David R Hilgendorf

Hey Tom, I don't have the time anymore that I used to. My son turns 1 next week, so he is a little more independent now. I recently upgraded my cab to the (then) latest version of GameEx, although it's already outdated It appears you have been busy adding more and more useful features, and growing your fan club. I want to see what the new skins can do, but I haven't time to play with it myself. I am probably missing out on a ton of other features added in the last year, now where did I put that manual? I am looking into upgrading my MAME-Cab PC, I am still running that PIII 800mhz in my sig And my AVGA is a 7200 based, so I think I want a 9250 one now. My goal is ~P4-2.4ghz, 1GB RAM, 160GB HD (got this covered), with the AVGA 9250. I am cragslisting now for parts, I might be able to do this upgrade for <$150 WOOT! Then there won't be much I can't play at full speed.

I also have full romsets, but choose to primarily play U games. Keep in mind there are many titles that are in english that were never released in the US however (European, Australian, and some Japanese games). For instance the European release of Zero Wing (notorious for All Your Base english butchery) was never released stateside. In addition there are some rom hacks of Japanese RPG's that were fan-translated into English, though they were never released stateside. So before you go deleting your international rom sets, make sure to take a look and see if there is anything that might actual be of interest to try. I found a handful of interesting titles that I would never have played if I was exclusive to *U* games. There are plenty of good games that have never been released commercially in the USA. Enjoy!

forget the name, but there is a PC gun (I think ACT labs) that works with PC monitors and I think is supported in one of the incarnations of MAME (advancemame?)... BYOC is the best place to find out more. I am not currently running light guns, but I was tempted to get that PC one when I heard about it. Not sure if it would work with the arcade monitor though UPDATE: Found it! $50 for 2 http://cgi.ebay.com/Act-Labs-PC-Arcade-Lig...1QQcmdZViewItem $80 for 1 VGA or $100 for 1 TV/S-video http://www.act-labs.com/products/gun1.htm I seem to recall these costing about $40 when they were first released, looks like the MSRP has increased a bit... ebay is your friend.

Tom, I have a small feature request. Include a hotkey for adding current selected game to the universal favorites list, preferrably something that can be pressed or shift-pressed with an IPAC/arcade controls. I don't use the submenus that give the option to add to favorites. Also a while ago I asked if there was a way to hide both the exit and home buttons on the top right. As I recall the exit can be disabled/hidden but home is still there. I see you have made some major updates lately, I need to get the newest version installed on the cab soon!

Hmm in my book that justifies good use

Outpost and Fry's Electronics have a 200GB Seagate (5 year warranty) drive on sale until July 5th for $109 minus a $60 rebate total $49 plus tax+shipping depending on what state you live in. I got mine at a local Fry's for $57 with tax. Time to upgrade my Mame cab. Going to put the 200GB in my main PC and take it's 120GB drive to put in the arcade for a total of 180GB = MORE VIDEO FUN! Outpost link

ARGHHH!!!!!! I downloaded all of these and now I find out I only have 566MB left on my 60GB HD in the Arcade Cab Looks like it really is nearing upgrade time for this old beast... Or time to eliminate some roms/isos.

okay next time I happen to pop into an xbox or arcade version of NES emu I will try the HQ2X filters. Thanks for the recommendation. Maybe they can add it to the PSP, that would be sweet too. BTW I got MSX Metal Gear rom to load and play, I was surprised it is completely different from the NES version, in fact it might be better. I still have no idea how to get Snatcher past the title screen however I always thought MSX looked like crap, and it does, but I recently discovered that MSX2 and MSX2+ games look maybe a little better than even a NES.... UPDATE: I looked at the HQ2X filter on the FCEU Xbox emulator, and I must say it's pretty impressive when enabled with Anisotropic filtering. Takes away all the jaggies without reducing any of the image quality. It still looks like a NES game, but would make them playable on a projector (where I tested it)

Yeah, on my projector I tend to run some kind of filter over every 8-bit and 16-bit emulator, though I still don't think it helps the NES much You really can't make much improvement when there isn't much to start with. I don't even play Atari 2600 games anymore, too painful on the eyes/ears/brain haha. NES is getting close to that level for me too. The no-swap hack is very cool, I recommend these emulators (at 333mhz speed): Genesis - PSPGenesis .13 (Very Good) needs zip support, save states, screen stretch SNES - ua_snes9x .03a (Very Good) Frameskip 2, sound 11khz or off, no stretch NES - NesterJ 1.06 (Excellent) WOW! GameBoy Color - RIN 1.26 (Excellent) not a big fan of this system TurboGrafx/PC Engine - PCEP v0.7 (Excellent) no SuperGrafx or CD yet Sega Master System/GameGear - SMS PSP V0.4 (Excellent) needs screen stretch MSX - fMSX 0.61 (jury is out) Difficult to configure: I got it to load Snatcher title screen, can't get any farther, never had an MSX, no good documentation AVOID: Mame - SLOW and supports almost nothing yet, can't wait for this one to develop GBA - SLOW, supports only a single ROM, can't wait for this one to develop Haven't tried: NeoGeo CD - seems like too much work, and no sound support NeoGeo Pocket - was never a fan of this system Wonderswan - was never a fan of this system Also noteworthy: Doom/DoomII port - very good stuff, I burned out on these 10 years ago though. Beats of Rage - too bad it takes up 60MB What I am waiting for? Quake2/Duke3D Wireless multiplayer on the console emulators Full speed GBA, SNES and Genesis emulation (it will happen) FinalBurn or Kawaks for CPS2 and NeoGeo goodness MAME - I'd be happy if they just got the major hit 8/16-bit systems through the early 90's working (Atari, Sega, Taito, Namco, Midway, etc). I wouldn't want the whole thing ported anyway, it's become bloated the last few years. But I am totally happy with the 6 working emulators mentioned above...

I would add that none of them are even very good Hard to configure, low compatibility, HIGH system requirements. I got Nights and Panzer Dragoon Saga to actually run in the last 6 months, but found them unplayable and gave up on Saturn emulation until some major breakthrough is released. A lot of hassle for little pleasure.

Well the PSP is 480x272 pixels, if you haven't seen it in action, it's far from small. It is actually a higher resolution than every classic console and most arcade games. Thus the emulators either take up a fraction of the PSP screen, or have to be "stretched" to fit. I can't argue with the fact that most emulation looks superb, often superior, on an arcade monitor, however there is also something to be said for being able to play all your classics on the go... Besides low res games look great on smaller screens imho, less pixelization and jaggies. It's very hard for me to play NES games on a TV or my projector anymore because they look like crap, but they look pretty good on the PSP. SNES and Genesis games get a whole new life in portability, just ask any Sega Nomad or GameBoy Advance owner.

There is no modding required provided you have the retail installed bios 1.50 (do not upgrade to a newer version via the PSP utilities). There is an exploit in the bios that allows unsigned software to run and all you have to do is copy the necessary files over to your memory card. I have created a 32MB emulator zip file that includes the most common emulators and a few sample roms that should fit onto the small pro duo card that was included with every new PSP in the USA. Tom you can PM me if you would like a copy. Unfortunately I can't make it available to the public as it would violate the license agreements for the various emulators, but it is easy to find out more information on how to do this by reading the websites listed above. They even have emulator packages like mine for download without the ROMS in them. Very cool exploit for a very cool and very powerful portable system.

Hey Tom et. al. I have been super busy setting up and playing my 8-bit and 16-bit console emulators on my PSP! It's totally distracted me from my GameEx/MAME cab. I need to get GameEx 4.06 installed and running. I guess you have slowed down some with the releases as well lately. I apologize if I made it seem that i was dissatisfied in any way with GameEx in regards to performance. I was just struggling to see why I had vastly different utilization numbers across the various systems I had installed GameEx on. As long as it works well in my MAME cab (the 850mhz one) I am not to concerned about the other systems. I am overall very satisfied with the program and I am still using it as my exclusive front-end. Now can you port it to PSP? (jk) If any of you are interested in running GG,SMS,GEN,GBC,NES,SNES,TG16,MSX,NGPC,etc on your PSP take a look at www.psp-hacks.com or www.psphacker.com for more information. Truly an amazing step forward for portable gaming... -Dave

Apparently no one is using his feature. I tried to google it to see what other apps are available besides weather and I found nothing useful. Maybe I am searching using the wrong terminology? Has ANYONE found other HTML apps that they can give us some links to try out? This is a cool feature that I feel is not seeing enough use due to lack of info/knowledge.

I guess you are right about MCE (eshell) using nearly the same amount of RAM. Since I tend to run high amounts of RAM this doesn't bug me as much as the CPU load. Even running video MCE only hits about 50% CPU usage, where GameEx is constantly over 95% just sitting idle. That seems a bit abnormal and can cause other apps to slow down (including windows itself). The funny thing is that on my P4 2.4ghz I don't see this anomaly, however on my 1.6GHZ Centrino I do. I may have the GameEx config different on both, and I still need to check my Arcade cab (850mhz) to see if it has this problem, which I am pretty sure it does not. I'll see if I can narrow it down some more.

I checked my task manager a couple times while GameEx was running to find that it is using between 50MB and 150MB of memory. Is there a memory leak or is it really that bloated? It stays at or near the top of the list on mem usage. Also I noticed CPU usage was at 95%+ for gameEx just sitting at the GameEx start page. This is on my laptop which has a Pentium M Centrino 1.6Ghz and 1.25GB of RAM. Hardly a slouch. I need to check these specs on my arcade cab, though I know the memory usage is high there as well, but I haven't checked the CPU usage. It would seem that some optimizations could be made in both respects?

I also have very slow saving of configuration on my very new laptop. Strangely it works just fine on my crappy arcade cabinet (see specs below).

Oh yeah, I remember now. I didn't realize that feature worked for consoles, I thought it was only for MAME. I prefer not to use that option as it adds an extra step in actually running the game. Oh well, there's always hope for the future.

Arcade games look best on the equipment they originally ran on. Thus an Arcade monitor will look much better than a high res PC monitor for old low-res games if configured appropriately (use an ArcadeVGA card). However if you plan to play 3D PC games, or run a Media Center (DVD/video) extensively then a PC monitor is the way to go. I personally run an arcade cabinet with an arcade monitor for MAME and a MCE PC hooked to an HDTV for multimedia/pc gaming. I don't believe in combining the two, but others do so and make the sacrifices.

Not quite entirely true. Most old arcade monitors can operate at 640x480i (interlaced) which is how I run mine. Though 640x288p (progressive) is the max prog scan resolution. For a detailed discussion of interlaced vs. progressive start reading up on some PC vs. TV forums or HDTV formats 1080i vs 720p. There are plusses and minuses to both and I generally find that 640x480i is fine for GameEx/emulation frontends, though it is less than stellar for Windows navigation even though it can be viewed for short periods of time for config/tweaking.

Tom, this feature, I have added the directories in the configuration, but I noticed that none of the title/box/cart pics load. I assume they would normally load in the standard image window, but I only get snaps, even if no snap exists but a box/title does. What is the preference of GameEx as to which image it shows? Could it be set to look in order, i.e. no snap, look for title; no title, look for boxart; no boxart, look for cart.... Right now I only see snaps, but I want to get more from this feature.

Well it's been a while since I updated, glad to see the following features: 1) Sound during system select video 2) Coin into attract allows you to play game 3) Alpha paging is working 4) Multi-system favorites (though I still haven't played with it) All those HTPC features, I may play around with this on my 2 MCE PC's as well now as a HTPC frontend. Of course it stays on the Arcade cab as a gaming frontend. Having FFDSHOW support in DVD and Media Center MS files could be very cool indeed, now I need a component switching receiver too... argh!

Sweet! I finally got around to downloading GameEx 4.x and the MNG test files, and I must say they run pretty darn well even on my crap hardware. I don't really see much difference in the MNG's vs the AVI's other than that there are more MNG's in the full set. Some of the duplicates I have are smaller as AVI and some are smaller as MNG, of course the video is not the same on each as the Crashtest MNG's are more gameplay and the AVI's tend to have logo and attract screens. Anyone notice a big difference in quality or size that would make one format better than the other? I was thinking that converting the avi's to Xvid/divx would probably make them considerably smaller assuming that I can get gameex to read the files (I had problems with this for the system avi files). But I don't have the 4GB of MNG files yet, just this test file. Of course on my system smaller is always better, not sure I have room for 4GB of AVI's and I wasn't looking to put a bigger drive in...

Holy cow Tom. I have been meaning to tell you I think the configuration tool menus have always been a bit "disorganized" but man it's gotten downright confusing with all the new additions. Would you be interested in some help cleaning it up/organizing it better? There are just simply too many menus and not everything is where it probably should be logically.

Mostly I just copied different jpg files from the old to the new and changed the font and some other lines in the ini file to match the old config. Nothing major, never bothered to figure out why Video Fun and the old BlueEx theme don't work, just happy that I got the new BlueEx theme functioning the way I like it. I could maybe take a video of my system at some point and post it here so people can see what I have done. Assuming anyone actually cares as it's very emulation specific (no htpc at all). How about posting a couple of MNG files for testing purposes?