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I looked through again and I'm really not seeing that. Could you give step-by-step directions to it? :/ Sorry.

I've looked through the Config program and I can't seem to find this, so is there any way to map the Exit Game function to something other than Escape? As a lot of emulators use escape to go to their settings screens, for mapping controls and the like. This is for non-MAME emulators, obviously.

Or check/post the log in log.txt to see if there's any mention of the game not launching correctly.

My ideas, after playing around a little: MAME parent/clone display: I've brought this one up before, but having parent/clone display ala the merged sets, and being able to specify which country you want as the primary... might take some work, to see what we'd need to accomplish for that, based on naming formats. Screensaver options: Something I've been a little confused about is, will the screensaver pull a random version of the game, or only pull the first one from the list(/parent for MAME)? I'd like the option to specify which (versions of) games are included in the screensaver... This would also add the benefit of being able to exclude games that really don't have an attract mode, like some of the really old cheap arcade games, or PC games and things that don't have it. Advanced game database support: I'm not sure what the current status on the game databases is--if they're being worked or not. I'd love to be able to edit my own databases to include things like romhacks, as well change some of the more goofier game descriptions. New game sorting options: For merged sets, I'd like to be able to choose what order the games sort in, based on country. I'd also love to be able to see games chronologically based on series--like, have an option under Super Mario World to view all Mario games on past systems... this could probably be linked into the database somehow, if support were added. Something with Romhacks: Not sure about this one, really, but I tend to want to have romhacks be shown as their own game, rather than included as an "alternate" under their main game. But I'd like the romhack, when you select it, to be able to link back to the main game, in a (smaller but similar) style to the above. Would need information from the database, again. Multiple emulator save games: This one might be relatively easy to implement, but is pretty low on my personal want list, but. Have the ability to have multiple saves/SRAMs for a game. Would be useful for games that only have one save slot. Could easily be done by letting you name a Save file (ie, "Bob"), and then renaming the rom to "Romname.Bob.sfc", and that will the sram save will correspond to that particular one. When you're done playing a game, GameEx can delete the temporary rom, but the save will still be there in the emulator's save folder. And sorry if any of these have been requested before...

Quite possibly! I was looking through other topics and saw information on map files and using parent/clone dats. Any easy guide on what I would need to do to get that all set up? Sorry for all the dumb questions... :S EDIT: Currently playing with RomCenter and using it to merge my roms, so we'll see what the results are...

Okay, so I just registered and got this setup for the other emulators. But it doesn't seem to be working right. A few games that all have the same name (like Super Mario World) are showing up right, but games with different names (Super Mario World - Yossy's Island VS Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island) aren't being combined. Another set I have is merged in 7zip format, and for that one, it's only reading the main name, not looking at the roms in the 7zip archive. I'm positive I have 7zip support on. But it just reads it as the title of the 7zip archive, doesn't load up any information from the game's database, and doesn't let me choose which ROM to run.

That did it. Thank you!

I originally had turned on "Remove Text in Brackets", but have since turned it off. However, when I access the game list, it's still showing it without brackets. Is there something I'm missing? Do I need to go somewhere to refresh the list?

Hmm... unless I'm missing something/chose the wrong option, the only one I can see is "Remove Duplicates", which... just flat out removes the duplicates. I want to merge everything under one item, so I can choose which version of the game to play. Is that at all possible?

Any handy guide I can read on how those work?

I swear I read this somewhere, but I'm not sure if it was just a feature request or if it's actually in there--if it is, I can't find it. So what I want to know is, is there a way to "group" the same games? What I mean is, for MAME, have "Play Game" lead to the US/main ROM, while have an option for "Other Version" that shows all the other country/versions of game. Would be nice to have it for other emulators to do this as well, but it would probably require one to manually link the ROMs together... which would be doable. So it is possible? Is it a potential feature request? Outside of that, when messing around with the MAME sorting options, what can I expect if I filter out games? Ideally I would like only one version of each game to be in the main list, but I don't want it to accidentally filter out any games...

Okay, I just found what it is. I'm not sure if this applies to regular MAME, but I'm using AdvanceMAME and in the setup for it, it's set to "-dir_rom "C:\Emulators\Mame32\roms". So I had to actually change that for AdvanceMAME in the GameEX settings. Derp.

The roms are in E:\Roms\Mame\roms, does that count? GameEX can see them fine. I'll try changing it in mame.ini and see if that helps. If that fails, I'll just put MAME on my storage drive with the roms.

I have my MAME emulator on my C: drive, but all my roms on my E: drive. In the GameEX Setup Wizard, I choose the E: drive for both the MAME setup and the GameEX rom lookup setup. The roms show up in GameEX, but when it tries to launch them, according to the log, it's still searching in "C:\Emulators\Mame32\roms". Is there any other place I can correct this if the Setup Wizard is reporting something else?

Right now, on my current budget, I'm really thinking I should put the RAID thing off... I can always do it one day in the future (even though it will probably mean restarting my storage as a whole). Someone else suggested this as an alternative to save $80 on Windows, with I think the only downside being not having support from Microsoft if I need it. But, that's what the internet is for... As far as one case VS the other, I just... really like the look of the Zalman one, so unless the Lian Li offers some other benefit I'm not seeing...? I'm kind of at the very end of my budget here (my goal really was about $1200 and I'm closing in on $1500, don't want to go over that)... I'll look into other options on the smaller drive, but I'm really not sold on Blu-Ray since... I doubt I'd ever buy any.

Well, like where?

I'm still not really sold on RAID.. It seems like a lot of extra work and having to pay more... So would there be any guide to explain easily what I would need to do to get it working, to maybe help convince me? And how much slower would it be, how much of an inconvenience would it be to me just for that extra security? Also, not sure if I like that second case... but I dunno. Would the Zalman one really not be able to hold that many drives? It looks like it would, but maybe I'm wrong.

So here's what I currently have in my cart, and is basically my preliminary final. So any thoughts, recommendations, changes, anything I'm missing, etc. give 'em to me now: CASE: ZALMAN Black Aluminum / Plastic / Steel HD501 ATX Media Center / HTPC Case MOTHER BOARD: GIGABYTE GA-890GPA-UD3H AM3 AMD 890GX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core Processor Model HDZ955FBGIBOX VIDEO CARD: SAPPHIRE Vapor-X 100283VXL Radeon HD 5770 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card POWER SUPPLY: CORSAIR CMPSU-650TX 650W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Compatible with Core i7 Power Supply MEMORY: G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL9D-4GBNQ x2 FAN: ZALMAN CNPS9500 AT 2 Ball CPU Cooling Fan/Heatsink NETWORK CABLE: BYTECC C6EB-7P 7 ft. Cat 6 Purple Enhanced 550MHz Patch Cables MAIN HD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3160215A 160GB 7200 RPM IDE Ultra ATA100 3.5" Hard Drive (Perpendicular Recording) -Bare Drive STORAGE HD: Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS 2TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive CD DRIVE: LG 22X DVD±R DVD Burner Black IDE Model GH22NP20 - OEM OPERATING SYSTEM: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Full

Thank you so much for your help! I definitely did consider expanding it in the future with an external drive, but I wanted it to be, at least at first, an entirely self-contained unit. When I look at the pictures on that second site, it clues me in that... the things with the handles on them, I didn't realize those were where the hard drives were going to go, haha. Like, I didn't realize what those were for... As far as hard drive setup goes, should I have one hard drive with the OS, GameEx, XBMC, and all the emulators on it, and the storage drive will have all the movies and ROMs on it? Think that would work best?

Do you think with that case, it will be able to fit two hard drives? Also it just occurred to me I hadn't planned to have a CD drive in it, since the only thing I can think of I'd need it for is to install Windows...

Well, I am a little bit new on this, as I said... I definitely feel like I understand the basics--of course I get that "more is better", I just wondered which of the 3 things that were listed were important, but I think I've gotten a general gist of it from else where. I found a guide here that lists some general breakdowns for different levels of machine, and I kind of decided on this one... The only question I have is that I'm not going to be using the 640 GB hard drive. I'd like to know, basically... well, as long as it's a SATA hard drive, I should be fine, right? I guess I've heard of like, larger hard drives (ie, 2 TB) being slower or having less performance, is that something I should worry about? How will it affect something like this, how noticeable will it be? Can anyone speak from experience on it, what kind of hard drives have you all used? EDIT: And as another question, would it be in my best interest to go with Vista for this? I'm really used to XP so if XP would somehow be safer/easier, then let me know...

No problem at all! Your post was really informative. I've started taking a look at things, and I found a small thing I'm confused about. What is the difference between this and this? That is to say, one has a higher L3 Cache and the other has a higher operating frequency, and also one us Dual Core while the other is Quad Core... what do each of those 3 things mean, what is important?

Reposting this from a forum I frequent, figured I could get good advice here too... I'm pretty sure I've made this topic before, but I'm returning to the idea again to ask for advice. I'm going to build a Media PC; essentially, a PC connected to my HDTV with (most likely) GameEx and XBMC installed. I want it to be able to easily play encoded HD video without a hiccup, and be able to play some higher end games, possibly even emulated PS2 or GCN games if emulation is that far along on them, or ever does become so in the future. I guess I'm not against having to upgrade it in the future, but I'll see where things take me/what I can do for now. So my questions, in general, are... How do I know if CPUs and Motherboards are "compatible"? What should I even be looking for in both of these? What do I need to know about cooling? What kind of video card will I need, in terms of both having HDMI output and being powerful enough as I need it to be? How can I find out about what pieces of hardware are going to be "quiet", outside of reading reviews? Same goes for actual form/size, and whether it will fit into a case I find, without physically seeing it. Maybe I'm dumb but I haven't found this information for most things. And really, in general, what kind of benchmarks should I shoot for? How do I know what's high end or good enough. Should I go back to using XP, or should I try out Windows 7? Not that I'll need to use the OS all that much, so my main concern is compatibility with both older and newer PC games. And, er, anything else you think I should know? To be honest, I wish I had a place like Fry's around me as I'm sure they could help. Anyone know of any places in Orlando/places that should be around the country that I might be able to find?

My ideal situation would be to running GameEX and XBMC together; one for games, the other for TV/movies. I'm wondering if anyone else at all has tried this, or if anyone can give insight into how well GameEX or XBMC can close out/open the other. Additionally, I'm also wondering what kind of rig most people are running. I'm looking to set this up on an HDTV, and I know enough basics to put a PC together, but I really don't know what kind of benchmarks I'm shooting for, since my computer is ancient.

Argh, okay. That... worked. o_O; Just seems... pointless... GameEx.zip