connection to this machine. It was the last project me and my father did before he moved to another country so i love it particularly. thanks for looking!

This is the earlier progress, basically stripped it down, and painted it.. t molding, basically just quick cheap rehab. hosting images BEGINNING OF CP WORK photo hosting sites

Hey guys, and for the third time today, thanks for looking. This is my 3rd ever build. And i am beyond blown away by my own skills.. Sounds cocky, but if you knew how novice, and how much research, trial error, luck and learning i did to achieve this one. EVERYTHING was new to me, and it took about a year to build. The led lights, the lexan cutting and bending, the pc mounting, EVERY SINGLE THING was a daunting and new challenge to me, and anyone that has seen it has been blown away. It was built for my friends mancave, and id like to go get much better pictures, and video as well as footage of the system running, the front end, etc. I took the time to program different LED animations for menus, different emulators, to light up game used buttons, or menu useable buttons. I custom re did the front end theme.. Every single damn thing about this is as customized as can possibly be. Not much else to say except answering any questions. Compared to my first two builds, this is like a goodyear space ship tire compared to the first stone wheel. The pc was mounted so gosh darn cleanly. Also a few features. I made it so you can reach into the coin door under the cp, remove 4 bolts easily and the whole CP pops off. I built the WHOLE system inside the CP so this arcade is 100% transportable and can simply be carried and set on top of a bar or table!. I also made the tower of the body, and the base removable for full access in small rooms or hallways. Again i wish i had more video of the whole thing powering up and rocking out, but ill get to that. I hope some of you can share this enjoyment. The creative ideas such as art was suggested by my friend who it was for.. I personally dont like the cp art with the marquees, but its simply what he wanted. He found one "mame invaders" image on google, so i took that idea and just went to town on the custom artwork. Look at the other 2 machines i posted then look at this. Im in awe and love it. Thanks for looking, BUT THANK YOU FOR ALL THE ENDLESS HELP IN MAKING THAT HAPPEN!

Hello and thanks all for looking! Ive been here for quite awhile now, and while I do ask and get a lot of help, if failed to update some of my projects so you fine people can see the results.. So todays post is for my 2nd ever build. It was meant to be a bartop arcade, and i basically just drew a random shape and went with it. Basically winged it. Now originally it was for my girlfriend at the time who loved spongebob, so you will see its original birth as a sponge bob themed arcade which i think came out great. After that our relationship ended up like most old arcades, worn out and in the garbage for other people to take... And thus became the transformation into a new cabinet. I stripped it down and re did it. It was for my tattoo artist. A few things to note, any and all defects, problems, or things that dont look great, im fully aware of. It was an amateur build, especially compared to my pedestal after that. Everything was basically thrown together at the end to finally just get rid of it. I feel like i achieved a pretty damn clean and nice machine for the given circumstances. The only thing im not crazy about is my pc mounting in the back. I have refined that method by a million, but this one looks rough. I tried the method of keeping it half in the case and cutting out what i dont need. Regardless of my rant, i present to you a bunch of pictures and the rise, fall and rebirth of my 2nd mame machine ever. Thank you for looking! It appears for one reason or another i dont have a picture of the spongebob fully down with all artwork installed at once, but in seperate pictures you can see the eventual marquee, bezel and cp art. image hosting 10mb limit

Hey guys, and thanks again for looking. As youll see in another post in here, im finally getting around to posting up pictures and progress on things im working on. Here id like to show off my FIRST EVER experience in the world of arcade building. This was about 5 years ago. I found a cabinet on craigslist for 50 dollars. I went and picked it up, and it was a heap of crap. Someone already converted it to a mame machine with a tank stick. This thing was BUTCHERED. There was like what seemed like 2 inches of orange paint over everything. The inside was incredibly crudely built to house whatever he put in there. Also a horrible cut out for a keyboard..the pics do justice. While my first thought was, leave it in the garbage, i thought it would be fun to go ahead and restore it as much as i can. I began by removing the paint... which wasnt terrible. Hours of scraping, but i do remember peeling off large patches of the paint which i NOW realize i was probably peeling of original artwork under it. I DO NOT KNOW WHAT CABINET THIS WAS AND WOULD LOVE INPUT ON IT!!!.. The only thing I can help with is say it came with a centuri coin door. Anyways moving on. Me and my father ended up putting together a decent machine. I dabbled with my first control panel EVER as well as my first large format art print for the cp. Basically EVERYTHING was new, but im damn happy how it came out! Sadly it never made it super close to completion. I had a POS Pc in there that i had laying around. Ripped a crt monitor out and mounted it which eventually looked horrible. Marquee was never full installed nor was the bezel.. Basically, what you see is what got done.. Had mamewah somewhat running with a mess of rom set. So now i am committed to rehabbing this bad boy to a beautiful new machine. I know it looks super rough, but its fixable. I took it all apart. A lot of the wood was crap inside, or replaced by the guy with like, cardboard wood. So my first mission was simply take apart the cabinet, and basically trace all the wood components, copy them and re-build the cabinet. Alot of the edges look real bad, but ive decided im going to saw them off about 1/4 inch, As well as use metal L rails as a finish as its worked nicely on other builds. So yes, im fully confident this machine can be brought back to full life with minimal work. Here are picture of the day i got it, and whatever pictures i have of what i ended up with. This post will be important as i will be looking for a lot of advice on restoration, so people can use this as a reference. Here i give to you, my FIRST EVER attempt at a mame arcade... The day i got it... Any thoughts on what this couldve been? The fact that the cp was butchered off im sure doesnt help.... hosting images

I have a somewhat "workaround"setup for my pinballx. After so much work, I really dont want to get into editing xml files, especially as i dont want to have to edit it every time i buy a table or something, so i found a way to just launch the whole fx2 app which i like. Im running fx2 through steam. I set the fx2 settings in pinballx setup, and then in game manager, i simply added the sorcerers table, and change the wheel logo to a pinballfx logo, so whenever i select the pinball fx logo on my wheel, it just starts pinballfx2, and takes me to the actual app. Now ive set a "global" button on my panel to close the program via pinballx as i use with all the other pinball emulators. But i noticed if i use the "Exit" function within fx2, pinballx does not recognize the exit and brings me to the loading screen, until i hit my "global exit" button..But further, if i use my global exit button, it will kill fx2, but i noticed i then end up with an fx window running in the backround, not connected to pinballx. Its like somehow im launching an external fx2. I read alot of threads on here and picked up bits of info here and there. Including a killfx2 script or bat?? Can anyone simplify the best way to kill pinballfx2 either by buiit in exit option, or pinballx's exit emulator key. PinballX.ini log.txt

i believe ive solved this. and it is a very strange issue. I cleanly reinstalled steam, and i got it working with startup.. but i just remembered to set it to run as admin as usually suggested.. and guess what, it didnt start! i rebooted 6 times, 3 with admin on, and 3 off, and steam will NOT startup at windows when set to run as admin. This is what gave me hell last time. Oddly enough im going through issues that i once had before, as seen in some previous posts ill link when im on my pc.. for instance hideos.exe keeping a black screen over gamex. Its deja vu all over. But for now, i can say i solved the steam startup problem.

so for some unknown reason i keep getting an error when i try to reinstall windows. it just reloads my setup and tells me it cant install.. but at the same time it pisses me off to reinstall windows simply because steam wont start. It shows up as enabled in task manager start up. I will say on the topic of .net, i just noticed in my list of installed software "gamex .net 2.0 service pack 1 install"... i may be crazy, but i dont remember seeing that last time i was uninstalling software. But steam giving me that error in gameex, and steam not starting has to be 2 different things right? and if so, why didnt snes emulator start but nes did. This sucks. It can be so many things. and after a year of building my pedestal for my friend, this is the last thing thats happening and it kills me to start playing around with so many things when i got it right.. edit a few small things. the little i can find online relevant to this, some people mentioned that in msconfig, their startup selection was "Selective startup" and even when they changed it to normal, it would just go back to selective. Id assume since i changed so many settings for my preference it should be selective.. im just noting this as it was mentioned. Also in msconfig, in the services tab, it says steam client service is stopped, even when i have steam running. Is this relevant? In taskmanager startup list steam bootstrapper is enabled for startup, but obviously is doesnt work. Could this stopped service be an issue? for those willing to check- run>msconfig>services steam client service

no i dont beleive so. Im running windows 8.1 pro with a clean key. I reinstalled steam, and still no luck. I did just set an nes and snes emulator as startup programs to see if they worked. when i booted up,only gamex and the nes emulator started. no luck on steam. this would be my 2nd windows install, for stupid little reasons. I cant imagine why this stopped working. Anyway to check my registry or .net problems? the ONNNLLLY thing i dabbled with in between noticing this problem is 800t logo changer, which i cant get to work anyways. I played around with it which mightve changed my bootres.dll i copied my original to replace if i messed up and i have since replaced the original file. I also played with permission settings, to allow myself to copy the bootres file in the windows folder.. I cant imagine giving myself extra permissions is disturbing the start up process. If i cant figure this out, im going to just re install windows......again. I love taking 30 steps back when im almost done...

I reinstalled it last night but fell asleep so didn't try it yet. Regardless, why would it just stop working? I have a fresh install of windows... It was working fine since I set it up and now just stops. This can cause a lot of problems for my buddy who will be using this machine.

**RESOLUTION** Ive found that when steam is set to run as administrator, it wont boot up at start up for some reason. it appears the client service doesnt start. Maybe it makes sense, maybe it doesnt, but in this case, running steam as admin will stop it from running at start up So i was literally "done" with my cabinet.. and hey! new random problem. Steam stopped working on startup. I set steam shortcut in the startup folder.. set it with a -silent command as was suggested in my last topic. It worked fine since then. And now it just doesnt start, When i open my task manager it shows the steam bootstrapper as enabled, but it still doesnt start. If i set it to start with windows from within steam, it still wont start. So i decided to try having gameex launch it.. but im getting an error? what in the hell is going on included ini and log. Im so frustrated. i was about to move this machine to my friends mancave and it all of a sudden just does not want to start steam, which messes my whole operation up as far as what i had going. No google searches turn up an answer to windows not starting it. but maybe you can help with this gameex problem? maybe they correlate? GameEx.ini log.txt

1) I am setting up the layout GameEx. But I did not find a way to edit the "MENU" option. Is this possible? This option shows more things than I wanted. I would like to edit it, and in some cases remove it. ------depending on what exactly you want, you can achieve this. In the very first menu, if youd like to remove things such as external programs, the settings menu and such, you can achieve this by disabling certain things Off the top of my mind, you can disable or enable exit from gameex which will eliminate that option. If you disable "allow theme picker, allow settings, etc" it will remove the features off of the menu. If you specify exactly what youd like to remove, ill tell you what to disable 2)Within "MAME settings" can not find the option to remove the option to display that appears when we entered the mame through GameEx, "Update List". You can do it? ----- in settings, go to the "enable disable features" page, and fine "hide update list", set it to yes.. there ya go 3) Another thing I wanted to edit is a possibility to remove the "Image" and "Image 2" on some systems. -----if you mean in the actual gameex themes where it places different art? or to make gameex use say a marquee instead of backround image.. specify this issue. If its within the theme, it can be tricky as the theme editor thus far isnt to in depth. You can open your theme in the editor (found under themes), and with a little playing around u can with the side menu, you can find the images your looking for. You cant delete them per say, so you will have to physically drag them off of the menu page in the corner or something. Its more of a work around than a fix. People will be able to answer this a little more precisely, i dont have a pc in front of me so this is all off my head, but a lot of it should help

I basically found a work around that works for me. All visual pinball and virtual pinball tables show up fine after adding them in game manager. Pinball arcade and pinballfx2 were launching games, but just taking me straight to the actual app, so i added 1 game for each system, changed the icon to its respective emulators,so now on my pinballx menu i have all my VP and FP tables, and then 1 icon for pinballfx2 and 1 for pinball arcade. I like this setup very much. it keeps all my pinball stuff together but lets me launch right into fx2 and pinball arcade and use their own interface.. thanks for the advice lol

ill ask an ignorant question if you dont mind. The ONLY reason i wish i had a hyperspin set up was to use all that nifty art and menus that it has, with all those game overlays and such. Does this method somehow allow that? I dont really understand the relationship and how gameex gains new features through hyperlaunch. I remember reading about gameex evo and how those game menu bezels would be a feature, but someone explained thats not the case, and just some workaround from hyperspin? Basically im just asking what relationship do the two programs have to eachother, does one launch and work in the backround of the other? And what gameex features are actually gained or useable with this method. I dont even want to begin to learn about it just yet, but it seems intriguing.