rabidpuppy

Sounds good! I will add it to my to-do list. Unfortunately it's a bit cold out in the bungalow where this cabinet is at the moment, so my to-do list is probably going to wait until spring.

Hi. I recently built a 4 player (franken)panel that has a 7" LCD display in it (it's a DoubleSight USB monitor), for my mame upright cabinet. I had also replaced the PC in this cabinet (from Windows XP to Windows 7 x64) and am setting things up fresh. Before I get too far, thought I would ask anyone else with a second display what their experiences have been with the different options out there for a second display e.g. mamehooker, mame magician, cpwizard etc. At this point I have only tried mamehooker and gotten it working with mame. I had a few head scratching moments where it seemed to work and then didn't and then did. I'm happy with just using the second display for static images like marquees, but as well as mame would also like an image displayed when GameEx is running, and also want to use it for other emulators. Looking at the mamehooker tutorials looked even more complex for non-mame applications than it was setting up for mame. Please give me your thoughts on if I should stick with mamehooker or try something else. Cheers!

I just bought this for USD$14.99 as it said 50% off. Deal ends in 16 hours. (I have never actually played any Steam game, nor installed via GameEx. This will be on my to-do list.)

I'm putting together a new PC for an old cabinet, wondering if anyone has put together a single download for this theme?

On the subject of backups, what methods or systems are people using these days? I feel I am I am a bit antiquated, or perhaps unnecessarily complex. So curious how others do it. I use a stack of 3.5" internal drives, and depending on the machine, a external USB 3.0 HDD dock, or internal removable HDD caddy. Then it's the normal "windows backup" for system images, and then I use robocopy for data. robocopy allows you to only copy what has changed, & keep the destination the same as the source. I like having the data in an accessible format (not archived, zipped, or in a proprietary format). I've used it forever and am comfortable with it. Sometimes if I'm lazy I will just do it from my main machine across the network and not physically goto the machine I'm backing up. Then the drives are physically stored in a bungalow type building on my property (it's not attached to my house). Except for the drives for the upright arcade cabinet that's in the bungalow, they stay in the house. This is for about 25TB. The arcade stuff is about 7TB on its own.

I had this happen randomly also (under Windows XP however, on a currently disassembled cab), since I was using an ipac I just used the shift function mapped to an ALT-TAB "macro" which would switch to GameEx.

Killing it bro

My mame videos are actually all working fine in your theme. Both on the home screen and within the mame game select menu.

Okay so here's my home screen, emulator select, and n64 game list: I'm guessing that's how it is supposed to look? If the only way to get a video playing on the home screen next to Emulated Games is to change the custom text, I will live with it as is. Cheers!

Thanks! I cleared the path that was present in BakSnapPath= and that fixed the background snap image problem. Could not find this in GameEx.ini for Daphne so used the setup wizard. However I still didn't have any logo or video for Nintendo N64 in the emulator select screen and it didn't make a difference if it was 64 or N64. I saw emu_1_startpagelogo=[Console] Nintendo 64 and StartPageLogo=[Console] Nintendo 64 in GameEx.ini so I put a [Console] Nintendo 64.png in LOGOS and both image and video came up: My hopefully only remaining question is regarding the front / home / start page. Should there be a video played next to the Emulated Games selection (called Console & Computer in mine), the same as there is for MAME (called Arcade Coin-Op in mine)?

Cheers GameEx.ini In case it's relevant this machine is on Windows XP SP3 (3.5GB RAM). I may be wrong but it looks like the background is flashing really quickly before being replaced. Is this just a background snap setting? My setup wizard doesn't show that being enabled.

Yes and no.. but this may be another issue. I did as advised above, renaming from Nintendo 64 to Nintendo N64 as that's what mine is setup as: So this is my Emulator selection screen: And this is the game list screen after selecting the emulator: So the foreground elements are there but not the background. But now that I've just checked, it is the same for my mame & daphne games (although they correctly have a logo and video preview whereas Nintendo N64 has nothing). Any ideas?

I plan on installing this this weekend, and have a followup question regarding this. What exactly does this entail (the bit I've highlighted above)? e.g. my "mame all games" has been changed in the custom text to "coin-op" (or something like that), and "emulated games" is "console & computer". I don't want to change my custom text, but I do want everything to work correctly. Cheers,

Agreed... switches! I have a bunch of 2600s in my collection but only got one woody before I stopped collecting..

This looks hot. Look forward to it. So many details are spot on (you need to put a floppy disk double-siding notcher in there somewhere!). Also, all the best with your surgery.

Just to show anyone visiting this thread after a search this is what I did: I only made that Description box a little bit bigger, but it fixed the issue. The result: 5 years using GameEx and first time using the theme editor, ha! Cheers!

Yes! I did just need to make the field a little bigger. There is now a full description. It does fade away after a bit but I believe I read elsewhere you cannot edit the timings. So be it. I would also love to get rid of the "sort by" menu at the top, but not sure how to do this. The theme went bonkers when I tried simple mode. Will play around some more. (I'm trying to get it so the user can scroll through the top of the list to get to the bottom, instead of jumping up to that horizontal menu). Thanks again.

Hi, I'm building this little cocktail cabinet and am going for a fairly basic retro layout. "Show game info" is off so a game is launched immediately without showing the sub-menu with flyers, suggested games, mameinfo / history etc. (I have a full size cabinet that is a bit more full on and uses that structure). I'm using the awesome Space Invaders HD theme but wanted to remove the rss scroller and time/date as that was a bit modern and this won't be connected to the internet. Now I could not actually figure out how to delete an object in the theme editor (never used it before) so just made the height and width zero. (shrug?) This has left me with an area perfect for some game info, so I tried the "description" object: This okay but am not a fan of the star ratings (as they are not my ratings). I was hoping for something from mameinfo.dat or history.dat. Any ideas how to do this, or other suggestions if this is not possible?

I was in the process of updating a full size upright cabinet I built in 2009, which had a PC from that year running Windows XP x32. I only got halfway done, having bought new components with Windows 7 x64 and ripped out the old stuff. (I chose Win7 because it's what I use on my main PC, so I'm familiar and happy with it. Have never tried Win 8. So my vote goes to Win7.) I was looking at this "old stuff" and was thinking that it still all works. Given that the cabinet was never connected to the internet, it was also kind of irrelevant that XP support was ending. So now I am using the old stuff to build a new cocktail cabinet. Bugger it, I paid for that retail full price (i.e. non-upgrade) Windows XP licence so I'm going to use it until I have no hardware left that supports it! Sadly this means the main cabinet will be sitting there gutless until I have time.. (also thinking about making 2 mini bartops with the spare timber, buttons & joysticks I have.. it never ends)

Is there a way to point the Download Service Utility at the MESS roms/software location and do all systems?

I just happened to do a fresh gameex install with 0.150 (on a PC for testing before putting in cabinet) and had the carnevil bug, and edited the history.dat to fix (thanks for that). What are the other errors need to look for? Something with neo-geo (please explain)? I was hoping .150 to be my go-to version since last updated my cabinet (in 2009).

Okay thanks great feedback! The only hardware is an iPac4, nothing else too flash. Joysticks and buttons go through that, button lighting comes directly from my PSU.. coin slot slot, speakers, marquee lighting, fans etc not reliant on software. The emulators, well I don't really recall the names of anything as I haven't tinkered with the cabinet in a few years (running emus for zx81, c64, spectrum, amiga, 2600, 5200, st, and the usual nintendo and sega console suspects) What also got me thinking about updating was as well as the SSD I also got two 2TB drives, to update my old "roms only" mame to a full 0.148 roms and chds (as well as expanding my psx and gamecube collection by x-hundred GB). So I guess I'm already halfway through updating the hardware anyway, I will just go ahead and go the win7 route. I have spare joysticks and buttons so I will keep my existing hardware to perhaps construct a mini-cab or something, running the existing build from 2009.

Background I built an arcade cabinet back in 2009, using GameEx as the front end, running mame and quite a few other emulators (both computer and console. I grew up using a ZX81, Sinclair Spectrum etc). Running Windows XP 32bit. I recently moved house and in the house, the CPU heatsink got damaged. I pulled most of the guts out because I didn't know at first what the problem was, fixed it, and figured while I was there would get a cheap 60GB SSD for the boot drive. It previously had a 160GB boot drive (only about 20GB used), and a few other drives for my roms and emulators. So eventually I get XP re-installed on the SSD (I had no idea it would involved me rooting around for a floppy drive to put the motherboards sata drivers on for AHCI, let alone actually finding a usable floppy disk to install them on because the motherboard didn't come with one). Question Even though it actually boots up real nice and runs quick, that whole process got me thinking. Right now I'm looking at the long road of re-installing and setting everything up, which I perfectly happy doing, but should I just go and update to Windows 7? I haven't kept up to date in the last 4 years so no idea what the status of any emulators are.. fine under 7 or any that don't run under it? What about GameEx? Thanks for any input from anyone that has either gone to 7 from XP (for their arcade cabinet I mean, my normal PC is running Windows 7 64 on a SSD), or looked into it and decided against. Cheers!

It is, I've tried this but it doesn't appear to work. Either using the .ico files or my own .png logo, in any of the icons, custom list or logos folders.. no combination seems to work. No biggie, but would be nice after scrolling past the in-built lists (not yet played, golden era etc) that do have specified logos to have the logos continue when hitting the custom lists.

I didn't so much strip as re-arrange.. 3+ player games went into either 2 player alt or 2 player sim. So Gauntlet still there baby (I assume)! Perhaps I should rename those cats to just "multiplayer alternative" and "multiplayer simultaneous". I'm interesting to see how other people do this, since this is my first go. Also - is it possible to put logos next to the categories generated from these files, in the same way "golden.png" etc are assigned to the in-built GameEx categories on the same page?