skidrash

So I run a 4200 in my MCE2005 box with drivers 9371 right now, and GameEx is terribly slow. I've been tweaking for a while now trying to speed it up, and I guess this must be the reason, huh? So I'm wondering, will the 6697 or 6693 drivers work with MCE2005? Yeah, I know they will install and GameEx will work, but will MCE load, as it requires special MCE confirmed drivers? (yeah I could just try it, but I'm sure anyone who has a white-box MCE will understand my reluctance to mess with currently "working" drivers) I looked on Nvidia's site, and all I can find is their driver archive for XP/2000, and not for MCE. Does anyone know if they are the same thing? If so, what version did the drivers start registering the "compatible with MCE"? For that matter, is there any way to make use of newer drivers at decent speed? From what I can tell, Nvidia added some nice MCE features after ver 7779... Thank a lot! OK, I found 6677 for mce... So did I answer my own question? I don't know... I'll try these. tx!

I figured it out... I'm an idiot. When you set up the controllers, there is a drop-down that you can select a memory pack or rumble pack... I had it on rumble instead of memory. Changing that fixed it. Although it makes me wonder, is there no way to have the rumble function along with the memory, at the same time? I guess I'll have to check out the project64 forums... Thanks for the reply! ~skidrash

I know this is more of a project64 question, but I figured there were probably people here that may have had the same problem... When I load Castlevania64 in Project64 via gameex, the game says "Controller1 not connected. Please turn the power off and attach Controller into Socket 1." Any suggestions?

I am running v5.86. I checked the ini file and there is only one instance of MediaCenterMode and it is set to 2. I checked the theme.ini for the theme I'm using and there was the culprit. mediacentermode=0 I changed it to 2 (because I didn't know if it was safe to just remove it), and now its working right. MCE shutsdown and comes back just as it should. I did notice that when I leave GameEx I see the desktop for a second or two before MCE starts. Its only from GameEx to MCE. From MCE to GameEx the screen just blanks, and GameEx loads. Is there an option I can turn on that blanks the screen when I leave GameEx, just until MCE loads? Thanks for you help Tom, and all your hard work! ~skidrash

I can't seem to get GameEx to reliably close Windows Media Center when I load it, nor does it reliably restart it when I exit GameEx. It will close MCE sometimes, but most of the times is just minimizes it (and I don't have enough processing power to run both at the same time). When I exit GameEx, if MCE was closed, it will sometimes restart it, but not all the times. If it just minimized MCE, it won't bring MCE back to focus. I have messed around with the settings in Tweaks/Performance for stoping and restarting MCE, and they don't seem to make much of a difference. I have upgraded quite a few times now... Could this be a problem with how my config file has been upgraded over the previous version? (I really don't want to rebuild the ini file, it took me a LOOOONG time) Any suggestions would be great. Thanks! ~skidrash

Alright I tried to get the whole shell thing working and finally just gave up. I figure, when I log in as administrator I can always just kill the media center shell and run explorer via taskmanager. So, now I have a new question.... When I the Windows Media Center executable as my shell and reboot, everything comes up as expected, except the media center doesn't have focus. It looks like it does, but if you press a button on the keyboard nothing happens. You have to like the mouse on screen (to give the media center app focus) before the keyboard inputs work. So why isn't the media center "shell" gaining focus automatically on bootup? Any suggestions? ~skidrash

First off, I'm not sure if this is the right board to post in, so I'm sorry if it's not... I have my Media Center set up to allow concurrent connections, and I load GameEx as a plugin for my emulator frontend. I would like to use Instant Sheller to load my Media Center (which I can do just fine) when I log in as one user, but I want explorer.exe to be my shell when I log in as a different user. This would really help facilitate my updates, etc. when using remote desktop. I've tried Instant Sheller under these pretenses, but I end up loading MCE as my shell regardless of who I log in as, either directly or through Remote Desktop. Any suggestions? ~skidrash

Sorry about the late reply. I'm using a 16mb PCI, ATI Rage 128 All-in-Wonder card (not the pro version). It seems to be running great now. As I recall, some of the early cards that had hardware assisted DVD playback had a problem with running the DVD's in 32bit color. I don't know if that was a driver, software, or hardware problem, but I think thats what we ran into.

Alright, so messing with that some more, I found two factors that were keeping my DVDs from playing. First off, it apparently does not want to run my DVDs in 32bit color. Which is really strange because WMP and Media Portal were able too, but for some reason it just wouldn't do it in GameEx. So instead of changing the option in GameEx, I just changed my desktop color depth too 16bit. The other thing was FFDShow. For whatever reason, if I have FFDShow enabled for my Videos or my DVD, they just won't play. The DVD would kick right back out, and the video would play the sound but no video. So I changed all the "use FFDShow" settings too 'No'. The other settings you mentioned I just put back too the defaults and it is working great now: Display- Alpha Blend Videos: Yes Use 16 Bit Colour: No MultiMedia/HTPC- Video Use FFDSHOW: No DVR-MS Use FFDSHOW: No DVD Use FFDSHOW: No And 16bit color desktop.

Hey, that worked for me! I set: Display- Alpha Blend Videos: No Use 16 Bit Colour: Yes MultiMedia/HTPC- Video Use FFDSHOW: No DVR-MS Use FFDSHOW: No DVD Use FFDSHOW: No I haven't had any time at all the mess with it, but I saw your post and decided to give it a try. The DVD loaded and started playing perfectly. Unfortunately I didn't have time to check anything else (for example, you mentioned the videos looking poorly). When I have some time today or tomorrow I'll experiment a little more with these settings and let you know how I make out.

It seems to me that the 360 simply acts as a media extender for Media center... With that in mind, I think it does something like a remote desktop or terminal service to the Media Center, so that you see the output on the xbox. I'm just speculating here, but if thats true, than all of your stuff should run on the Media Center and be displayed on the xbox, including emulators and GameEx. I'm sure its not that simple, because I don't think GameEx likes being run on the fake video card driver that remote desktop uses. But for that matter Windows Media Center doesn't either. If the 360 just acts as an extender, I believe we'll probably see a lot more things move to the 360 faster than you might think.

Dual P3 866's 768mb ram ATI AIW Rage128 16mb PCI Runs fine, even with 3d animations turned on. You said you are using i815 video? Might be the problem (though I'm not terribly familiar with the i815). Especailly if it shares video ram with the system. I'd try a full video card. My Rage128 is about as cheap as you can go, and like I said, it works fine for me. By the way, I think your 933 is fine. I don't think GameEx is multithreaded (though i haven't checked... Tom?), so technically I'm running it on one 866.

I still have not fixed it. I originally had a codec pack installed, so I uninstalled it and installed the stand-alone ffdshow and the nVidia DVD decoder. I also upgraded too the latest GameEx just too make sure. Still no luck. I can play videos from the videos menu, and I can play DVDs on WMP, but not in GameEx.

So after messing with some of the FDshow settings, I was able to get the DVD player to spin the disc up, and I could very faint hear the audio coming out of my left speaker, but thats it. No video, and obviously the sound was way too low. Now it's stopped doing that much. Now when I hit enter on "play DVD" the screen goes black, waits a few seconds, I hear the gameex "chime" and it goes back to the multimedia screen. Any ideas at all? I'm at a loss.

I had the exact same problem with my gens emulator(I think it was gens...?). Anyways, I don't know why, but when I changed the emulator from 24bit color too 16bit color, it fixed it. My suggestion is to try to match you desktop or gameex color depth.(or just try different depths and see if any work for you)

Oh awsome! Thats good to know. Maybe I can delay buying a new card a little bit longer than. So now that I know that it does have hardware, does anyone know why I can't see anything? It acts a lot like emulators do when you set the "show desktop" option incorrectly. Although now that I think about it, the DVD rom drive didn't spin up or anything either.

Yes, it plays in WMP just fine. Version 10.0 And it plays surprisingly well for software decoding.(I'm assuming software decoding, because I don't think the Rage128 chip had any hardware assist, but I could be wrong?)

I'm sure someone else has already asked this, so I'm sorry if I'm repeating a thread, but the forum won't let me search for srings less than 4 characters (ie. DVD). So basically I can't seem to play DVD's. When I click "play DVD," all I get a black screen. It stays that way until I hit 'backspace', at which time it goes back to GameEx. I'm using 5.16, and I've gone through the Configuration and set it too my Nvidia codec. (I've also tried some of the free and GPL'd dvd codec, with the same results). I don't know if it matters, but my pertinent hardware consists of dual 866mhz P3's, and a ATI All-in-wonder Rage128 card(for TV out). Now I know this card doesn't have hardware DVD, but I just want to get software DVD decoding going, just so I can test drive GameEx's DVD capabilities. Any suggestions?