headkaze

I don't think Marker means any offence when he says this, it's a valid point he's making - why so many MahJong games? I think the answer is simple; it's a very popular game over there. I think there is an option to filter them out, or just add "mahjong" to your filtering list and it won't show them.

Perhaps the show desktop setting. Are you compiling the PP presentation to an exe file?

I have mine merged with no problems. I think Mame manages how it deals with clones and what not, so I don't think this is a GameEx related issue. GameEx uses a Mame generated list, not a list of ROM filenames, so it knows which zip file to use. You should have no problems with merged ROMs.

..and the latest drivers for your video card

Okay, I think I've squashed the save bug, but I'm not totally sure. Attached is the exe file you can just overwrite your existing one. Please report back here if there are any more saving problems. GameEx Theme Editor v1.54 BETA - fixed save bug (hopefully)

Yeah sorry about that, the save bug should be fixed next release

I guess your right, this discussion has gone as far as it can. *Locked*

I was going to say try moving the analog stick very quickly when trying to config it. I know some games work that way with analog controls, not sure about Mame though. I thought Mame32FX had stopped being developed. He must have continued it again. That's good news.

I don't understand this paragraph especially when you link to a post that explains why it's technically impossible to stream games through to an extender using the RD protocol. MAME itself can't be streamed so how does having a FE running on an extender help in any way when the emulators themselves wont work. Just because TV can stream over the wires it has nothing to do with streaming games or realtime generated graphics. They are completely different things, video is a simple matter of streaming and decoding pre-coded video frames over the wires, running a DirectX/DirectShow application is not possible this way. Your comparing chalk and cheese. It may not even be possible with Windows Vista or any time soon. The emulators that do work through an extender are running as an embedded object in an HTML form, using Java or Flash. These technologies are designed to run through a limited bandwidth. Even a port of MAME to Java would only allow you to run a handful of ROMs and the speed would be questionable. GameEx is a FE, and has nothing to do with the development of MAME, so you would have to ask someone else for a Java port because this is not the place. Try running any DirectX game through your extender and you will be sadly dissappointed that it is not possible to do so. So go and complain to Microsoft that their RD technology won't allow streaming of high speed graphics. It's something alot of people are annoyed about. So besides the technical impossibility of what your suggesting, and your demonstration in lack of understanding the technology your whinging about, the MCE userbase is only a small portion of the greater userbase. For example I don't run GameEx on an MCE machine, I use it on an XP machine in an arcade cabinet. People who run GameEx on an MCE machine obviously run it directly on the PC, not through an extender. GameEx will never run through an extender to your XBOX unless Microsoft decide to update the RD protocol and DirectX API's to allow for such a thing. Nothing else will be able to do what you want for a long time either, so it's a futile argument your presenting here.

I believe the key update is the support for Direct3D rather than DirectDraw which should improve rendering quite a bit on hardware accelerated video cards.

Do the different states of the Taskbar look okay in the actual Theme Editor? (Under Templates, check that the taskbar looks ok under Taskbar 1, 2 and 3). The default settings for the Taskbar is below, you can try pasting these over [Taskbar] section in the theme.ini and see if that helps.. [TaskBar] MCEButtonOver=24,0,80,46 MCEButtonDown=24,0,80,46 BackButtonOver=118,0,49,46 BackButtonDown=118,0,49,46 HelpButtonOver=176,0,47,46 HelpButtonDown=176,0,47,46 MediaControl=624,0,148,46 MediaControlStop=624,0,148,46 TopBarLeft=24,0,206,46 TopBarMiddle=0,0,800,46 Window=772,0,28,46 Hmm.. I should have called it Toolbar... ohwell

So your saying it dosn't happen all of the time? Have you got GameEx loading at startup from using Tom's Instant Sheller? If this is the case perhaps a particular driver is not getting loaded properly at startup. Try restoring the shell back using Instant Sheller and place a link to GameEx in the Startup folder (Start->Programs->Startup) and see if it's booting okay that way.

I just spoke to Tom, and he hasn't yet added separate layout support for Emulators yet. He will be looking at adding this in the near future. When this is implemented I will be doing some greater testing of this feature and will be releasing a MameWah theme pack for GameEx.

Not exactly sure how much resizing the menu object effects the list display in GameEx. This depends on how Tom uses the layout information saved in the Theme's ini file. My guess is that since it uses set font sizes, resizing the menu would only effect the bounding box, not the font size. At the moment you can't use different layouts for each screen but Tom is constantly adding more support for the Theme Editor, so it's not impossible to think that it might be added in the near future. You can resize the icons directly in the Theme Editor by either dragging the corner of the logo, or by entering in the Width and Height in the boxes for per pixel accuracy. You can also easily change logos in the Theme Editor.. for example, you could search for "N64" on Google's image search. When you find a logo you like, just right click it and select "Copy", go into the Theme Editor and select the N64 logo, select the paste icon and it should paste it over the top, then just resize if you want and save. Couldn't be any more easier! If you need to remove the background by making it black, you could of course paste the image into an image editor like Photoshop before and paste it into the Theme Editor. Or you can click the "Edit" button and it will load the default graphic editor set in the Options.

I'm not upset honestly. Your not the first person to say GameEx looks like MCE, so I was curious why people felt that way. I work with Tom on the GameEx Theme Editor, so it's my business to know how to make it better for users to customize the look of GameEx. If I seemed upset it's only that I'm passionate about GameEx. No motive really, I'm actually curious about what can be done to make GameEx less like MCE (as an option) to those who don't want it to look like it.

I don't want to start a flame war here, so please don't take this post the wrong way. But it seems whenever there is a debate or question posted about which FE is the best it gets brought up that GameEx looks too much like MCE. This is at arcadecontrols of course. I usually try and say go to the wiki and judge for yourself, but there always seems to be someone who pipes in about GX looking too much like MCE. I then start to think "this guy obviously hasn't seen some of the new themes", so I post some screenshots of some of the user submitted themes. But the reply back is the same "it still looks too MCE PCish" etc. I am perplexed, apart from the animated selector bar, I just can't see any resemblence in the user submitted themes. And even the fact that GX can import MameWah themes, people still think that MameWah looks like an arcade FE, and GameEx looks like MCE running on a PC. Am I going insaine? What is it about GameEx that makes it look like MCE. And what features do you think could be implemented to change that? Tom has addressed most of them I thought - options to remove buttons, remove the task bar, remove the date/time, change the selector bar and what not. I would just like to hear some opinions on the matter, because I'm starting to think I may need to see an eye specialist if I am mistaken here

You have to have a registered version of GameEx to use the Karaoke feature. Have you registered GameEx (ie. Received the key and applied it)? Also it would make sense to put the karaoke files into a directory rather than the root of C:, perhaps something like C:\Karaoke?

The program you are looking for is ppjoykey. You will need to set up some batch files to run it before the game. Read more about it here. I can say that Virtua Tennis is an awesome game for a cab, I've had two people on the arcade controls and two people on the wireless game pads, and it's really cool. It is low level stuff, it actually uses a joystick driver, so you setup Virtua Tennis to use a joystick and the keys are mapped through the driver.

If the "L" key is already mapped to something in Mame, I'm not sure if it will work. Press [TAB] while in Mame and check your key mappings.

Mame32 still has the command line options, in fact it's the same as MAME but also with a built in GUI.

Believe it or not there are quite a few Game & Watch emulators for PC, do a search on Google. Also a few remakes have been made for GBA, so you could play them through Visual Boy Advance if you really wanted too

Hi Marker, thanks for the bug report. It seems a few people have reported the Theme Editor not saving settings. I will check into it, unfortunately due to a recent virus attack I have needed to re-install everything from scratch on my dev machine. My dev environment has to be set up again before I can compile any fixes. Second, if you want to use the same layout in several themes, you can copy and paste the layout information contained in the theme's ini file to another file. Not sure what you mean by "menu" field, again I don't have access to it right now.

Wow! Very impressed amos!! And it's really nice to see some good use of the V2 theme format!

I would try uninstalling the .NET Framework's and re-installing them. Is sounds like there is possibly a damaged file on your system, or some process causing a problem. You can try running Task Manager and killing any non-standard Windows processes, then try running GameEx. If it works, then you can try eliminating the conflict by killing them one by one until it fails again. There are two suggestions before you do a complete rebuild anyway. Might save a few hours of reinstalling. There is always the repair option for XP too.

That's wierd cos mine isn't asking to be updated.. it did once, then Tom posted saying to download the new version because there ware an auto update bug.. I downloaded that version and it hasn't asked to update again... hmm