hansolo77

I discovered GameEx has support for something called client/server MAME which, if I understand correctly, allows users to play online with/against eachother. How well is this emplimented? I might be able to convince my brother to setup a system too, and would really like the ability to play with him. Also, is there any planned functionality to have a setup somewhat like X-Box Live's messaging service? I think it'd be really cool if you could press a button, and have it pop up a window that displays information, like what friends are online, what they're currently playing, an ability to join them, an internal messaging system, etc. Just think, I load up GameEx, and it alerts me that Adultery has sent me a message. Then I can read it, reply back, and go on my way. Then while navigating around in the menus, it can pop up an alert that he's online. Then later that he wants to play a game with me, which would then have the ability to link right to that game so I don't have to find it. What would REALLY make this shine is if there was a way to have it popup during a game, but probably MAME would be the only possible option for this.

Add me to list, wishing you the happiest day of the year (unless you're a grumpy old man for getting older and older heheh)

I know right? I don't even own a WII. I added Adultery77 and Draco1962 as friends on Xbox, waiting for acceptance. Here's my list of XB360 games I can play online: Conan The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (offline?) Grand Theft Auto IV Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock Guitar Hero 5 Halo 3 Halo 3: ODST Halo: Reach Kung Fu Panda (offline?) LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga NCAA Football 09 NHL 09 Perfect Dark Zero Project Gotham Racing 3 Rock Band 2 Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (offline?) Star Wars: The Force Unleashed: Ultimate Sith Edition (offline) Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II Xbox Live Arcade Compilation Disc (Uno, etc) All my other games are *cough* backups (legit of course, read my fire topics about how Microsoft refused to replace them). I won't risk playing them online because of potential banning. MS is full of it; banning people for legit reasons to backup games, and not willing to replace damaged games from a fire...

Sounds like fun; I play Halo Reach for a few hours on the nights I have off from work. I play with 2 Canadian buddies, the one guy is the one who donated to me $20 after the fire. Invite me as a friend if you want. I'll probably be on tonight (Wednesday, 17th) in about an hour (10:30'ish EST).

I try to come up with good suggestions.. It's not really a problem, just that it cost's too much space to keep (in some cases) 20 or so copies of the file, when only 1 should be displayed anyway.

Problem solved. I downloaded the latest WIP version, and it had none of the problems I was having before. I was able to remap my gamepad with no problems, and I didn't have any issues with the full screen rendering the program's window. All good!

Yeah, but I'm not too worried about it. I'm not good with stuff like that either... I tried my hand at painting my spare (modded) xbox 360. I thought I read all the suggested instructions right, but it turned out looking like crapola. The paint is uneven, bubble/drip in some spots, chipping, etc. And the clear coat I put on it wasn't smooth enough and dried with fingerprints. I masked off the power button so I could have the lights show through, but apparently it wasn't good enough and they don't. I'm just no good at the hand's on stuff. Way back before the fire, I had attempted a custom build of a control panel. I bought a USB keyboard and mapped all the key's to the controller chip. Then I bought a set of buttons and a joystick from a web retailer. For the panel itself, I used an old closet shelf (like 5 feet wide, 1 foot deep, 1 inch thick). I cut it into a box using a powered jigsaw since I don't own a table saw. It looked terrible, with half inch gaps in the corners, and places where the finish split off. When I drilled the holes for the buttons, I didn't have a hole drill bit, so I marked it off and drilled lots of tiny holes in a circle, and chizled the holes out. Took me all summer to do to, and it looked like total crap. But it worked, and I loved the feel of the joystick and buttons. I even put a homemade spinner (from an old mouse) on the right side, and 2 flipper buttons for pinball. I was proud it worked, but ashamed at the look. I salvaged it from the fire, but decided it just looked way to crappy to keep, and chucked the whole thing when we moved back in. I kinda wish I saved the internal parts and buttons though, but they only cost me like $16 I think. I'm probably not going to do any other kind of hands on stuff like this again. I'll just stick to pre-fabricated stuff if I decide to get a new control panel. Until then, I'm happy with my keyboard, mouse, and game pad.

Yup. I don't care what it looks like. I don't even look at it like 95% of the time. It's on the bottom shelf of a 3-shelf tv stand anyway.. Granted, it looks nasty when you REALLY care, it was awesome when it was brand new. Shiny and streak/blotch free. But it fulfills it's purpose, which is all I need it for.

Does ALT+SHIFT+1 work while the emu is in full screen? When I run the emu in full screen, it doesn't. Also, I get the windows frame visible on the screen when full screen too.. is this fixed in the beta you're using?

No rush; I'm still just getting everything setup. MESS works for me except for that one annoyance. If you can figure out what I'm doing wrong, great. I'm off the next 3 days, so plenty of time to figure it out.

Ok, here's the pictures of the HTPC case. The front crud. The top crud.

Looks awesome Circo! Too bad I was never much of a Street Fighter fan! I was more into Mortal Kombat myself.

Ok, but how do you set it up with custom inputs? I tried EVERYTHING to make it popup something to let me change the inputs, but it just didn't work. Is the newest version on the website maybe crippled and an older version the one I need?

Heh ok, fixed now.

I do notice 1 other very annoying problem with this program... When downloading for Sega CD games, it first downloads the 1 file, then makes copies of every one of them to fill in for all the .cue/.iso/.mp3 (or .wav) files associated with it. I have GameEx set to filter ROMs to *.iso, so it only lists 1 game each, but the downloader makes copies for all the files. Can this be solved (with a future update) without having to manually go in and erase all the extras by hand?

Adultery, did you get my PM?

No, just kicked out

Yeah I'm kinda bummed about that game. I only played it once, against my DAD who was nerdy like me when it first came out. He actually beat me because he "tricked" me on a question, and I gave it too him. He beat me by 1 question! Good memory though. As for a silver lining, the only things I can think of is the stuff I replaced... A bigger LCD tv, a true surround reciever and speakers (actually, I got my old one for $125 bucks, and this one I spent my entire $1300 income tax refund on), and a replacement Xbox 360 (old one got a single red RROD E74 error) that's newer and better than my old one. That's about it. Negatively, I now have to live with our landlord because she got engaged to DAD! UHG!

I tried F1, F2, ALT+SHIFT+1(like the documentation says). Nothing works. If I press 1, 2, etc it brings up a little box asking which save state. That's all I can get it to do. I don't know if there is a setting somewhere I have to enable or something, or what. MESS works fine though. I just need to figure out how to get past the "first time turning on the NGP" part.

Ok, I'm sure this will be answered by Mesk, the designated MESS god. I tried using NeoPop, crashed on a lot of my roms. Tried Mednafen, have no idea how to make it work and the documented keystroke to enable a controller config doesn't work. Good old MESS works great with it. So I set it up in GameEx, and it launches my game after going through an initial device setup (meaning, I had to tell MESS what the NeoGeo Pocket's lanuage and time was). My problem is.. when I closed one rom and opened another, I had to re-enter all the language and device info. Is there no way of having MESS save this information so I don't need to enter it every time? If not, is there a flag somewhere that I can use to BYPASS that stage? Would also be helpful if I knew how to tell GameEx to send a keystroke to turn the device on (Says you have to press Q, but I remapped it to the controller). I know GameEx can do this, but I don't know how to make it work. [RESOLVED] Switch to Mednafen but use the latest WIP version, not the "official" version on the site.

It's just disturbing to know somebody you DON'T know was in there, getting into your stuff.

WTF.. Why didn't I think of that? What an awesome idea! This post has been lovingly edited by the Mod Ninja! Thank you for stopping by!

Yeah, I actually lost a lot more than I salvaged. Pretty much everything was destroyed, not by the fire but by the fire fighting. Anything that was made of wood was destroyed because they swelled and split. Other things like cardboard didn't survive either (hench the Star Wars game). I ended up having to completely replace all my DVD cases with new ones, and reprint the cover sleeves. No movie company was willing to just "replace" them. The only guys that were willing were Disney, and they wanted like $5 per movie, and all they would do was replace the Disk. My disks were fine, so I just redid the cases. The fire department dumped like 30,000 gallons of water a second on this thing and it still didn't put it out. They had to call in a special truck that did some kind of foaming spray to put it out. The foam had it out in like 2 minutes, when they were using water hoses for like 45 minutes. We were so pissed it took them so long to get that foaming truck. A lot of stuff could have been different if they did. The fire might not have even spread to our unit. If you look at all the other photobucket pictures, I have a lot of pictures of MOLD and stuff. I actually had to take those so the health department could compensate us if we got sick. There was asbestos too, which didn't help the salvaging. The hardest part was just deciding what to take and what to leave. I kept everything electronic, and then stuff like DVDs, Comics, Video Games. I had 2 boxes of PlayBoy magazines from back in the late '70s to mid '80's that my uncle gave me. They didn't make it. Kinda pissed me off too.. on the 2nd or 3rd day of salvaging, I discovered somebody had been in there and left one of the centerfolds open on the bed. It just disturbed me so much that somebody was in there that had no business being there. The cops were supposed to be keeping a 24 hour watch on the place. In one of the pictures, my "broken" LCD tv was left in the downstairs hallway one day during salvaging. Came back the next day, and it was gone. Somebody broke in through the back patio doors and stole it. It was broke, so it was no big deal. BUT SOMEBODY WAS IN THERE AND STOLE IT!!! Well, I'm sure nobody wants to hear me rant. Enjoy the pictures. Cya tomorrow.

No roof or ceiling again! This is actually a view of the wall behind my door, between the door and the closet. This is where my TV and HTPC once sat. The 1-inch diameter holes were from me, taking out my frustrations about the damage with hammer. The wall itself is missing because the fire department needed to check the area behind it for still burning embers. This is an exterior view of the building. 109 is ours, and the 2 windows with the fully closed blinds were my bedroom. Another view of the building. We're second from the right end. The blue tarp was laid over the 2 units in the building that weren't damaged. They eventually tore the whole building down, but this gave those residents time to get everything out. The fire started in the empty unit right next to where the blue tarp ends. Another exterior of the front of the building. View of the damage from the back. Our unit is behind the pine tree.. Better angle from the back of just our unit. Yup, pretty bad. I don't know if I mentioned it before, but our unit was actually the WORST damaged out of the whole building. I forget what the term is (it's not backdraft) but we experienced the fire coming from 2 directions. If looking from the front of the building, it spread to the right, passed us, then bounced back once it hit the outside wall on the far right. So we got it twice. The other unit's only got 1, and the end unit was put out first. If you're interested, I've got more pictures in the photobucket album. http://s5.photobucket.com/albums/y190/hansolo77/Fire%20Damage/ Also, if anybody is interested... I'll upload the rebuilding progression too. I know Draco and Adultery want to see the picture of my HTPC, but I don't have one of that yet. I'll try and get it tomorrow though.