TheUltimateLink

And that's why I just gave up. Looking at WireShark, there was no traffic coming from GameEx. There was other stuff that I coudln't explain. I mean, when I ran it, all traffic was blocked to my arcade's IP at the switch level. All the traffic WireShark was detecting was coming from local network discoveries and some traffic going to (or at least attempting to) other unknown places. So unless someone knows which ports specifically GameEx uses, I'm just going to reinstall my protection suite and hope for the best.

The specific reason why is that I want to use it as a get up and go. If I go awhile without playing on it, as soon as I turn it on, it wants to go and grab updates and just generally slows it down. isolating it allows me to administrate it remotely since there's no keyboard/mouse connected to it, and won't allow remote attackers to get into it. I already changed the port for RDP to something obscure and generally unused and setup a Username/Password to thwart anyone trying to get in. The main point is that I don't want anything standing in between Windows and GameEx. If GameEx was it's own standalone OS that would be perfect. But since I have to deal with Windows, I'm trying to defend myself and my network without having to bog the machine down. Just got done turning off all the extras that use network connections and it was still loading slow. I'm going to use WireShark to see what it's trying to use, and possibly open them up, depending on which ports they are.

I thank you for your quick replies! The machine is set up to be as self-contained as possible and the only programs the computer uses outside of GameEx are the respective emulators like MAME and Dolphin. The machine itself is extremely simple and meant to be the minimal required to run the games without any hiccups. That being said, I think the only thing running besides that is the automatic art download. I should disable that and see if it fixes the issue. If it does, that'll be perfect. I already have all the games loaded that I'll ever need, so there's no need to re-download the artwork ever again. If that's not it, I'll hit up WireShark and see where traffic is going. I appreciate all your help, Gentlemen! And of course, I'll keep you updated of my findings.

So I set up an BYOAC with GameEx as my front end. I thought I could save myself some OS resources and increase overall speed and efficiency if I could isolate my arcade on my network, disable all traffic to and from it except for RDP (for management), and then not install updates or antivirus suite. The problem is that once I isolated the arcade on the network, I noticed that GameEX took a huge performance hit and I was facing long loading screens between menu selections. As soon as I would turn the isolation off, it was running like a dream. It was going out to the internet and downloading and checking things like MAME artwork. My question is what ports does the program use, so I can enable those ports only and not have to worry about loading a firewall/AV suite and keeping it updated. I want to close as many ports as possible to cut the chances of a remote attacker figuring out my system isn't protected and getting in and doing something bad. Can anyone help me out? I appreciate any help anyone can provide me.