shroud

Is it possible to download somewhere the latest database files for GameEx? I haven't updated GameEx itself for almost a couple of years, and I am afraid now to lose some of my configuration and settings if I upgrade it all at once, but I'd like at least to upgrade the database files, in hope that they include now more of the games in my collection. Are these files available somewhere?

I can help you with the C64 and DOS if you want, and can tolerate some delays in my responses... Setting up the C64 for me was easy, but not the DOS!

(Copying the same question over from the other thread...) I have found both the Logitech Driving Force GT and the Thrustmaster Ferrari GT Experience on sale second-hand for 35e... which one would you pick, if you'd be using them mostly with emulators? The Thrustmaster has the nice fringe benefit of not needing an external power supply, but it only rotates 90 degrees in each direction (compared to the DFGT 450 degrees each side), how can you even play effectively with such narrow rotation? :/

Actually it's more like 180 degrees only, meaning 90 degrees on each side...

Ok, so it appears that there are some second-hand of either of these models on sales locally: - Logitech Driving Force GT (http://support.logitech.com/en_us/product/driving-force-gt) - Thrustmaster Ferrari GT Experience (https://support.thrustmaster.com/en/product/ferrarigterw-en/) The Logitech wins in terms of rotation degrees (900 vs 360), and has an additional gear shifter stick but only sequential. The Thrustmaster has the advantage of not needing the power supply, so one less cable around, and has better gear shifter paddles. Given the same price is asked for them (35e), which one would you pick, considering we'll be mostly using it with emulators?

All right... I went for the PDP Afterglow, and so far everything is working fine No problems with the 2 controllers working simultaneously in MAME, WinUAE, WinVice, Higan and ePSXe. I'll test the rest of my emulators in the following days. Thanks to all of you for the suggestions! Now off to find some good 2-players games to play

I had a similar problem when using a wired controller (SpeedLink Competition Pro) and a wireless controller (Logitech F710). I wanted the latter to be treated as "player 1" controller but Windows always defaulted to the other way around. Although at least it with wired+wireless Windows was always able to figure out that they are actually two distinct controllers. The point is that we want to play from the couch and that's why we should get a second wireless controller.

Yeah that's whay I am afraid of... I might eventually go with the different PDP Afterglow controller then, unless you guys tell me that it's a bad one.

Thank you both! Do you think PDP Afterglow products qualify as "knock off"? Or are they legitimate? I've found them in our local shop, and thought that maybe getting a separate brand for the second controller would decrease the risk of them being recognized as a single controller. The PDP Afterglow gamepad says it also supports PS3 besides PC, so it's an added benefit. But when I tried to check their website to figure out if it supports X-Input or DirectInput, I cannot find that gamepad exactly, which raises some suspicions: http://pdp.com/en/afterglow/shop/controllers This is the exact model on sales locally: https://www.amazon.com/Afterglow-Wireless-Controller-PS3/dp/B017VLXH3C/ref=pd_sim_63_2/142-5751085-4690920?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B017VLXH3C&pd_rd_r=1GMKWGSJRBWA7DYTPA96&pd_rd_w=a80es&pd_rd_wg=Hgug4&psc=1&refRID=1GMKWGSJRBWA7DYTPA96

We've been using a Logitech F710 wireless gamepad for all our GameEx games, and really liking it. I think it's time to get a second gamepad so that we can play some 2-player games simultaneously, but I have a noob question as usual... Do you think that multiple usb-wireless controllers are generally recognized without problems in Windows 7, so that they can work together without messing up and being instead e.g. recognized as one? What is a safer choice from this point of view, between buying another Logitech F710 or buying a gamepad from a different brand (although they all seem to work at 2.4GHz)?

Is it possible at all to play such games with a modern steering while like the Driving Force GT? As I was asking in a separate thread, I am mostly into old top-down driving games such as Sprint or Ivan Ironman Stewart's Off-Road, but I am beginning to understand that maybe those games were controlled by a free-spinning wheel that essentially worked like a spinner? So I wonder if there's a way to configure them to use a modern return-to-zero steering wheel instead.

Thanks! Maybe I should have added the question to the other thread... Mostly however my question is related to how old MAME games work with a steering wheel, rather than PC games and emulators in general. Sorry for the dumb question, but what exactly is a ball-stick? Is it something that works different from a regular joystick? So just to be sure I will ask the same question again in slightly different terms If I remember correctly, the old top-view MAME arcade driving games like Sprint were controlled in such a way that the steering wheel determined the absolute angle, so for example if your car was moving upward and you needed to go left, you would spin the wheel 90 degrees left and keep it there (you would not return the wheel back into its rest position at 0 degrees). If that is what also MAME expects you to do, it means those games are unplayable with a modern steering wheel, because you cannot turn such wheel more than its maximum. Such maximum is 90 degrees (either side) for low-end wheels, but even the 900+ degrees of top-end wheels would work, because each time you complete one lap on those games, you have turned the wheel 360 degrees, so any limit whatever large would get in the way at some point and make it impossible to continue the race after a few laps. So I guess I am looking for people on this forum who have a PC steering wheel, and would be kindly willing to give it a try with a few of those MAME games, to either verify my pessimistic expectations or instead prove that those games can be played with a modern steering wheel. It would be nice for me to know before buying a wheel myself and then find out I've wasted my money

I am tempted about buying a second-hand steering wheel for driving games... but how about simple old driving games such as these, do they work with a steering wheel? - Sprint - Ivan Stewart's Off Road Racing - Badlands And if you can play those old games with a steering wheel, do you think a 180-degrees wheel would work? Or did the original cabs had infinitely-turning wheels, that controlled the absolute angle instead (so that each lap, you would have actually turned the wheel a whole 360 degrees)?

Hello all, I have noticed that the support for game manuals has been made available also to users of the free version of GameEx. Is there a way to popup the display of a manual while you are in the middle of running a game? Or is manuals display limited to the GameEx menus? I don't usually even need a game's manual, but I was thinking that occasionally there are complex games for which you might want to take a look at a map or even a walkthrough if you get stuck, and it would be quite useful if it was possible to do so without exiting emulation each time. Thanks!

I will have to check both these categories out. I am quite a fan of puzzles, not so much of shoot'em ups, but generally speaking I always felt like they are a bit out of place in powerful systems. For some reason I tend to think that the best place for puzzles is portable systems for playing them on a train or in bed... As for shoot'em ups, everything after the 80s have typically left me unimpressed in gameplay (of course, the graphics can be gorgeous), but I am terribly outdated and can't name a single shmup released in the past 20 years. So feel free to pick some name for me!

Uhm... there are some games which are done both for DOS and Playstation, for example The Lost Vikings 2. Looking at the screeshots I don't see much difference. So I don't know if it's better to get the DOS or PS version...

Well I have the Oddworld originals for PC already so no need to get them for the PS also. But they are indeed great games

I have recently tried out PS and PS2 emulation for the first time. The latter is a bit too demanding on my PC (even tho according to the info on the PCSX2 emulator's website my PC and GFX card should be powerful enough), so I am focusing on PS only. I am looking for suggestions on interesting games for the original PS, but all the popular ones are either FPS, beat'em ups, or sports, and to be honest I am not very keen on any of those kind... I am afraid that the reason is that I am actually a lot more interested in 2D games rather than 3D (with the exception of racing games)! Given that the PlayStation was largely 3D-oriented since the first model, it doesn't surprise me that it's hard to find popular 2D games for it. Do you have any great 2D title to suggest? You can also still suggest me 3D games, as long as they are not FPS/beatemups/sports.

Is there any steering wheel that works for both PS and PC? I was thinking of buying a second-hand PS3 with a steering wheel (mostly for GT4), but it'd be nice if it worked also for our GameEx retrogames on the PC.

Makes sense! My collection follows a different approach, all my games are cherry-picked, averaging ~30-40 per system. I keep it small so that we don't get overwhelmed, or never get past games starting with 'A'

Wow, just WOW! I think I need to ask you the next question... how many games (roughly) do you have for each of those systems? Do you use gamebases, or did you cherrypick a selection of titles for each? Because with so many systems emulated, the total number of games might be astronomical!

Old Windows games can run in modern OS such as Windows 7, but a common problem is the "palette swap". I have been launching those games using DxWnd to get rid of this problem. But can you do so from GameEx?

I am interesting in knowing in general what kind of retrogames do people play and include in their GameEx setup. A poll might be too long to handle the responses tho Here's my own list of systems and emulator of choice: - Arcade Coin-Ops (MAME) - Lasergame Coin-Ops (Daphne) - Atari VCS/2600 (Stella) - Coleco Vision (ColEm) - IntelliVision (Bliss) - Nintendo NES/Famicom (Higan) - Nintendo SNES/SuperFamicom (Higan) - Sega Master System (Fusion) - Sega MegaDrive/Genesis (Fusion) - Sony PlayStation (ePSXe) - Sinclair ZX Spectrum (ZXSpin) - Commodore Vic20 (WinVice) - Commodore 64 (WinVice) - Commodore Amiga (WinUAE) - MSX/MSX2 (MESS) - MS DOS (DOSBox) - Graphic adventures (ScummVM) - MS Windows (DxWnd)

Have you managed to run Daphne games in GameEx? I always get headaches with Daphne, but here's what I think: - Daphne doesn't need any DVD in the drive to run games. The related DaphneLoader program is supposed to download automatically all the files you need to play a supported game. Some games (Dragon's Lair, Dragon's Lair II Time Warp, Space Ace and Thayer's Quest) require a valid DVD to trigger the downloads, but even these games will download the actual game files, so after you've triggered the download, you don't need to keep the DVD in the drive. Daphne never runs anything from those DVDs, it only uses them for verification the first time. - In my personal experience, that kind of error message always tells me that either the filename or the path of the framefile is wrong. It's a no-brainer, but you should first of all check that you really have a framefile called "lair_hd.txt" at that path location. - DaphneLoader and GameEx can point to different framefiles, so if your games work from DaphneLoader but not from GameEx, it probably just means you have to change the path or filename in GameEx settings. See cnells2000 pictures above, there's a section Daphne Games -> Options, this is the strings for the Daphne.exe command line. If you put here some -framefile flag followed by a path/filename string, this will tell Daphne where to look for the framefile of the current game. However, the name "lair_hd" raises my suspicion... have you tried to run Dragon's Lair from DaphneLoader, or only from the DVD? I am thinking that maybe you have the HD version of the Dragon's Lair DVD. Daphne doesn't support the HD version (it also generally doesn't support all the possible DVD versions, there are several). By "support" here I mean that Daphne will not trigger the download of all necessary Dragon's Lair files unless you put one of the supported DVD versions in the drive, and the HD version is not one of them. So it might be that you still don't have the necessary files in Daphne to play Dragon's Lair through it In this case, I think the only thing you could do to play Dragon's Lair from GameEx, is to put it under Windows games instead of under Daphne games, and simply launch a shortcut to it. You will definitely need the DVD in the drive in this case however.

Other emulators seem to be mentioned in these threads about bezels, but not all of them because they work http://www.rlauncher.com/forum/archive/index.php/f-57.html So what does RocketLauncher do that GameEx can't? It interacts directly with the emulators, while GameEx merely starts them?