cracksloth

@vsilvalopes: thanks but keep in mind this is just a mockup that seems currently impossible. skinning is pretty limited in gameex (although i would love to be proven wrong) and some choices made early on regarding the menu system seem weird to me (such as scrolling through lables and each line of a description as if it were a nonfunctional item, requiring the display of all navigational elements at all times, lack of true layering, blah blah). anyway, it's been awhile since i tried skinning gameex and i"m sure there have been quite a few enhancements since then. i just remember trying to create a skin and it being so inexplicably buggy that i gave up. i really think gameex would benefit from catering to a few more artists. as it stands, it is just a hard thing to skin if you love design. @KRC: yeah, honestly i've been playing around with other options like GameBrowser and XBMC plugins. it's all a give and take in terms of features but having just revisited gameex, i must admit that i don't even understand how mame works in the settings with the interplay of advance mame, model 2, zinc, daphne, etc - is it one combined list of games, are you setting up multiple, how do you arrange your roms accordingly... it just isn't intuitive and i'm not exactly new to this. i think i'm out on doing anything but keep an eye on vsilvalopes - i think he's your one.

i also made some mockups based off vsilvalopes' excellent design just to demonstrate some ideas for the future in case anyone is interested. this isn't currently possible, but maybe one day! basically, this hides the option menu when viewing the list until the user activates it by pressing to the left. the art has rounded corners and a shadow glow. the limits of the list fade away giving a subtle clean indicator that there is more content above and below. when a game is selected, each line of the menu is some sort of real item (not a label, blank line, or descriptive text). just some food for thought!

just a bump because i too have longed for a simple and aesthetic theme for gameex. i'm always surprised at how gaga every gets about the visuals in hyperspin - my preference is quiet functional simplicity. i actually tried to make my own simple skin once and totally gave up. i really hope the skinning engine becomes more powerful and you succeed because i for one will definitely use it!

thanks for the responses! well, it turned out that the new loaders just weren't working for me. i can enter in custom commandlines and everything works properly. nologic, i can provide my settings if it would be helpful in fixing the loaders (just let me know what all to include). -cs

it's been awhile since i created a new install of gameex but i decided to turn a vista machine into a dedicated gaming rig. unfortunately, after installing and using the wizard to download/install my emulators, i found that mame would work just fine *but* nestopia and zsnes would load the rom but nothing could be seen (everything was blacked out). nestopia and zsnes are the only non-mame emulators i have loaded atm. it appears as if they simply can't reach on-top status. i can tell that they are loaded just fine by the audio and when i hover the mouse over the taskbar, i can see the game running in the popup thumbnail. i'm sure i'm just missing something stupid but i would really appreciate some help. i have tried every setting that i thought could effect it. i am using the new loaders and presets made by nologic. also, here are a few observations i had while installing: 1) i have noticed this for awhile so i'm surprised no one has noticed but it seems that when you use the wizard to download zinc, it is extracted to "c:\emulators" rather than "c:\emulators\zinc". the same is true for model2. 2) why isn't there an option to download MAME or MAMEUI from the emulator list? i only see advancemame. 3) when adding emulators using nologic's presets, it would be nice if the default paths referred to "c:\emulators" since that is where the installer has already extracted the install files. none of these are huge issues by any means but they might help out new users that are unfamiliar with gameex. just an idea -cs

i am relatively new to using the gameex jukebox (i use another frontend primarily) but i'm having a party and i wanted gameex to be the only interface people had to interact with. although gameex wasn't designed for a divided/grouped collection of music, it seems like it would be good for throwing in a bunch of party music for playing randomly. in experimenting with the gameex jukebox, i made a few observations and was wondering if anyone else can reproduce this: - when exiting the music visualization, gameex (latest version) will return to the playlist location that was playing when the visualization started. for party-goers, this means the playlist will seem to start repeating itself anytime someone exits visualization mode. - when viewing "all music" i can select "clear & queue all". when i do this, only 40 files are loaded into the playlist. is it possible that gameex quits after encountering a corrupt file? - another problem i've encountered is when gameex loads a video, it seems to be playing the video twice. the video will play "normally" but i can hear 2 simultaneous audio tracks (one playing slightly behind the other). i realize that a fresh install of gameex or windows might fix that last problem but i do not want to lose all of my favorites. does anyone know how to back them up? thanks for all the help and sorry for the problems! -crack

i read in the changelog that these new updates are in place. does anyone know how to backup and restore favorites?

my vote: support for navigating folder structure in the jukebox: the user could choose to navigate music by "folder" (a sidebar button below genre and artist). gameex would then navigate music similar to the current video module. i am forced to use a different htpc frontend for music management so i would like to move over to gameex completely.

i would like to do a *fresh* install of gameex (due to some problems i've encountered). do i understand correctly that there is currently no way to just backup gameex favorites? this might be a nice tool to add to the gameex distribution for users like me or users who want to transfer favorites to another system (that already have their own unique configs). this could be accomplished not only for mame but for other emulators as well. users could backup the favorites for a specific emulator to a *.fav file and then import that file for an installed emulator on a target machine. the only possible conflict is that the target machine may not have those particular roms installed but i'm sure this conflict can be managed somehow. it would also allow users to trade lists of their favorite games. this is something a few friends of mine would be interested in.

i just wanted to confirm that the new changes work beautifully. thanks for all the hard work!

@headkaze your test version works fine (at selecting a rom) however the complete version posted above does not work (for me) and the version that comes with the latest gameex does not work (for me). the model2 emulator will start but then immediately exit. i even tried nologic's but had similar problems. it did not select the correct rom and it does not enter fullscreen.

"quicktime alternative" supposedly allows directshow players to play quicktime media. however, i'm not sure if it would be as simple as forcing gameex to attempt to play the file (currently gameex doesn't recognize it as a video filetype so i don't know if there is a good way to test this). the same applies to the "real alternative" codec pack. however, media player classic can properly utilize both the real and quicktime alternative packs without problem. until some work is done on the gameex video component, i'm afraid you'll have to setup an "emulator" to launch these file formats using media player classic (or other player). there is a description on how to do this in the pinned topic "User Submitted Configs and Databases (Uploads)". not the most elegant solution but it is all we have for now.

you cannot unilaterally say that: people are different and so are their needs. my needs would be better filled using a folder based approach. it is not that i don't understand how tags work or how to manipulate them. but according to my needs they are not only a redundancy but they are also extra work (not only for me but for others in my situation). like i said, i have my music organized by categories and subcategories which is something that tags do not allow (using custom genres is not enough). folder organization also has the benefit of speed and simplicity (a major benefit for some users). in short, i realize that those like me usually cannot use gameex and are not found in this forum but please remember that not all sane people restrict themselves to tags exclusively. there are valid reasons for using a heirarchy and, unfortuantely, tags do not store heirarchal information. for the record, my tags (to my knowledge) are in perfect order. so my feature request is not designed out of laziness. rather, i find heirarchies to be a more natural and specific way to organize my music.

i totally agree. the lack of mp3 folder navigation is my most missed feature since switching to gameex. i find organizing my mp3s using a file manager much easier than using a tag tool (particularly organizing by my own unique genre system). i would much rather have a speedy folder view that parses filenames/folders rather than tags. with folders, you always know which files have been sorted. with mp3 tags, you may never know that a file has been mistagged because the song just doesn't show up during relevant searches/filters. i know it has been requested before (even once by me... and i usually remain forum silent). users that are accustomed to the way other frontends manage mp3s may find this to be a real stumbling block. obviously, gameex makes up for this in other ways but even today i am still annoyed when i have to batch tag new mp3s when this was never required of me before.

i would be very interested. would you consider making the screenshots available for download? if you don't have a host, perhaps you could use: http://www.sendthisfile.com/ or something similar?

it is a program that accepts virtually any type of input (keyboard, remote control, gamepad, etc.) and convert it into a useful action like navigating gameex. got it working, unfortunately, mame requires direct input and so my remote will not control mame (just gameex). has anyone else had any luck getting mame to accept girder input? i've seen rumors of a directinput plugin but have not seen it for download.

finally figured out the problem. any future girder users out there, just make sure that "Enable Keyboard DirectInput" is set to "no" in the config. anyway, just figured i'd share the solution in case some future poster decides to search first!

has anyone had any luck using girder with gameex? for some reason, girder does not seem to be properly sending the button presses. i suspect it has something to do with the target window settings but it doesn't even work when simply sending keystrokes to the foreground task. very weird. has anyone used girder successfully with gameex?

goodmerge supports 7z, rar, ace, and zip (but the most compression comes from using 7z). you are right, whenever making solid archives, you will get the best compression when archiving closely related the files (with similar data structure). that is why this tool is so beneficial from a compression point of view. rar and ace support solid archives i think but they have smaller dictionaries hence the compression is not as great. although it would take a small amount of additional load time, i think the organization and compression far outweigh any negatives (my personal opinion). i also realize that not many emulators support 7z which is why it has so far only been supported by frontends. if gamex were to support goodmerge, it would be the first htpc emulator frontend to do so. that is why i am pleading like a newb for support (there are no other options available). if tom decides not to do let gameex extract roms from 7z files, perhaps there is a convoluted workaround which would require some scripting. i noticed in the emulator settings that gameex supports running a command both before and after launching the rom. here is my thought: create a script that would mimic the folder hiearchy of the *.7z files with 0 byte files. there are many ways to do this. the most elegant would be a script that uses the commandline 7z tool to "list" the files and then use that output to create the structure. unfortunately, i am not gifted in any kind of code-ability. the second and less cool way would be to extract the entire contents and find a way to automatically replace each of the extracted roms with a 0 byte file of the same name. ultimately, using the example 7z above: gamename.7z dumpname.rom dumpname2.rom dumpname_the_best_one.rom would create a disk structure of: gamename [FOLDER] dumpname.rom [FILE] dumpname2.rom [FILE] dumpname_the_best_one.rom [FILE] then you would configure the gameex "launch before" to replace the fake romfile with the real one by extracting it with a commandline 7z utility. the "launch after" command would replace the rom with a 0 byte file by copying a template 0 byte file to the original location replacing the working rom (by naming it appropriately). make sense? that being said, i am not capable of writing the script that would mimic the folder structure of the 7z archives. maybe someone else is interested? but i guess no one who uses goodmerge would be using gameex... i also would need a way to extract just the parent folder from the the [ROMPATH] supplied by gameex. does anyone else want to brainstorm with me? does anyone know of come commandline tools that may make this process easier? i am completely untalented. -cracksloth

would it be possible to support GoodMerge ROMsets in a future version (or perhaps someone already knows of a way to get this to work)? for those who don't know it is basically just an automated organization of roms where clones and different dumps of the same game are combined in a single archive (7z, zip, etc). this not only provides good organization, but it also saves *a lot* of space. i have seen other frontends that have added support for GoodMerge but of course they suck in comparison to gameex. to clarify, all roms of a given game are contained within a single archive: gamename.7z dumpname.rom dumpname2.rom dumpname_the_best_one.rom i think the easiest method would be to treat gamename.7z as a folder if it contains more than one rom. is this possible somehow? more info can be found here: http://goodmerge.sourceforge.net/About.php thanks for the great frontend, tom! i have been drooling over gameex for awhile and finally installed it yesterday! -cracksloth