headkaze

I think I know why it's not detecting the Mame version correctly. I'm running Mame64 v0.124a and I think the "a" is probably throwing off your version detection. THe output looks like this I think CPWizard would have a problem with that version too, because as soon as I try to convert a number with a letter in it, I will get zero. So I believe it will detect that as Mame v0. Another thing I noticed is when running GameEx with "Set Resolution to below" setting. When GameEx first launches it will change resolution then launch CPWizard. CPWizard assumes the resolution it detects upon launching is the desktop resolution. It has to do this because minimizing a game will restore the resolution back to the desktop res which is where CPWizard displays. So I'm noticing that sometimes it's showing in a small section of the screen instead of fullscreen. I'm not sure how to overcome this, I guess you could launch CPWizard before you change res or something or if I need to make a change to CPWizard let me know. Other than those minor things, so far the integration seems to work really well.

Tom the CPWizard integration works great! Love it! Couple of things though, first is I'm still getting "-artwork unknown option" when I turn on "Use Bezel for vertical games". The option has changed to -artpath in newer versions of Mame. Also I notice with the PluginLCD when you launch a game it will say "Launching game" then show the CPWizard and after CPWizard exits it will say the name of the game. Not sure why it would do that but no biggy. I can't believe how well the two programs work together, very seamless integration awesome stuff! It also solves that annoying problem people are having when trying to get CPWizard to load on startup when GameEx is set to launch as shell. Makes life alot easier! sbaby: Not sure why it's not working for you mate, perhaps you should try uninstalling CPWizard and re-installing it. Make sure you back everything up first though. I'm sure it's something relatively easy to fix. I'm going to keep testing it here for a while see if I have any problems.

I think I've had too much coffee tonight I sometimes drink a large iced coffee drink with a tablespoon of coffee! Yeah Xara is really easy to use, you basically pick a font, type in what you want, select the animation, and export to an avi. So yeah changing the font or speed is easy to do.

Here is an example of using Xara 3d for the text underneath. Vector.zip

Check your PM

Well the transparency thing is something I'm sure Tom could add support for quite easily. Of course he would have to be careful not to have it spoil avi snaps so perhaps support for avi logo's only or something. So I'm sure Tom will pipe in with an answer to that. Without color keying I'm not sure they would look any good, although I could be wrong. Resolution-wise I would go with 320x240 or 640x480. The EmuMovies HQ set is 640x480 but that might be too much for slower PC's. I think you should definately create a set in 640x480 first though as it's not that hard to use VirtualDub to make a smaller set if needed. For compression I would probably use XVid with mp3 audio. That is if you want to add audio which I think would be cool if done well.

Yeah I realised after messing around with all these command line tools that Premiere would make it a hell of a lot easier. Just didn't know if you had it or not. Premiere would make it really easy. Do you have EmuMovies HQ set? That would be perfect for this. Just overlay a png with transparent area where you want to show the video through. I like your idea of using a few videos in the category and having static between them. I think something else that might work is 3d text of the category name spinning around below the logo. Have you ever played with a program called Xara 3D or ULead Cool 3D? It's really easy to make 3d text spin around that could be used below the logo. Another thing I was thinking about is transparency. This is probably more of a question for Tom, and that is do avi logo's support the black color key? I think it will be important to have the background around the logo to be transparent. I was mucking around with the Mame logo today and have come up with some psd's your welcome to use (no hidden copyright ) and it also has the Mame logo in wmf format so it can be opened in high quality. You will need to use the included wmf importer for Photoshop. Also included is the "Metal Styles" I used to add the metal effect to the Mame logo. Anyway I can't wait to see what you come up with Adultery! bkenobi: No worries mate MameLogo.7z

I think bkenobi was talking about your obsession with the Tempest game. So no need to derail another thread guys!

You could use batch files or Advanced Configs. Although using Advanced Configs would require you to set up each PC game as an emulator. Not really practical. So I would probably go with batch files. They are pretty simple thing to write, lets say you have a game called MyGame.exe located in a subfolder called MyGame in C:\Games Create a file called My Game.bat and place it in C:\Games Also create your ahk file and place it in C:\Games (Eg. AToB.ahk) -- My Game.bat -- @ECHO OFF AToB.ahk CD .\MyGame MyGame.exe taskkill /F /IM AutoHotKey.exe /T Now you will need to set up an Emulator to run your PC games from batch. Set the filter to *.bat and point the ROM Folder to C:\Games. Eg. +C: +Games\ +--My Game.bat +--AToB.ahk +--MyGame\ +---+MyGame.exe You can really have you actual game located anywhere though, simply change the CD to be the folder location of the game (Eg. CD E:\Games\MyGame)

Yeah placing them in the GameEx folder should be perfect because it means if you launch them with LaunchBefore and LaunchAfter you don't need the full path. So copy the AtoB.ahk to the GameEx folder LaunchBefore=AtoB.ahk LaunchAfter=taskkill /F /IM AutoHotKey.exe /T Also note that if you right click the AtoB.ahk file it will have an option called "Edit Script" and "Compile Script". If you compile it it will create a file called AtoB.exe. That creates an executable that anyone can run (ahk files need AutoHotKey installed to run). If you compile the script, you would change the lines to the following: LaunchBefore=AtoB.exe LaunchAfter=taskkill /F /IM AtoB.exe /T I recommend compiling scripts for people you want to share them with so they don't need AutoHotKey installed. For personal use you might as well keep them in .ahk format so you can edit them anytime you need to. Although with AutoHotKey you can decompile them anyway, it's easier to modify them if they are in .ahk format.

PlugInLCD v2.72 Released - Fixed a bug introduced last release that removed Colors.ini support. Oops!

Your absolutely right, some bug must have crept in when I updated the mapping code. I'll release a new version as soon as I figure out what I screwed up. EDIT: Yep last update when I was moving code from CPWizard into the plugin I accidently overwrote a line of code that was needed for Colors.ini. Check Version 2.72 hopefully it should work again. Sorry about that! lol

You don't have a help/support quota here so don't feel bad about asking for help First question about CPWizard, I've had a few people have this problem and the solution is to use a program like RunAsSvc so CPWizard will run as a service instead. You can find the utility on this page For your second question mapping one key to another is very simple. It looks like this a::b That will map "a" to "b". Just download the AutoHotkey software, enter the above into Notepad, then save it as atob.ahk then running it will map the key. Very simple. To stop it running right click on the icon in the icon tray and select exit. For more info go to http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/misc/Remap.htm

I was playing with this idea yesterday (after reading this thread) and have come up with a few ways of doing this. First there are a few tools needed - advancecomp-1.15-windows-pentium.zip. This contains a utility called advmng.exe which can extract png frames from mng's. - VirtualDub. This program can read in png frames and write them to an avi. - ImageMagick. Used to overlay an image on each frame. - The attached LogoCreator scripts which demonstrate how to overlay an image to each frame. Okay so this is how I did it... 1. Run Mame with the game you want to grab the frames from. Press Shift-F12 to start recording. It will output an mng file (default snap\[rom]). 2. Run advmng.exe -x 0000.mng (or whatever the mng file is called). This will extract png frames from the mng file. 3. Place them into the Backgrounds folder for LogoCreator. Then run "runme.bat". You should have ImageMagick installed for this to work. It will overlay the "M" logo to each frame. 4. Run VirtualDub and open the first frame saved in the Output folder 5. You will probably need to change a few settings like turn off audio, change the FPS to 30 etc. Save the AVI There is an easier way than this and that would be to use the EmuMovies collection and a program like Adobe Premiere and simply overlay the logo on one of the avi snaps. But the above will work with freeware so I thought it would be worth showing. BTW I couldn't find the psd of the original M series so I left Nologic's one there for the demo (LogoCreator was something I made a while ago). Obviously we need to change it back to yours Adultery or create a new one. LogoCreator.zip

I was thinking it could have been the multi-threaded booting you added recently. Where the startup video would show while GameEx would continue loading in the background. Could it be something like this perhaps?

Cool!

I don't really understand how your launching the CoD4.bat file. You have *.lnk as your ROMFilter, so you are running lnk's, so how is the bat file launched? Also remember that GameEx is waiting for a process to end before you can exit back to it. So if your waiting on XPAdder, then it's not going to exit. So even with the pskill it won't help. You need to launch the executable and wait for that. I'm not sure how a lnk will effect that waiting process. From memory it should be okay. There are also things known as "Advanced Config's" for emulators that can specify the process to wait on. Probably not what your after here though. Maybe if you explain how the bat file is launched and what's inside the lnk's I can help figure out what is going on.

Great work TimmyB I was going to check this out myself but still haven't got my U360's in my cab yet. People will really appreciate this!

As the log says Go into the Advanced Configuration or Setup Wizard and set the correct working path for Emulator 2 or disable it.

Tom I was thinking you could redirect the output of the 7Zip unzipper to some log file so it can be checked for any errors when running it from GameEx. It might help track down this problem.

If you want the two to launch at the same time then just create two batch files and launch them both from another batch file. --- RunMe.bat --- @ECHO OFF start Daemon.bat start XPAdder.bat --- Daemon.bat --- @ECHO OFF C:\Program Files\Daemon Tools\daemon.exe -mount 0, "G:\Games\3d0\gex.nrg" --- XPAdder.bat --- @ECHO OFF C:\XPadder\XPAdder.exe 3d0 /m

I think your looking for something called hard links. Check out this Link Shell Extension.

I can recommend the NVidia PureVideo Decoder but it's not free. If you bought a DVD drive most of the time you will get an application like PowerDVD with it. That also has the MPEG2 codec.

Hey Robert Actually GameEx uses Ghostscript the same way CPWizard does, so we do both use the same underlying technology when it comes to displaying manuals I'm not sure what error your getting because you haven't specified what it is, and posting your CPWizard.log file should help alot. Also what version of Mame32 are you using? Perhaps it's an old version that is not compatible with CPWizard? BTW Thanks for the donation!

The problem is the GameEx video system is using DirectDraw which does not support alpha channel only color keying a single color. Unless Tom rewrites the entire video system for Direct3D alpha channel will never be supported.