Greego

Well, that's it. I got Dragon's Lair 1 and 2 well as Space Ace running through GameEx now. I got it all done just as my company was ringing the doorbell on their arrival. With the tweaked graphics, I am now officially done with my setup. Of course, there are always small things to do such as getting bezels around some games that don't have them but I still consider the setup 100% set up since all of the other stuff will be icing on the cake. I have GameEx and Mame essentially doing what I want them to do at this point and how I envisioned it at the start of my build. I really didn't have high hopes for getting Dragon's Lair running so I almost fell from my stool when I clicked it inside of GameEx and it started right up. My friends and family were really impressed by it all.

Well, that did it, my friend. It looks really good after adjusting the prescale settings in the ini. Looks a lot more authentic now. Thanks. This is great since I have some company that is about to come over to play games on my new setup and I also have some company coming over tomorrow so this is right on time...

So when I went into the video options in Mame, I noticed an option for the HLSL. It was turned off. Since you had showed me the video above, I decided to just turn it on to see what happens. And it did smooth out the lines and make the graphics look more sharp but, unfortunately, I did not think I like the trade-off... When I turned on the HLSL, although it became less pixelated, the graphics appeared less colorful and bright. Also, I noticed that the picture overall appeared more grainy but not necessarily in a bad way but I just preferred the very clean looking colorful graphics that came with the pixelated look so I think I am just going to stick with "pixel perfect" for now. I may tweak around with stuff using the video one weekend in the near future though.

Thanks, Thurman. I guess if the graphics are as really good as a gets or can only become marginally better, I won't bother tinkering with it any more. I am really noy bothered by the level of pixelation bevause it is only prominent in more graphically detailed games like Street Fighter but I am stilll able to enjoy them. I just wanted to get them as close to the original versions as possible. I watched that video. I may try dabbing around with that to see what it can do. Thanks again.

Well, I had to pretty much re-install GameEx again. I find it is necessary sometimes (although a major pain) when I run into a hiccup because there seems to be no great way to troubleshoot all of these moving parts when something goes wrong and lets face it, this isn't the busiest forum on the internet. Although somewhat of a pain, just starting from the top seems to be the path of least resistance sometimes when I ran into trouble. Once, I re-installed GameEx, I focused on the Input Settings screen and made sure the Trackball support was on but what I noticed was that some of the things that seem to have had "yes" on as a default answer after my last re-install, automatically had "No" selected as default. I am not sure exactly what did it but I just worked through that Input Settings section as you two suggested and I came out on top somehow. I think it was making some things "No" when they said "Yes." Basically, when she says "yes" she really means "no..." I think I am like 98% there now. I can't believe it after all of this time. Check out my new, beautiful GameEx/Mame arcade cabinet below. I put more work into it than actually raising my own kid and my career. All I need to do is add Dragon's Lair and tweak the resolutions and I am done completely. Keep in mind that all I knew before starting this project was console gaming and I had never even built a PC before. I built the PC, the cabinet with no help, added the peripherals, hunted down the games, etc. It has a lightgun, spinner, and steering wheel that can be placed on the spinner and pedals for driving and reloading in Time Crisis. It was about two months of mind-numbing and mentally abusive work. It meant a lot to me though since I love gaming but got too busy with my career to continue console gaming so it's nice to be able to get a short game of Centipede or Arkanoid in at the end of a long day without having to commit to a 30 minute stage of some single-player console game. Also, since I grew up so poor, I could only afford to watch other kids play these games in the arcade when I was growing up so this cabinet set up is a symbol of how hard I have worked. BTW, what do you mean by "pixel perfect?" Are you saying that my graphics may be as good as it gets? My display is actually a flat screen TV. I wish I would have shopped around a bit for a actual monitor but I was spending so much time learning about all of this stuff that I didn't want to agonize over a monitor selection.

Thanks, guys. 'precitate it... Hey, before any one of you mark this as resolved, is there a way I can sharpen up the resolution of Mame through Gameex? I am not sure how to do it through Mame. I have Mame64 and the information online seems to not coincide with the menus in Mame63. In GameEx display settings in the Set Up wizard, I selected "Gameex won't change resolution" which, if I understand correctly, means GameEx will default to my display's Native resolution which is 1920 X 1080. I am running a Nvidia GeForce 750 ti graphics card as well. I don't know, I recall these games looking much sharper in the arcade 30 years ago. I figure with the technology I am working with now, the graphics should look much sharper. It is quite pixelated. I can still enjoy them but, the online videos I have seen show much sharper graphics. The graphics only look pixelated for my Mame games which I run through the GameEx Aracade Edition. My Nintendo and N64 games in the GamEx standard edition look fine.

My Setup Wizard looks a bit different than the one displayed in the link. I have the Setup Wizard 3.0.0. by default, under Gamepad Device to use under the Input Settings section, "-use all attached devices-" is selected. Matter-of-fact, everything in the section has "yes" selected. I am pretty sure it is something very simple such as you suggested, most likely since I wasn't having these issues the first time I set it up. Thanks.

Just to be on the safe side, I decided to also include my Mame configuration settings.

When I initially setup GameEx a couple of weeks or so ago, I set up my lightgun and trackball without much difficulty. However, I had to completely re-install Windows followed by a re-installation of GameEx on my pc last week due to an error message that wouldn't allow me to boot up GameEx any longer. In any event, my non-trackball and non-lightgun games play just fine but every since the re-install, I cannot register or set up my trackball/lightgun through GameEx. I can set up both lightgun and trackball in Mame from the desktop. however, when I boot up GameEx, the changes I made in Mame from the desktop do not transfer into GameEx. When I try to set them up in Gameex, using the Mame menu (by pressing Tab and going to General Input or Input for This Maxchine), my track ball and lightgun movements are not even registered. Strangely, if I highlight Trackball X or Y axis and move the trackball accordingly, another, lighter highlight line appears below the one used to set up the trackball or lightgun and it will move up and down the menu list when I roll the trackball but it does not get registered as an input for setting up the X or y axis movement for the lightgun or trackball. In other words, when I highlight Trackball X, press enter on the keyboard and then rotate the trackball to the right in order to set up the X axis for the trackball, another, lighter highlight line may appear instead and that line may simply move up and down the list of items in the menu instead of being registered as the X axis movement for the trackball. My ini file is listed below and I have set up the batch file similar to how I did it when I initially set up GameEx. Matter-of-fact, I have even tried copying and pasting my old Mame configuration file from my initial Mame/GameEx setup (the one in which the lightgun and trackball easily registered and worked inside of GameEx) but even that did not work. Again, below is my ini file. Can someone help me?

Well, let me ask you this: In your experience here, which one has been easier to setup for players?

Okay, I just looked this up, it is from the same team that brought us GameEx it seems...

I'm listening....more of a benefit?

I decided to just start building a pincab altogether separate from my main GameEx arcade cabinet. I have an old PC running Windows 8 that I wasn't using so thought this would be great to set up Visual Pinball (VP) on. Before I get building the cabinet, I want to set up VP on the PC first. I have tried the standard Gameex setup which is not working. Can some of you guys send me your config for your VP set up? The more, the merrier...

Sweet. Thanks!

As stated in another closed thread, after re-installing Windows and GameEx, I took my PC offline that runs Gameex in order to avoid any updates form Windows, Gameex, etc,. However, every time I load up Gameex, it notifies me that an update is available and it asks me if I would like to perform the update. Well, I am satisfied with my current setup and won't be updating anything on that PC for as long as I can help it. I am currently running GameEx 14.70. I assume that when I re-installed GameEx, somehow, the information regarding a new update and the update itself (GameEx 14.75 update, I'm sure) was embedded in the setup. I also assume that the update is actually hiding in the bushes of my hard drive waiting to be activated so it may not matter that machine is offline. So now I guess this message plans to tap me on the shoulder every time I boot up GameEx for the next 10 years. I have other plans...please tell me how I can disable this update message. There have been a few times that I hit 'Enter' by mistake (Or it did itself) and the update started proceeding and I had to hurry and hit the power switch on my power strip to shut down everything in order to avoid the update.

Hi Draco, You can mark this one as "resolved." I did a complete Windows 10 uninstall on machine today then re-installed it. When I re-installed it, I left Windows Update disabled completely. I don't want it to screw up anything in the future. Afterward, I re-installed Gameex Arcade Edition and then Gameex standard editions (14.71?) and 14.70 respectively. I avoided any updated software although Gameex tried to sneak in one occasionally while I was setting stuff up (I may have hit a key or two by error). I finally got everything running back beautifully with no error messages. So there was one final thing to do...disable the internet from my machine. I do not want my gaming rig speaking to the outside world ever again. It will be self-contained from here on out. I was really tempted to get a couple of visual pinball tables back running on it but it not worth the risk at this point. I am a bit disappointed because wanting a pinball machine in my man-cave is what started all of this and now, after all of the energy I put into this setup, I don't even want to risk trying to put even one pinball table back on the rig, BTW, I did the Cumalative Update prior to re-installing Windows and it did not fix my issue. My fingers were crossed because I didn't want to spend my day getting the rig back up and running but it is what it is at this point.

I found out what goes in those plugin folders. You can download them from the setup wizard. I tried a couple of them and my cabinet started talking to me and taunting me. After I was told to "come and get some." I started imagining me taking nap in my mancave and waking up with my arcade cabinet standing over me with a butcher knife so I uninstalled the plugins. I guess watching Terminator Genysis yesterday may have had something to do with it...

Hey RedDog, I uninstalled and deleted everything in the Gameex 14.75 folder and reinstalled 14.70. Gameex now launches and I can initially launch a game but now I get plugins errors and Direct3D errors with failed to initialize my HAL device and I am instructed to make sure I have a properly configured 3D graphics card compatible with Direct3D 6.0. Although I used to not receive these errors, at least I am in now. I am sure I can eventually fix the errors after some searching around. I updated my Windows 10. Didn't feel comfortable with it but I do know one thing, once I get this baby back up and running, Windows is going into airplane mode forever and nothing will be updated again. Many thanks, bro. I greatly appreciate your time and effort into this. Addendum: I just ran my Gameex Arcade edition for my mame setup and it also had some video issues. The preview movies would not show and the colors and fonts on the main page was way off. I checked my plugin folders for both the Standard and Arcade version and they both are empty. What should be in those folders? I believe this may be the key to the video issues but I am not sure how those folders both became empty.

I was trying to make some sort of connection with all of this. I can't help but to wonder if it has something to do with that update. After RedDog fixed my initial problems, I had about a week video game bliss. Felt like I had just given birth to healthy twin boys then I do the update and Not to long after, I can't get it to even run. It may be coincidence but I do know one thing, if I ever get it back running, I will disconnect my arcade setup from internet altogether. If it ain't broke, I wont fix it.

I wonder if this is somehow related to my issue as well which I reported in another thread. I get an error that states something about a path error but Gameex won't even launch for me. I am thinking it is somehow related to the Setup Wizard which is the only place that I know of that deals with reporting or inputting of paths.

Can someone take a peek at my ini file and give me some suggestions? Thanks.

Hey, if you got 5,000 games, that would make about 500 of them being described right. That's too many games to give up on. Haha,

I guess one day I will learn to be able to look through ini files and know what I'm looking at hanging out here on the forums for a while. Otherwise, it all may as well be French to me but I am picking up bits and pieces along the way. I am in a similar boat. I just started my vacation and all I could see myself doing was slipping back into my college days and really working out my Gameex library on my new cabinet. I updated to the new version involuntarily (it just started updating when I booted up Gameex). At first I panicked because I immediately thought of the pain I went through as a noob to build the cabinet, install all the parts, build the PC and setup Maximus Arcade then Gameex since Maximus Arcade wasn't working out. It was my first time doing any of this kind of stuff. So when my well-working Gameex started updating, my first thought was to stop it somehow but I was afraid that stopping it may corrupt something so I let it proceed. Things seem to operate okay immediately afterward but now I get "Sorry. An Error was encountered" and I get some sort of log list below this. Thankfully, my Gameex Arcade Edition still boots up properly but I am afraid to even use it because I am concerned that it may start changing on me somehow like the Standard version did so I will wait until that's fixed. Anyway, it sounds like your errors began before the update which is even more peculiar. Did you make any other changes to your PC recently? Maybe try a system restore if you did. Hopefully, you have better luck than me.

Sorry, I forgot to attach the ini file. I will also paste it... GameEx.ini

I found the GameEx.UpgradeBackup in the Config folder as you stated. I made a copy of it and renamed it GameEx.ini but I got the same error message. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Gameex last night but that didn't help either. Any other ideas would be tremendously appreciated.