headkaze

$50 US still only converts to ~26 GBP! Man the exchange rate it brutal!

Thanks Amos! I think you know the Theme Editor better than I do, since I've never even used it to make a theme; I made my cab's theme before I wrote the editor! Some options are available under the Edit->Options... Okay just checked and there is no EnableMediaControls setting in there! Okay, probably need to do another update with more of the options in there - I would really like to remove the need to edit ini files.

I don't have many Dreamcast games setup on my cab, since my cab's theme is Soul Calibur I had to include it in my cab. I can recommend you go to the Chankast forum on the EmuTalk.net foums as it is a great resource for all things Chankast.

Wow, thanks Adultery I guess I should have checked in the User Submitted Config area of the forum first! Cheers mate, this will make life alot easier EDIT: Wow Adultery, you've done an awesome job with these config files mate.

I'm just talking to Tom about adding a cool new feature to GameEx that will make life easier for new users. The new feature is the GameEx Setup Wizard. It will guide you through the setup of GameEx features and emulators. What I need to do though is get a bunch of the most commonly used emulator ini files. If someone who has alot of emu's setup with GameEx can provide a zip of their ini files that would be a great help. Also, they need to be setup to be as generic as possible so that means no fancy .bat files or anything like that. Well, unless they are things that are necessary to get the emu to run for everyone. I guess the more ini files the merrier since I am going to have go through and get the wizard to work with all the emulators. It's gonna be a big job, so your help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance

Perhaps there needs to be a delay between the {ENTER} and the keypresses? Just as a note to Tom, to emulate the pause between a keypress so it's exactly the right speed I use the following C code to calculate the time to wait. DWORD kbs; SystemParametersInfo(SPI_GETKEYBOARDSPEED, 0, &kbs, 0); kbs += 2; int KeyDelayValue = 1000/kbs;

Sounds good to me. I've sent you an E-Mail.

Perhaps this games needs the ShowDesktop=True option? Some PC games need that setting.

I've never had a problem with updating GameEx. It never corrupts the old version or anything like that for me. I guess the failsafe method of backing up could make sure you can restore if anything goes wrong. The newer versions of GameEx have automatic update which seems to work fine for me too. There are times when Tom adds new features and turns them on by default, so occationally you have to go into the config to turn them off, but it's good to be able to check out the new features that your might miss otherwise.

Hi I just wanted to write a reminder to those users out there that love GameEx to please donate the small price to register GameEx and show your appreciation. Tom has once again donated money to me for the GameEx Theme Editor and I havn't even done an update. That is the sort of person Tom is, and he is always doing that. So please, help Tom even if it's only enough to cover a carton of beer for the weekend, it's nice to know your work is appreciated.

I've had this problem before, I think in chankast, so used an AutoHokey script to map the key to something else. In chankast it's really annoying because the alt key will pause the game for a few seconds. Another method I used in VisualBoy Advance was to remove the menu using Resource Hacker. That was just to stop the menu showing when you hit ESC to exit the emu.

Maybe you have to run a list update in GameEx?

I point out the lines of code that need to be added at the end of this thread.

Well things like that really don't fall into the area of Theme Editor issues. I can only really help solve and debug the actual functionality of the Theme Editor. The way GameEx handles the themes on the other hand is a different story and where Tom comes in. The source to GameEx is closed to Tom, so when it comes to displaying a layout created in the Theme Editor it really falls upon the realm of Tom. If the text in an object dosn't seem to be stretching across the full size of the boxed area, that could well be a layout display bug in GameEx. We might need Tom's opinion on the matter for this one.

As far as I know the controls for the audio on the ToolBar only has two visual states. Play and Stop. For the rest I think as long as you line up the buttons they should all work fine. It would get a bit complicated if we made it so each button was separate, and each button had two states. ToolBar looks good btw. I'm not sure if your requesting features for the Theme Editor, but I can only add things that Tom adds support for in GameEx first, so perhaps you need to put a post in the request forum.

I think this is the intended behaviour of GameEx to do that. It's debatable as to whether or not it should function this way, but there are positives for it being this way to. It does force the user to have a correct working directory for every enabled emu. I think a better way to handle this would be to allow GameEx to launch but upon selecting the emulator an error message pops up indicating the working path is incorrect. In a way using the log file method makes debugging easier though, since making a screenshot of an error message is more difficult than pasting the log text file.

Your probably trying to run chankast at a resolution the TV can't handle. Try lowering it to 1024x768 or more probably 800x600. I will assume your using the latest version of chankast, otherwise you need the -forcefull option.

Hmm I'm a little worried about the attract mode supporting other emulators. I know some games I have don't work and crash the emu's, so I'm wondering how it will cope. I know you probably just force the process to end after a while anyway. I've just run auto-update, so I guess I'll leave it running and see what happens. I hope you treat yourself to a pint or two after every major update

Sorry I missed your last couple of PM's hope you didn't go too mental trying to get chankast_launch.exe working. Did you end up getting it to work with the newer version of Daemon Tools, or did you have to use 4.0? EDIT: Got my answer in PM:

Great work Tom, I love optimization!

I really enjoyed reading that, great article. One thing I would debate though is the use of BitBlt. When we were doing experimentations with screen rotation I found you can just write to the DirectDraw surface using a stream along with DirectShowLib. Check out the code below IntPtr ip = IntPtr.Zero; ip = video.GetBitmap(); if(ip != IntPtr.Zero) { Bitmap bmp = video.IPToBmp(ip); System.IO.MemoryStream stream = new System.IO.MemoryStream(); bmp.Save(stream, ImageFormat.Bmp); LockedData videoData = videoSurface.Lock(LockFlags.SurfaceMemoryPointer | LockFlags.WriteOnly); videoData.Data.Write(stream.GetBuffer(), 54, (int) stream.Length); videoSurface.Unlock(); Rectangle srcRect = new Rectangle(0, 0, 640, 480); Rectangle destRect = new Rectangle(0, 0, 640, 480); back.Draw(destRect, videoSurface, srcRect, DrawFlags.DoNotWait); front.Flip(back, FlipFlags.DoNotWait); bmp.Dispose(); bmp = null; System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.FreeCoTaskMem(ip); ip = IntPtr.Zero; stream.Close(); } It would be interesting to know which method is faster, this one or a straight bitblt. Anyway, I sent you the code to this called VideoRotate to your FTP. Probably not worth looking into, but the above is probably the way I would approach the situation in VB.NET.

Yeah, I used to use Ghost alot when I was working for the IT dept in a Hospital over here in Perth. Actually it was a DOS version of Ghost and we were one of the first places to experiment with Ghosting for mass installations over here. I also used it extensively when I was working for an IT company too. But yeah, I havn't used Ghost for a long time, and I'm with Tom in that it dosn't take me too long to install everything again. I've just installed my sisters new laptop yesterday and another PC two days ago for a friend. My dev machine does take a big longer than usual though, so Ghosting it would be cool I guess, just prefer to keep the HDD space for other things. Luckily I have a backup of most of C: from the last virus attack, so all my documents and shit loads of code I've written is all safe on another drive. The C: on my dev machine was making a funny noise when I was reinstalling it before so it should have been enough of a warning for me to replace it. Oh well we live and learn eh.

I've never had a problem with WD drives.. until now. All my drives are WD. I've heard a few people have HDD failures using seagate drives, but now I guess I've proven it can happen to both brands.

Some of you may know that I had a recent virus attack which prompted me to do a full re-install of my dev machine. I just recently got everything set up again including my dev environment so to get back into the groove of things I did an update to the Theme Editor. Today I was downloading the Desert Combat mod for BF 1942 because me and some mates are planning to do a LAN session next weekend. Download went fine but when I went to copy it to one of my network drives I got the dreaded "cyclic redundancy error" message. The file wouldn't move. So I think ok, I'll do a chkdsk /R and fix any bad sectors on the drive, since I had never had any problems with it before and thought it must be a few sectors this 500 odd meg file occupied. Windows reboots and does the chkdsk, okay a few files have allocation errors and what not. It finishes and the login screen pops up. I log in under my usual account except this time it's like all my personal settings have been deleted and it's logging in like it's a freshly created account. Oh no! But it gets worse, the machine crashes before it logs back in. I reboot - this time it won't go back into windows even in safe mode! I decide to try a restore, so I boot up my XP CD and there is no option to repair! I try recovery console to rebuild the boot.ini but still no repair option. By now I'm thinking ok, it's time to get rid of the HDD and put in a new one and start from scratch once again. Painful, but no other option seems possible. But the issue lies with the recent Theme Editor update which was a number of hours of work. After messing around with some floppy disks I manage to get a DOS program called ReadNTFS to copy the updated source files onto a 3 1/4 floppy drive. So at least I saved the source for that. I won't mention the other stuff I've lost since it's not really relevent to GameEx, and this post is OT enough. So close call, but all is okay in the end. Just dreading the big re-install. Quick message to Tom: I'll be sending over the latest source for the Theme Editor soon!

Thats exactly why its not working