hansolo77

I still play the 19xx games and I'm running an AMD Sempron 2600+ with the latest build of mame (.106 something). It runs fine and I've not noticed any slowups...

Perhaps you should send Tom a quick PM and let him know. His file may be infected and he doesn't even know.

Ok i'll check into again after I get my machine back up. I'm like 99% there, and believe I've fixed the final problem. Just want to do another full night's worth of burnin testing to make sure. Then I'm going to start the GameEx installation and setting up my emulators again. I have them all backed up on another drive, and I exported all their configs from GameEx so I just have to import them after I reinstall (a great addition by the way TOM).

Yep, it was the full screen option that I noticed primarily that wouldn't save after exit. It's a bit tricky in the cfg file too.. You have to set the windowed to 0 and full screen to 1. And I think you have to set an option like "render window" to 0 and "render fullscreen" to 1, but that might be a different emulator. I think the BIOS file locations don't save either.. I was able to get it just the way I wanted it by running gens and putting in the mode, then opening gens.cfg while it was still running, then I copied all the data to another file. Then closed gens, erased the original cfg, and replaced it with the copy I made, then set it to read only. Hasn't given me an issue since!

I'm using gens on my system and its the only genesis emulator I've ever used. I've never had any problems with it. There are some tweaks you can do to it's gens.cfg file that aren't available from the program directly. Also, I've noticed that some settings you use through the program don't save to the gens.cfg file after you exit. So I got around this by setting it up the way I want via notepad, and then making the cfg file 'read-only'. That way it can't get written to by the gens program. Once I get my computer back up and running properly, I'll send over the information for you Adultery, so you can host it on your config site.

Your instructions, blunt as they are, are exactly what I usually did. But when I'd run the scanner, it would come back with almost every single rom being incorrectly named, etc. How can this be if it's a complete download from somebody who's also ran clrmamepro on the set?

Any idea how you got it? Was it hiding in an emulator-related torrent?

I've never been able to figure out clrmame. Whenever I launch it, the best I can do is scan roms. But it gives me all kinds of errors. Even after I've downloaded a complete rom set through a torrent that's been verified to be clrmame'd already. I know there's instructions out there but I can't make heads or tails with them. They even have .dat's for stuff like the artwork, but I haven't even gotten that far yet. Any helps?

Looks good so far! If it really picks up and starts getting a lot of traffic, maybe you can consider setting up an MCE configuration page. Heh, I suggest this only in joke because my MCE is totally f*d up right now. My computer's network stopped working. I thought it was drivers or something, but after a complete reinstall of TCP/IP, DNS, WINS, DHCP, nic drivers, etc, nothing worked. So like a dummy I formatted my system, just to find out it still didn't work after reinstalling Windows. I later discovered that a jumper had fallen off my MB that enabled the port (the way my case is designed, the MB hangs upside down). So now that it's fixed, I'm having one heck of a time trying to get MCE working again. I've spent like a week poking and prodding but can't get the stupid TV to work right. It keeps locking up and freezing, and stuttering, etc. When it decides it's ready to work, it'll work for an hour then stop again! ARRG! Once I get it fully back up and working, I'm gonna backup with Ghost so I never have to go through this again. Say, any ideas/suggestions for me from the forum visitors?

All stupidity and flaming aside, I think you misunderstand the purpose of GameEx reminator. Allow me to explain it. GameEx is a frontend MCE replacement. It's original purpose is to provide an enduser with an easy access to mutiple emulators from which they can view from their couch and control with a remote. It's design is based loosely on MCE. It has menus, etc. The HTPC aspect of the program is secondary to it's main purpose of gaming. Now, given that information, if you only use MAME, then it's perfectly plausable that you would rather use MAME's own mame32gui for a front end. The ability, however, to use the gui is limited to that machine only (until the programmers of MAME decide to create a 360 plugin). What GameEx does, is not only contain a 360 fronted for MAME, but support anything a user would want to have access to. Be it other emulators, movies, music, videos, news, weather, etc. The fact that it is "announced as an MCE plugin" is because it can be installed to have a launch option from both the MCE start menu and the MCE's more programs. Yes, it is a PC frontend. And many people have taken the time to shell directly to GameEx and bypass windows and MCE completely. This is fine too. I use it as an MCE plugin. When I want to play games, I launch GameEx from within MCE. When I want to do other HTPC stuff, I exit GameEx and MCE opens back up. What you are looking to do is completely possible. You may just have some configuration problems that need sorted out. I don't have a 360 to play around with this with, but the programming is there. Nobody was meaning to be rude. The idea of cabinets is that GameEx has become such a popular Emulator frontend, that people have built from scratch or refurbished arcade cabinets, and use GameEx for those machines. Now lets take a look at Toms post... He talks of the majority of people using GameEx on PCs connected to TV's or arcade cabinets, and the fact that an XBOX360 version is unfeesable. He's not specifically saying what it is that he was referring to, but if you look at it, you can clearly see that he wasn't exactly on target with your general question of "why isn't gameex showing on my MCE screen when i look through the 360?" Am I right in assuming this was your question? Now Tom's answer was more a detour to what he may of thought your question being of "how can i get gameex on my 360". Adultery's comment was to basically give props to GameEx for being such a good frontend program. He's having trouble getting his 360 to work on his network. He is merely commenting on GameEx, not necessarily being directed to you. The comment about 360 working as a 360 was merely to show you that even if you can't get it to work, you still have a nice machine as it is. Now for your reply. I can completely understand your frustration. Apparently nobody replied to your question, and gave you an answer not entirely related to your thread. I'm sorry this happened. If you spend a little more time exploring the forum, you'll see that a LOT of people here are very helpful and want to help. Tom being one of the best because it's his program, his baby. I am, regretfully, unable to answer your question either. The reason, as said previously, is because I don't have a 360 to expirement with. If I did, you know I'd be jumping on the oppertunity to play games through GameEx on it. The thing you have to remember though, is that until 360 programming becomes more widly available, and GameEx expands itself to further multi-platform languages, you'll have to stream data from a computer; over your network; to your xbox 360 extender. I hope this attempt at calming down your frustration was succesful. Again I do apologize that I'm not personally able to help you, and I hope you stay and work with us. You should be able to get GameEx running, and playing through your 360 extender with no problem. It just takes time, effort, and patience. Ask around, read other topics, and familiarize yourself with the program first. We're all here to help others and get help ourselves.

This is indeed a very good idea Adultery. Of course, anybody who actually spends a little bit of time reading the documents and probing the forum can figure it all out on their own. One suggestion for your site.. set it up according to System, then under each system list their emulators, and then under the emulator have the configs. That way it's easy to navigate. If I'm new and want to get an NES system up and running, I'm not going to be looking for any particular config right off the bat. Going from NES to JNES would be much easier in my opinion. Also, for each system you should have an email link or something so somebody can send you a new config. That would make the work a little less painful and strenuous for you. You could also have a little subsection for details on setting up / installing the emulators. Hell, if you hadn't thought of it, I'd probably make a site like that myself. Heh.

Just an added thought.. I've not downloaded the CHDs for MAME yet. These are the hard drive files that the more recent games use. You may have the ROMs if you downloaded them from a torrent or something, but the CHDs you may not. This might be why you're showing all the games, because they're not in your list of available, since they don't work. I found a torrent with CHDs I'm going to start getting a week or so. It's around 48gb in size. So needless to say, you don't have them unless you KNOW you have them. Also, fRESH_OiL has a point about the extensions/file types. Make sure you're not setting a specific rom filter for those. IE, don't use *.zip. Just leave it blank. Some ROM's may not be zipped, or they may be in a different format. MAME will recognize them, but GameEx won't if you're limiting a rom type.

Bittorrent has been the best new program written since the creation of DOS in my opinion. Of course, I'm referring to it's lega uses I prefer the Azureus client myself. I used to use BitTornado but Azureus is a much better client for seeding and for setting up ban filters from government spies (just in case).

You have no idea how true this is. The first couple are the hardest because you have no clue what you're doing. Once you figure it out, its so easy to do. I orinally just wanted an NES and Sega Genesis emulator since I own those systems. Now I've got MAME, N64, Nes, SNES, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 7800, Atari Jaguar, Atari Lynx, Sega Master System, Sega Game Gear, Sega Genesis, Sega 32x, Sega CD, NeoGeo Pocket, and Visual Pinball! I've still got like 180gb's left to fill too! My next challenge is to try and get Future Pinball, Daphne, and all those CHDs for MAME. Then I'm gonna try the Gameboys, GBA, etc. Theres so much more to do, and I'll probably NEVER play them all! Hehe.

Working path is the root folder of the emulator. So if your emulator is in "C:\Program Files\Nestcl95", then that's where your working path should be. Now, if your directory looks kinda like this: C:\ |-\Program Files |--\games |---\Nestcl95 |---->artbox |---->artcart |---->artsnap |---->arttitle |---->roms Then "C:\Program Files\games\Nestcle95" is your working path. Note the quotation marks. Windows requires these if you have spaces in your folder names, or if they are longer than 8 characters in length. GameEx should cover this for you automatically if you select [bROWSE] and go to the folder.. but if not, make sure you put them in there, and check your capitaliztion too. I belive the purpose of the working path is to tell the emulator where to store it's configuration and history information. I've noticed that if I change my working path to something different but keep the roms in the same place, ie, "C:\Program Files\games\Nestcl95\roms" and main program in "C:\Program Files\Nesticle" (new location) then the new location will store the newly created configs, and this is where GameEx will go to look for them. In the above example, you would then continue and use "C:\Program Files\games\Nestcle95\artbox" for your box images, "C:\Program Files\games\Nestcle95\artcart" for your cartridge images, "C:\Program Files\games\Nestcle95\artsnap" for your screenshots, "C:\Program Files\games\Nestcle95\arttitle" for your title screenshots, and "C:\Program Files\games\Nestcle95\roms" for your rom files. Lastly, make sure your command line is setup correctly. I don't have nesticle, so don't take this example literally... It should look something like: nesticle "[RomPath]\[ROMfile]" Now, depending on the emulator and it's command line options, you may need to include a -rom flag so nesticle knows you're loading a rom. Also, some emu's need stuff like -joy (enable joystick), -fullscreen (run in full screen), etc. So your command line may look something like this: emulator -options "[RomPath]\[ROMfile]" -moreoptions or even emulator.exe -option1 -option2 "[RomPath]\[ROMfile]" -moreoptions -evenmoreoptions It's all dependent on their settings. Basically though, it's pretty simple to setup once you know your command line options. Hope this helps!

I hate batch files. I'm using them to run all my SegaCD games so I can keep them stored in seperate folders. If only Tom would fix the "In Folders?" part of the configurator I'd be set. As for you, we need a little more detail as to what you're doing to figure out what you're doing wrong. One suggestion would be to have the option "Show Desktop" turned on so it's not just a black screen and you can kinda see whats going on. Another thing is to use the debug mode. It should shed some light on what the heck is going on. Lastly, you have to remember that batch files load batch files instantly. GameEx launches a batch file to run the games, and if the GameEx batch file is calling another batch file, the call will be instantaneous. So.. if your batch file has batch files in there.. it's not going to work the same way. EVERYTHING will get launched instantly. I first realized this when I made a batch file to automatically enable my specified controller profile (one batch file) then launch the game (another batch file) and then disable to profile (last batch file). So 3 batch files, 3 lines, all stored in 1 batch file. Basically it enabled, launched, and disabled all at once, and my profile didn't work. If I remember right, I think GameEx crashed too because it got hung up at all the launching. So try to remember that in your batch file making.

Hey Tom, minor request.. perhaps I should put it in the request thread... Is it possible to maybe have the "Export to MCE" function open another page and ask what you want to export? When I ran it and went back to MCE, I had to delete a lot of stuff from "More Programs" that I didn't really want. I think just a simple checkbox feature with options like "Export ALL, Export Most Played, Export Favorites" etc would suffice. Maybe further down the line you could have the option for each individual game to export to MCE.. kinda like you have the "Add to Favorites" option.

Hi. MAME itself is the emulator that runs the ROMS (which are the games). Snaps are another name for SCREENSHOTS. Basically what you want to do, is tell GameEx where all these files are located. So the MAME path is the folder where MAME is located, ROMS would be the ROMS for MAME, and SNAPS would be the screenshots. When it's looking for the executable, this is the file that actually RUNS MAME. Its usually just mame.exe. If you have some of the newer versions with a Graphical User Interface (gui) then you want to use the file that's not the gui. For instance.. MAME+ has 2 files, mamep.exe and mamepgui.exe. The first is the executable you want, and the second is for it's own built in GUI/frontend. Hope this helps some, feel free to use the [sEARCH] option in the forums for further help, read the documentations, and reply back with further questions if need be. This forum is visited constantly by MANY helpful people who are very eager to help (now don't call me a liar guys! ) You should be able to get up an running very quickly and easily.

Well, I thought you did. Sorry for my ignorance! Basically, Favorites and Most Played work, to a degree. When you assigned a game to be a favorite, it doesn't store right. When you go into favorites, it may have the correct NAME in the list, but when you go into that game's option, the information, screenshots, and even the game itself (rom, etc) will be completely different. Its not like it's just 1 or 2 names off either.. It'll be something completely crazy. Like I'll want to play Super Mario Brothers from favorites, and it loads up Tapper from MAME. Most Played does the same thing. It'll record the information properlly, IE; it will take the game games correctly. But when you go into their menus, they'll have the wrong screenshots and launch the wrong games. I have found, though, that if you exit the menu for Favorites and/or Most Played, it will be corrected the second time you enter. So my theory is that either the data isn't being stored properlly, or it's not being pulled correctly for display. The only part of it that seems to work (on the first viewing) is the game names. This goes along with a problem in the LIVE! feature of the website. People have been saying that the imagery in the pictures are completely wrong. Somebody could be playing a Star Wars game in the picture's preview window, but the screenshot image or box cover it shows would be of some fighting game. It's all buggy.

MrScary.. if you have the ability to, try and edit the video, cut out the audio track, and resave it. If it's in a format other than avi or mpeg, you might have trouble. Check out www.videohelp.com for tools and such.

You are absolutely right. Most Played and Favorites DO NOT WORK CORRECTLY. You're not alone. Tom is aware of this. What I've noticed is if you just go into Most Played, then back out, then back in again, it is correct the second time. Perhaps there's a problem with the temporary file? Like, it's not saving when GameEx exits or something. I don't know. But don't worry, it's every where. Just be patient (we hope!).

Ok I finally got it I think. "Sonic CD.bat" - RomPath=D:\_SEGACDROMS\BAT & RomFilter=*.bat (placed in rom path) "D:\_SEGACDROMS\gens.exe" "D:\_SEGACDROMS\ROMS\Sonic CD\Sonic CD.iso" -scd -auto "C:\Program Files\Saitek\Software\Profiles\CLEAR.bat" "SegaCD.bat" - AlsoLaunch= (activate SegaCD controller profile) (placed in profiler's folder) prfact -v-f"C:\Program Files\Saitek\Software\SEGACD.dat" -A "CLEAR.bat" (return to default controller profile) (placed in profiler's folder) prfact -v-f"C:\Program Files\Saitek\Software\DEFAULT.dat" -A I tried to use amos' idea with the delay, but it just seemed to sit there forever, so I gave up with that and tried the PAUSE command. That's supposed to give you time to press ENTER before taking the next step. I added the line to the beginning of the CLEAR.bat file, and added the ENTER button after the ALT+F4 assignment in the SEGACD.dat profile. That didn't work either. What that did was cause the game to start back up again once it returned to GameEx. The dos window was still open with the PAUSE command up. So I was about to give up. I then thought about putting the CLEAR.bat call into the end of rom bat file, and it worked! Going down the line, as bat files do, it loads the emu/rom and wait's till it's done. Then it calls CLEAR.bat. Once the call is made, the rom bat file closes and returns to GameEx. It's all about the process the computer takes with the files. When you have a bunch of BAT files being called from a bat file, one after another, they all launch at the same time. So I had to break out of the bat system. Because GameEx uses bat files internally, this was such a hassle. I had a bat file calling the profile, then a bat file calling the rom, then a bat file calling the default profile, all within Tom's automated bat file! So yeah, that don't work. With this little bit of trickery, the process now is the profile is launched the same time the rom is... Once the command to execute the profile is done, that bat file closes. The rom bat file continues to run until the execution of it's command (playing the game) is done, then it goes to the next line, calls the defaulting profile, closes, and loads up GameEx. While GameEx reloads, the defaulting profile is executed, changing the profile back to the other one, and then closes. Ta-Da! Ok now I've got to go try it again and make sure it's still working! LOL

Yeah I thought about using a delay like that, but it won't solve my problem. I'd have to only play for 9 seconds. I suppose I might be able to throw a PAUSE in there, and have the EXIT button perform not only an ALT+F4, but also an ENTER to unpause... then have it execute the unload. I'll try it and see.

I'm using a Saitek P2500 rumble pad controller. I've been trying to figure out how to map keys to my controller to exit games that are being executed via bat files (Sega CD games). Many people have found that using the JoyToKill program and taskkill seem to work, but it doesn't for me for some ungodly reason. So in my attempts to find an alternative solution I've found that my controller comes with software to program unused keys/buttons for other functions.. just like the JoyToKey program does. I've made a profile for SegaCD where my left shoulder button does a RESET CONSOLE (the TAB button) and my right shoulder button does an EXIT OF PROGRAM (the ALT+F4 buttons). To load this profile, Saitek was kind enough to also include a program called PrfAct (basically, Profile Activator). You use PrfAct on a command line, and direct it to the profile you want to activate (in my case, the segacd.dat file). Because it takes 2 commands to accomplish this, I've written a simple bat file to execute it. It calls the program, and then the profile. I direct the AlsoLaunch= option in GameEx to created bat file to execute the profile activation. That part works great. Everytime I go to load a game, it executes the profile like it should. However, to de-activate the profile, it's a little different. Apparently, the command "PrfAct -c" is supposed to clear the profile, but it doesn't work. I've already contacted tech support and posted numerous messages on their support forum. I'm still waiting to hear back. In the meanwhile, I've created a dummy profile, that is just a blank canvas with no assignments (since any button with no assignment simply makes the buttons act in their normal way). I then created another bat file to execute that profile. When I test from outside GameEx, the activation of the segacd profile works, and the activation of the default profile works. However, when I try to do this through GameEx, it doesn't. I put the "deactivation" bat file in the LaunchAfter= line. When I exit GameEx to check the status of the profile that's activated, it still shows the segacd profile. I was curious, and ran the process again with the debug turned on. Apparently what is happening is the LaunchAfter= command is being inputted into the basic start up game bat file that GameEx uses, only it's at the end. This would be ok normally, but because the games are being executed by bat files, the LaunchAfter= simply launches after calling the loading rom bat file. The profiler program is kinda slow, so the second activation command doesn't get recognized because it's still in the process of loading the other profile. The end result is that the segacd (first profile) profile remains running until I forcebly clear it. So to make that long story short, it doesn't work. The LaunchAfter= doesn't really launch after. What I need is an option like the AlsoLaunch= that will launch the command AFTER the emulator exits and returns back to GameEx. Is there anyway to do this? I need the LaunchAfter= to occur after the process has begun to return to GamEx, not after executing the rompath/romfile.

So I was right. ::SNICKER::