gryhnd

Let the games begin Yesterday I came across a guy on Craigslist getting rid of a Dell P1230 for $25. The P1230 is a 22", flat screen monitor with two inputs. Wow. It's a thing of beauty. Here it is on end, attached to the seen-better-days Vaio. I suspect it will be a few months before I move forward on this project. I still have to wrap up the last 15% of my home theater...just waiting for it to warm up so I can spend quality time in the shop.

I found a copy of Win2K Server laying around, and there turned out to be drivers for the laptop from the mfg for it. I ended up nuking W98SE altogether. No similar problems with W2K and GPFs in user.exe AFAI am concerned this issue is closed...but whether or not there's a real problem with W98SE or it was just my install is unknown.

Do you want me to post (or send) the two Dr.Watsons I have?

Selected 1941 World to view: as described above, Gameex minimizes, desktop icons blink forever. Selected Joust: after a lengthy pause and several screen blinks, the info page popped up OK. So it's not across the board. Bummer for me though, when I tried to play Joust it GPF'd after loading MAME just like the older GX version. #@&^%&^!!! "Play random". Three out of three went through and played (GPFs aside).

Understood. Would that be a red herring anyway, in terms of my original post with the GPF in USER.EXE?

All the game lists are updating now, so it'll be a while before I can confirm. I never made it to the launch phase before so I can't answer you at the moment. I'll be back and update you when it is done (I'll try a "play random game" which skips the info page). In the meantime, is there a place to download older builds of GX?

My observation is that gameex queries mame for the info of the game you have selected (this is the step before "play" where game history, snaps, etc are shown), yes? What happens with 9.86 against mame32 0.81 is that gameex displays the desktop, and the desktop icons 'flash' (blink) unceasingly. Let me double check that and get back to you.

Correction. I didn't C&P on top. I renamed the "new" GX folder, then copied the 9.29 GameEx folder over. Nevertheless I wonder if running the installer again would help fix things up.

For a brief background, I've been using Gameex for over a year now (registered) on a stand up cab running XP and am VERY pleased with it!! So, when I managed to resurrect my old Vaio PIII 500-Win 98SE-192mg laptop my thoughts turned to perhaps building a cocktail cab with it. Mame32 works fine. I cloned the mame folder from the stand up machine over to the laptop and tweaked it a bit. It's an old version (0.81) but it runs all the ROMs I want it too and I've got no reason to upgrade to the latest and greatest just to chase around for ROM updates when everything is otherwise working fine. I installed gameex, but unfortunately the newest version (9.86, I think) didn't play nice with my MAME version and would do strange things when a game was selected from the main list. When I copied the year old version of Gameex ( 9.29 ) from the standup cab over to the laptop I could now select games properly. Gameex of course required its own tweaking in the area of graphics so it wasn't a slug on the laptop. So everything seemed to be in order: mame worked great on its own, GX actually worked better than anticipated given the weak video hardware. Then I hit a wall. When I choose to play a game, GX goes through the usual loading motions (HideOS is active, loads MAME and the requested game), but then it GPFs in "user.exe" consistently as the game is loading...almost as if during the transition/hand off period. Mame will continue and the game runs. I'm no slouch when it comes to Windows, so when I say I've done everything I can think of, I truly mean it. The Win98 install is pretty clean. HD is sound, defragged, deleted/recreated paging file, etc. Registry has been sanitized, all updates and patches (including an obscure one for Net2.0) are in place. I even ran memtest overnight and all my RAM checked out. No virii I can find, etc. No other programs exhibit any problems of any sort. I don't have the original system disk for this laptop so I can't reinstall W98 from scratch, and I'm loath to "upgrade" to Win2K because I am afraid of driver issues (I really need the special toggle-key-sequence to enable the external display to work, for example). Ditto for XP even if I had an extra license. I know I can't expect much from you guys given the dated hardware, OS, and MAME32, but I thought I'd toss out a cry for help and see if anyone has any ideas. I did manage to get a couple of dumps via Dr. Watson, but I don't know how to read them or what to look for, and I didn't want to arbitrarily post them here. Oh, and the gameex logs don't show a thing. My only grasp-for-straws thought is that perhaps I need to run a clean install of the 9.29 version, rather than a copy and paste of 9.29 on top of the 9.86 Is there somewhere to grab older builds? Thanks gang.

In my cab, the CPU sits on the bottom (in its original case), and there are two 120mm fans blowing IN to the cabinet from the L&R sides. The monitor shelf has holes bored in it both for cabling and ventilation. At the top of the cab above the monitor is another 120mm fan blowing out this time. I get a nice airflow with this and haven't run in to any heat issues yet, even when running 100% CPU when stress testing.

The force told me so Good call though, I just read into the name and naturally...well...it was better than Biscuit.

What Ben said. My door came with bulbs, which promptly blew when I wired it up to a power supply I salvaged from an old PC. I went to NAPA autoparts with the bulbs and asked for 12V and I was in luck. I didn't want to muck with the PS in the computer itself, hence the spare. This also let me safely wire up a bunch of other goodies (3xLED fans in the cab walls, LED illuminated buttons, etc) without fear of toasting the expensive part of the operation. My door came with adjustable mechs. Haven't needed to fiddle with them yet, but when/if I do I'll be following this description.

My cab powers on with a momentary toggle switch at the back that is connected to the MB (IOW, acts like the power switch on the CPU itself). Once the CPU fires up, a Smart Strip power strip turns on everything else automatically. Below the monitor and above the CP I've installed a 4 port USB hub (for different non-MAME controllers, and also for my Griffin Powermate I use as a spinner), a USB CD/DVD drive (for PC games, watching movies, etc), and two illuminated LED buttons. One pauses MAME, the other will exit it. I also have a switch wired in to the coin door so that I can make it free play or pay-to-play.

Browsing through some D.O.D. offers today and I came across today's "nooner" for "All-in-One P4 2.4GHz 256MB 40GB DVD FDD 15" LCD Nooner Price: $249.99" Not a bad price. Little weak in some areas but I thought it might make a good table/bar top unit. Doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to build a cab around. Has anyone done similar with an all-in-one style unit? http://www.pacificgeek.com/product.asp?id=...C=220&S=982

Yet another possibility if you're building your cab. "Free 27" Zenith Color T.V. Cable ready" on the Cape Cod Craigslist. Yes yes, I look at CL a lot http://capecod.craigslist.org/zip/597496795.html

Got it (tankstick), love it. Works great with MAME, future pinball (with some help from autohotkey), etc. Don't sweat the keyboard. Chances are you have a USB kbd anyway but if not it does have the PS/2 pass through. I use a wireless kbd in my cab.

That's essentially what I did. I used bracing blocks glued into place and held with some short drywall screws. The one place though where I didn't want to rely strictly on glue, and where I would have used the blocks even if I hadn't anywhere else, is to support the bottom most shelf. This one has to bear the weight of the entire cabinet pressing down on it and needs to be especially strong and resistant to getting pushed back up into the cab (or pulling apart when the cab is moved around). The bracing blocks plus the dados really beefed it up.

Stating the obvious to experienced wood workers, so you may move on, but if you're handy with tools and have a router, it's pretty easy to get the sides of your cabinet identical to one another. Just buy a bit with a bearing on it (a template flush cutter I think they are called). Something akin to this. After you have tweaked one side to your liking, clamp it to another sheet of material. Set the bearing against the finished piece and start cutting. It'll trace the contours of the first and cut the second identically. Some sharp inside corners may be too small for the size of your bit, but they too can be cleaned up with either or both a smaller bit, a cheap drum sander on your drill, or a file and sandpaper. That's how I got this: duplicated and eventually turned into this: I really went overboard documenting my build, but if it helps anyone feel free to check it out.

Thanks. My mech is adjustable and already configured for tokens + quarters from the outfit I bought it from, so I should be OK. I also have learned how to tweak the mech if I should run into problems. I believe I came across that over at BYOAC.

Not Gameex related I know, but wondering if anyone has found a source for reasonably priced tokens for their machines? Seems everywhere I look they are about the same price as a quarter and often more. In my situation, if tokens or quarters are going to walk it will be more by accident than theft so there's little incentive to switch to tokens at current prices. There is a guy on ebay selling them for $.20/ea, which is the best I have found so far. TIA

I don't use a networked drive in Gameex, but I do have to connect to one when the automatic windows backup kicks in monthly. Here's what is in my batch file, which specifies the drive letter I want the share to be. Works like a charm: net use z:\\myservername\drive_share_name\folderNameIfRequired where "z" obviously is the drive letter you want the share to map to. I always make them high up in the alphabet to avoid conflicts with flash drives, daemon tools, etc.

yet another craigs list CRT find for someone who may be interested. Cape Cod, MA: http://capecod.craigslist.org/sys/568137443.html DELL P1130 20 Inch Trinitron Flat Screen CRT Monitor. This monitor works great and has a huge 20 Inch screen. It has Dual VGA inputs to connect to two different PC's if you wanted to. It comes with power cord and monitor cable. $30

No affiliation. Just saw it. Easton, MA: http://boston.craigslist.org/sob/zip/490012021.html

An unhelpful reply from me here, but I've run into the same thing occasionally. One of my kid's SIM games (Golf I think, coincidentally) will corrupt itself when booted via GX. Never happens when run direct. Even Futurepinball will hiccup sometimes on tables run via GX. Go back to running it direct and it works fine. Shrug.

Nice. Mine was actually a freebie AND a high end Nokia CAD monitor to boot. Sweet.