headkaze

I know there are probably a few of people planning on adding support for HS themes in other FE's. I was thinking it would be quite easy to write a converter for GameEx, all it would have to do it render the layout and "flatten" it into a background image. Maybe something for the future, but for this I was going to concentrate on layouts for each system. I think if I do make some per game layouts I will do them in HS format so they can benefit as well then have a converter to convert them to GameEx format. That way it's not a one way street, were sharing graphics so to speak. So for this particular theme I want character's to represent the systems, and now that I've found an arcade and pinball flyers site that will be great for backgrounds but now I'm really looking for characters. I found a great site with hi-res images of Sega characters but I find it hard to find ones for some of the other systems.

Sweet! Looks great Brian. I can see how the flyers add alot to the design Here is an Elvira with a background. I don't think I'll be going for a layout for each game though. Still it is fun to do per game themed layouts. I might have to join the HS team for that!

I did the Elvira one, had to use a bit of the clone tool to get out those crease marks but it came out okay.

Nice find there Brian, check out this Elvira one http://www.ipdb.org/showpic.pl?id=782&...4649&zoom=1 Too bad it has a crease down the middle but perhaps I could clean it up in Photoshop.

Brian I don't mind an Elvira one either, but it really needs to be a shot of the full pinball machine preferably with a plain background. Also that pic is a bit blurry but mainly I don't think it would look any good cut out. I am collecting the graphics out of this thread that I like and will cut them out when I'm in the mood.

Brian: that arcade flyer archive is a great resource, thanks for the link Flash: I like the first pinball for the Future Pinball one. I wonder if there is a hires one of "The Addams Family" pinball as that is one of the most popular pinball machines and would make a good icon for it.

Sweet, thanks Flash So what would be a good game character for ChannelF? Also I would like a new Future Pinball image if you have one, as I hate those bumpers too. I couldn't go with some characters because I couldn't find a decent quality image, so like I said if you find good quality images of the characters then post a link so I can grab it Yes they can be used as backgrounds in GameEx but I might make them more like the GameEx style. The reason I used Ultracade in the title is because HS is a clone and I didn't want the thread to be derailed into talk about HS. Mainly because I thought Tom would rather these boards be focused on GameEx. That being said we do wish Bill and Brian the best with the HS project. BTW I have seen newer screenshots of HS and it looks very different from the original video even so I do intend on changing the layouts around a bit to be more GameEx style. The hard part is collecting the graphics and cutting them out, not arranging them into a design.

I did mention that:

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I see whats happening now, you need to go into Options->Mame and set "Mame Layout" to the one you want for Mame. You shouldn't need to delete layouts. Now when you preview your layout it will load the "Mame layout". The reason it works this way is because you may be editing a different layout. You have to assign the layout you want to use for Mame. As for the PC games you only have to have the correct exe, but with Emulators you have to have the exe and you must send CPWizard the game name via command line.

Space Invader? Don't you mean PacMan? Have you been on the pints again? lol I was going to say "walking a bit on the wank" but wank must mean something different to the British They are designed in 640x480. I couldn't go higher than that because it's literally impossible to find character graphics that are a higher res than that. But it will be easy enough to upsize them in Photoshop to 1024x768. I think GameEx may even be able to do that itself. EDIT: Do you think I should add MCE style backgrounds and integrate it into the default theme style? Or do you think it should have different background designs?

I've now changed this theme to be separate backgrounds instead so you can place them in any theme you like and set the background in your Emulator setup. Copy the backgrounds into your theme's MEDIA folder then open the GameEx Setup Wizard and select Custom->Emulator Setup (3). You can now go through your emulators and set "Custom Background" to select the background you want for your emulators. Download Backgrounds

Had to split this up into two posts because I reached the maximum number of quotes! Lol (phew that's a loooong reply) It does now Check Version 1.84 it was a recent request by a user on BYOAC. That's really strange. All I can say to that is make sure you try this with the latest version and get back to me. Good idea Actually another user requested that the Export Bezel have export for a single game. So I might look into something like this. Hopefully sorted in 1.84, so get back to me if there are still any problems with this. It's a shame people are having to use the bezels because of the problems with showing the CP. I will have to look into it some time; time being the thing I seem to be lacking lately.

shaunopp: Thanks for the feedback. Some of the issues you mention I'm aware of, and some have already been addressed in Version 1.84 which was released yesterday. I will try and go through each of your points. I think it is explained in the documentation. I should make it more clear, so I think I'll put an explaination in the actual Options menu. Okay this was addressed in 1.84 and I realised I should have done this earlier. When you edit the properties of a label and click the "New" button it will open a dialog and allow you to press a key or move the joystick and it will enter the code for you. Should save people alot of time! Well most people know that pressing cancel will not save your settings. And in Windows it works like that and doesn't prompt you if you press cancel on any dialogs, so I don't think I will do it differently. And thats not because I'm being lazy Yeah this ones is really annoying. I asked the Mame developers if they could change Mame to have different "states" of pause so I can tell if it's a user initiated pause or Mame pausing during savestate etc. Unfortunately the only way around this would be for me to add this function to Mame itself via a diff. Shouldn't be too hard to do, everything just takes time. I encourage others to help out by investigating these things. A user on BYOAC updated my diff to unpause Mame on exit recently, and that helps. You got that problem too huh? Yeah I gotta get that sorted some time. AFAIK it is caused by changing resolution in Mame and when the desktop shows it changes back to desktop resolution. I added a "Show Delay" in the Options to help address this but it doesn't seem to work. Can you try it with a delay, and verbose logging on, and it should show in the log when the resolution is changed and when the waiting is occuring. It might help me track down the problem. The old no repeat problem. Yes this is a common request and a problem that was cause by legacy code. In fact it's a problem cause by a "design flaw" that is inherit in CPWizard. I wanted to support DirectDraw overlays (bad idea) which is a special method of overlaying graphics over anything. My idea was to enable the CP to appear over the game screen. But DirectDraw overlays are problematic and work differently depending on video card. The problem they have caused now is because of DD overlays I had to design CPWizard to update the entire screen when the display changes. Because DD overlays require one large bitmap to overlay and this whole bitmap needs to be updated when a change occurs. This means that changing graphics is slow and so having a repeat works really badly on something that is so slow to update. What I'd like to do is remove DD overlay support which has caused more problems that it was worth, and which I don't think anyone even uses anyway. But it will require a huge rewrite of sections of code so that graphics only update the changes instead of the whole display. This will have the benefit of speeding up CPWizard as well as enabling me to have key repeat. Yeah its a long story, but there it is. Well FarCry works okay for me, but I must admit I haven't tested this a whole lot. CPWizard is a monster of a program, one of the largest I've ever coded, so I rely alot on feedback to fix bugs. I think alot of people try things and when it doesn't work they think they've done something wrong. Sometimes it's actually a bug because I don't have alot of time to test all the features! Feeback it really important to get bugs fixed. So in this case, best thing to do is turn on "Verbose Logging" in the options and take a look in the CPWizard.log. Post it here with as much additional info you can gather, and I will attempt to fix it in the time I have. The more info you can find out saves time and also helps me identify where the problem is. The quicker I can do that the quicker I can fix it and the more likely it will be fixed. If I have to spend hours finding the bug or can't reproduce it myself the chances of a fix are much less. BTW The "Show Key" can be a source of confusion. For Mame it's usualy "P" becauase it detects pause, and for others it defaults to "L". That can confuse people, so if you are pressing the "L" key and it's not showing then there is possibly a problem. The log might help find out what it is.

BTW I use controls.xml

The first post shows what databases are currently assigned to who, so feel free to pick one. I'm not sure if Brian is going to be doing the ones he's assigned to or not as he's been a bit busy lately, but he might end up doing them I'm not sure, I guess he'll let us know when he reads this thread.

Just wondering if any volunteers have some status updates on the databases their working on? Flash: What's the status of the Sega Saturn one? Is v1.105 final for now or you got more updates coming? I'd rather you post it when it's "complete" so don't worry about uploading if your still working on it. How that C64 one? I think it could be trimmed down alot, 20,000 games is probably overkill. Perhaps we should do a "No-Intro" trimmed release as well? Brian: I noticed your dedicating alot of your time to HyperSpin lately which is not a problem but do you want me to assign your databases to someone else? Your going to have even less time when it's actually released. Don't worry I don't think your a "traitor" or anything , just need to keep the databases organised is all Tempest: Given up already? PimpDaddyStu, bkenobi, shaunopp and Stub: ?? The GameEx DBM program is at a stage where I think were happy with and should do enough to help producing databases as easy as possible. But it does have some functions that may be a bit confusing. If you need help with the program just ask, perhaps we should do a tutorial or something. Maybe I can convince Flash to make one *duck*

I never thought of that Amos, that's much more likely to be causing this problem than anything else.

I think I know the place your talking about, and I find it strange they won't host Nintendo video's as I don't see that even in the same ballpark as roms. Oh well rules is rules I guess.

Have you setup an emulator profile for Mame? You don't need to setup one for Mame because it's managed internally and would definately cause problems. Emulator profiles are used for emulators other than Mame. So first thing to try is deleting that (Edit->Options->Profiles->Select "mame" from the list then press the Delete button)

You can already use video backgrounds in GameEx. You will need to convert the YouTube video to avi or mpeg first but I believe there are tools on the web which can do this.

Happy birthday guys!

It would be great if you could take a look before I do, just to be sure your not doing something wrong. It will save me the time trying to track down the problem if it's just a configuration problem (which is most likely the case). Also just FYI that archive contains the CPWizard.exe not any config files. If you can't figure out the problem then post back here with the files and I'll take a look.

It's up to you if you want to update each release or not. I try to keep up to date when I can, although my cab is running around 0124. You really should run the same version of ROMs as the version of Mame as some may not work if they don't match. Some people run really old versions of Mame because some games run faster on older versions. It also depends on the performace of the PC. At some point I will more than likely update my cab's PC to something faster in the future (currently it's running a P4 3Ghz).

This question was already answered in your other thread. Blitz takes an overclocked Dual Core to get any decent FPS. All seattle games are like that. It's often used in benchmarking to test Mame with overclocked CPU's.