Vic Rattlehead

I decided to give Mednafen another try and downloaded the latest version, replacing the one, currently in my GameEx installation. It was surprisingly easy to get it to work, the issue that made me unable to play games in it was that the GameEx TurboGrafx default mapping files must be deleted before you can play any games. This was an issue with Magic Engine and Ootake as well, I had just forgotten about it. Getting CD games to work was as easy as dropping the SYSCARD1.PCE, SYSCARD2.PCE, and SYSCARD3.PCE files into Mednafen's main directory. (I think those three should cover all cards and BIOS files needed for anything right?) Configuring the gamepad to use was almost as fast as it is in Ootake, which is a blessing since this is something I have to do regularly. (Configuring controllers in Magic Engine is really cumbersome by comparison.) The emulation itself seems very similar to that it Magic Engine and Ootake. Both regarding how the music and sounds sound, as well as how it looks and feel when you play it. But I haven't played a lot of PC Engine yet so I may very well be missing many finer details. So far it's by far the best emulator of the three for practical reasons. And then I wanted to get some scanlines, or possibly a CRT filter if one was available. This was a little harder because it took some time to understand how I to edit the config file, and find the information I wanted. When you know what you are supposed to do, then of course it is pretty easy. It would be better if you could do things like turning on unlimited sprites or scanlines while the emulator was, running but it is not a big issue. At first I thought that you could use Blaargh's excellent nes.ntsc filter for PC Engine games, so it was a let down when I discovered that it was only for NES games! Still the basic scanlines that you can enable are as good as what you'll get with Ootake and Magic Engine and they do the job well. I would really recommend anyone interested in playing PC Engine games to try this emulator as it is in my opinion the best one for the job, although you really can't go wrong with any of the three as long as you manage to get the CD games to work. Thanks a lot Parka1300 for getting me to give this excellent emulator another chance! I also tried the NES emulation in Mednafen and it is great as well. The graphics were great when the NTSC filter was used and it is the same filter that is being used in Nestopia. The music was in my opinion not as beautiful as in Nestopia and MESS, a little more harsh to the ears and not as nuanced, but it is a long time since I've heard a real NES and that was through crappy TV speakers, so Mednafen's sound could be more authentic for all that i know. Parka, have you ever heard of anyone using third party graphics filters with Mednafen?

Great update! (Well it was probably the previous one.) GameEx is now much faster to use. I really like it. Even the SetupWizard program seemed faster to use in this version. Good work!

So I've managed to get hold of an old version of Daemon Tools and I'm considering to install it on my computer to see if I can get TurboGrafx CD (Magic Engine or Ootake) to work, since I really love shoot 'em ups. It is the only CD-based system that I've tried to get to work that I still hasn't succeeded with. I have a few questions though that perhaps somebody on this forum would know the answers to. The Daemon Tools version is an old one, because from what I've read Daemon Tools was bought ought by someone else who afterwards added adware\spyware to that did not always give the user the ability to opt out of it during installation. Such a questionable practice leads me to suspect that if the current developers wanted they could add more hidden and malicious types of spyware\trojans in the executable. Since Daemon Tools is in itself a rootkit, albeit a benevolent one, it would be easy to hide something extra within it, that would not be easy to discover. That's why I have downloaded an old version of it (3.47) that is from the time before it was bought by the new developers. But being so old, possible from 2005, could installing this program cause issues on my fairly new Windows 7 computer? This is my main computer and not a cabinet I use only for playing games, so I am more cautious about what I install on it than I would be if this was a gaming PC only. Are there any other problems that could arise by using such an old piece of software that does go deep down into windows? Any know exploits of Daemon Tools drivers used by hackers? Is this old version of Daemon Tools itself supported by GameEx, or is only more recent versions supported? Would I have any other option than installing this program? Maybe a disk image program will be included in GameEx Revolution? I have tried Virtual CloneDrive although with no success. Sega CD (Kega Fusion), PlayStation (ePSXe) and Gamecube (Dolphin) all works great through GameEx. PlayStation 2 (PCSX2) only works outside of GameEx, but I haven't really looked into the issue, so it's probably just some small thing that needs to be corrected.

I'd very much like a custom tag system as well. It would enable you me to make categories like "Mega Drive Shoot 'em up's " and "Ancient Far East Setting" I have another wish as well. Currently in the old GameEx when you play a game in two different emulators, say Rush'n Attack in Nestopia and then another time in MESS it is counted as two different games with one instance of playing each. What would be neat was if it was counted a two instances of playing the same game for playing time statistics.

I can confirm that the matter has been resolved :-)

I can only click on "Start new topic" at the top and not on "Reply to this topic" like I can in this topic.

Since the Feature & Enhancement Requests thread seem to be closed I will post one here. Sorry if I have misunderstood something. Currently in the old GameEx when you play a game in two different emulators, say Rush'n Attack in Nestopia and then another time in MESS it is counted as two different games with one instance of playing each. What would be neat was if it was counted a two instances of playing the same game for playing time statistics.

In the GameEx General forum, is it off-topic to post start Emulation related threads which are not remotely associated to setting up GameEx and getting it to work? Like for example: "Man, this MESS Emulator is totally awesome for playing NES games!".

Thank you very much! I'm going to go for it. It will be interesting to see how the situation with the older MAME build being taken down develops. It would be very strange if they removed them for good, but it is also weird that they have been gone for a week or more which makes it seem like it is not just website maintenance.

Hi again Sorry to bother you, but how do you know that the link you posted is an official mirror of MAME and not someone impersonating as that? I couldn't find any references for it.

I got the same warning from the from the virusTotal website (Zillya) about mess0161b.exe so it must be a false positive. So my speculations about Emulator-Zone was wrong.

Thanks for the link! The binary version is up again it seems as it was succesfully downloaded from:http://www.whiper.com/mame/ I downloaded all of the files, both the compiled and non-compiled versions of both MESS and MAME, you know just to be sure

Thanks. An interesting read.

Thank you very much. At first I was a little wary of compiling my own version since I have ever done that before, but KK's program doesn't seem very threatening to use so I was going to give it a shot but then I realized that mamedev.org have taken down all the old source codes as well with only the new 0162 remaining. I did download the file from Emulator-Zone but a scan using www.virustotal.com did show a worm called Worm.Feebs.Win32.145 in the executable. Just two of the virus-scanners on that site discovered anything suspicious and the one who named the worm was an antivirus program called Zillya which I have never heard about before. Most likely it is a false positive, I just don't want to take any chances with it. For comparison I also scanned MAME 0161 from the same site which gave the same results with the worm warning. I also scanned MAME 0160 from emuparadise and that file came out clean so it seems to imply that either there is something new in MAME (and MESS) 0161 which causes the false positive or that emulator-zone are inserting something extra in their downloads. The search goes on but if I don't find any trustworthy sources for the file I will just put my NES playing on the shelf for a while. I'm sure that mamedev.org must update their website soon. Thanks for the help anyway

I thought I was very satisfied with the NES emulation in Nestopia, but then I tried some PlayChoice and Versus games in MAME. Green Beret\Rush N' Attack for example, the HLSL filter (with custom settings) did some great things to the colours and the music I thought sounded even better than in Nestopia with more "punch" in it. GameEx downloads a MESS version from 2012, so I went to the MAMEDev website to dowload the latest version but it seems like they have merged MAME and MESS together in the latest version and for some reason they have taken down the old versions of MESS and MAME. I'm hopeful that they will put the old versions back up sometime in the future, but right now I'm very hyped about what MESS could do for some of the old NES titles. That is why I'm making this thread with the hopes that some kindhearted soul with a recent version of MESS(0155 - 0161) would be willing to upload it somewhere for me.

Awesome! Thanks for your feedback.

So it's just not my setup then. Thanks! I can understand that these databases are a lot of work ad not what Tom want to give priority at this time. Like the rest I'm very exited about Evolution

Since late last year or early this year the NES database on my setup has been severely lacking. For example If I look up from which year my NES games are from there are only entries for 86, 88, 89, 90 and 91 and there are only a few games attributed to each of those categories. Similarly the genre have over 200 games in my NES folder and most of the are recognized by the program, so something is wrong somewhere. I seem to recall that after an earlier update there was a notice about the NES database having been rewritten but that it was not finished. Because of this I have assumed that this is the reason for most of the games not being categorized but no I'm not so sure. Perhaps it is just I who did something wrong? It would be nice if it could be solved just by deleting a file and copying in a new. Does anyone here know anything about this? Are your NES categories similarly lacking?

I wrote a reply to him, but then I saw that he was already doing what I suggested so I edited the original post. I guess I should have just left the original post and made a new one instead

Sorry. Didn't read your post carefully. I have nothing to add.

FEATURE REQUEST (This may already exist, I just haven't seen it) The ability from within GameEx or the config file to switch between screenshot and Game Box view on the game select list. For those games that are missing game box artwork, nothing should be shown. Also, a mode that switches of the screenshots, title screens, (and videos if you use those) would be cool so that you sometimes could just browse the games by game art and not know how it looked, before you booted up the game.

It's a cool idea. It's not something that I would use, but I'm sure there are some that would.

FEATURE REQUEST This has probably been requested already, but here it goes: The ability to create and delete various user made categories from within GameEx. For example, I want to make a category for Mega Drive Shoot em' ups. I create a new category and call it "Mega Drive Shoot em' ups". I then go and add the games myself. Later I can add more games or delete the whole category if I want to.

FEATURE REQUESTS GameEx is an awesome frontend, thanks for all your hard work Tom! You have made a very customizable front-end that (if you take the time to understand it) is user friendly and not overtly complicated. Your long dedication and many updates to this program makes me believe that this is a project that will last a long time. My wishes for the Evolution release may be a bit different from the average user since I don't use GameEx for a cabinet. What I wanted it for in the first place was as a launcher for all my console emulators that kept track of how many times each game was played and for how long. But as I started to use GameEx I have really come to enjoy things like having the game box artwork available and the ability to sort the games by year, developers and publishers. My biggest wish for the GameEx Evolution is that the statistics screen and the statistics themselves are improved. I'd like to have available a list of all the games that I have played, sorted by the number of plays and another that is sorted by time played. The lists that are already there lists only a few games and the "time played" list is sorted the wrong way so that games that have been played for 8 minutes rank above those played for 10-79 minutes. A separate top-list for each of the console systems would also be very nice! (Or by developer, publisher, genre or release year! Though that would be much less important.) Another less important, but nonetheless cool feature would be a third type of top-list called average playtime, which is the amount of time spent divided by number of plays. I don't know how many GameEx user there is besides me, that thinks these features would be nice though. Also, when GameEx Evolution is released, will there be a possibility for importing the statistics from GamEx (automatically or manually) or will the databases be too different?

How do I mark this question as resolved? Should I just edit the thread name?