Sliver X

The way I handle things on my setup is that, with very few exceptions, emulators all point to a single script (Emulators.bat) that handles most of the logic for running things. I currently base it off file extension: The script will examine the extension passed to it as a command line argument, and based on what it sees will jump to a particular subroutine and execute the game. This lead to having to give some things odd extensions (.ps2 for Playstation 2 games, etc) but it works pretty well. You could do something like use WMIC or string manipulation to see what directory the ROM is in (Assuming you use a structured ROM directory schema for that) and it would be better, I suppose. You could put all three game types in the same directory and point the "Emulator" associated with the list to a batch script like this: TurboPCECD.bat ::Set file extension as a variable. SET EXTENSION=%~x1 ::Check File Extension and decide what to do. IF %EXTENSION% == .cue GOTO PCECD IF %EXTENSION% == .pce GOTO PCE IF %EXTENSION% == .t16 GOTO TG16 EXIT :PCECD START "..." /D "D:\EMULATORS\MAME64" /WAIT mame64.exe pcecd %1 EXIT :PCE START "..." /D "D:\EMULATORS\MAME64" /WAIT mame64.exe pce %1 EXIT :TG16 START "..." /D "D:\EMULATORS\MAME64" /WAIT mame64.exe tg16 %1 EXIT You'd have to give TG-16 games a unique extension, but yeah. This should at least give you an idea of what can be done this way?

Done.

I've worked on GameEX themes for years for the HTPCs I build. I have a few I'm not ashamed of to share at this point. The themes are pretty generalized, so if you have custom setups per emulator/etc it may not be ideal for you. They have "avi" (Really h.264 encoded MP4s) and static png backgrounds for everything so can be ran animated or not. I typically have a big gray bar across the bottom with a legend of what I've mapped my gamepads to but that seemed redundant for distributing them: This leaves a bit of space at the bottom that I should probably utilize better. It's designed for 1920x1080 but scales down to 1280x720 rather well. I'm assuming any higher 16:9 ratio resolution would also be fine? There are a bunch of high quality logos for most console and handheld systems as well as some generic icons I built for the theme (Like the gamepad one shown in the example screenshots). There may be some older, lower quality ones lurking in there as well that can be deleted/ignored. Attached are the themes. Through the magic of solid compression they decompress much larger (Dark Earth is 195MB and Organic Blue is 293MB) 2137282330_DarkEarth.7z 679228794_OrganicBlue.7z

I've done a lot to this. hardware and software-wise, and now consider it complete: Case: Coolermaster Elite 130 CPU: Intel Core i5 9600K MB: ASRock H310M-ITX/ac motherboard GPU: eVGA GeForce RTX 2070 Super RAM: 32GB Corsair DDR4-2667 PSU: eVGA 600W Bronze NVME: 256GB Silicon Power SATA SSD: 2x1TB Sandisk (RAID 0) HDD: 4TB WD Blue 7200RPM (64MB cache) Optical: LG BD-RW/DVD+RW/CD+RW NET: Intel Gb NIC, Intel 802.11ac WiFi/Bluetooth 4.2 Input: 4x Nintendo Switch Pro Controller Display: 42" 1080p non-HDR TV @ 60Hz via HDMI OS: Windows 10 LTSC 2019 GameEX 12.44 A video of its GameEX setup running.

I'm curious if there's a way to change the font size for the scrolling media playback text (Such as when playing a song)? I've never been able to find a way to alter this either in the theme INI or any other place in GameEX's configs. While this used to not be that big of a problem the DPI scaling Windows 10 does by default makes it extremely hard to read.

Case: Silverstone ML07 CPU: Intel Core i3 9100F (overclocked to 4GHz base) MB: ASRock H310M-ITX/ac motherboard GPU: eVGA GeForce GTX 1650 Super RAM: 16GB Corsair DDR4-2400 PSU: Silverstone 350W Bronze (SFX form-factor) NVME: 256GB Silicon Power SATA SSD: 1TB Sandisk HDD: 4TB WD Blue 7200RPM (64MB cache) Optical: TEAC DVD+RW slim (Slotload) NET: Intel Gb NIC, Intel 802.11ac WiFi/Bluetooth 4.2 Input: 4x Nintendo Switch Pro Controller Display: 42" 1080p non-HDR TV @ 60Hz via HDMI OS: Windows 10 LTSC 2019 GameEx 16.43 42 emulated platforms, >130 Windows/DOS Games Management: Kodi as file manager/SFTP login to machine The OS has been stripped down severely using a utility called NTLite, removing over 150 components. The total install size is 4.75GB (7GB without NTFS compressing the drive) with barely anything running in the background. I made the theme from a looping video file I found online and making a PNG overlay (The control legend at the bottom, etc) that I then encoded over it with ffmpeg. I've been using GameEx since 2009, I think, across 5 different media PC designs I've done. I've built setups with things like Kodi, MaLa, Wah!Cade, etc, but I keep coming back to it.

I finally replaced my aged Core i3 2120 HTPC with something more modern. I went with a Sega theme for it. The boot screen (The moon Oberon orbiting Uranus in a scene like the US Sega CD BIOS) The mITX case it resides in. Here's a Youtube video of my GameEx setup running on it. I didn't bother recording sound since I figured it would just immediately get hit with a copyright claim.

Ah, thank you; I guess that's what I get for manually editing the INI. Sorry to have you look for something that was my fault. Thanks again.

Currently I have 11,156 games, 2,301 of which are MAME. I've even set disablemame=true in GameEx.ini and it's only loading games from Emulator_32 (Sorry, I goofed and typed Emulator_35 in my original post). Attached is a zip with the requested files: The log was taken after three runs at Random Game. gameex_data.zip

I recently updated to v16.43 (From version 15.x) and noticed selecting Random Game only executes MAME games and one other emulator's (EMULATOR_35 [Out of 48] in my case). Nothing in the log is giving me any ideas as to why this may be happening. Is anyone else having this issue?

Thanks. I may do that soon or buy/borrow a decent camera so the BIOS and OS parts can be seen. The OSK uses VolGrey.png as the background for letters. I simply made that image a 1x1 translucent file to make it invisible. Since I don't use GameEX's volume indicator anymore the fact that doing this also affects it was a moot point for me.

I made a really terrible quality video of it in use here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEJkaMsYpUk

You can put really powerful CPUs into most ITX machines but GPUs are another matter. Most ITX cases only support single slot cards, which the GeForce 1030 is about the fastest one of those available currently. I'm not sure if that would be sufficient to run PS3/360 emulators. Another matter is having a PSU with enough power to feed a fast GPU. Most ITX power supplies aren't very strong on either wattage or +!2V amperage, and to get one that is would probably be fairly expensive since it's kind of a niche market for something like that and I'm sure not many are made. To answer your other question, WiFi is handled via a batch script, an AutoIT program I wrote to invoke the Network Manager applet via a keystroke, Touch-It Virtual Keyboard and AntiMicro to emulate mouse movement with right analog and the shoulders/triggers for Left Click/Right Click. Select on the DS3 toggles the network list, Start toggles the keyboard and the PS button exits back to GameEX Web browsing is handled via a similar setup, using Palemoon Portable. The URL bar autohides, L/R triggers Page Up/Page Down, the Dpad is arrow keys, X is Enter and O is Backspace. The filemanager is my previous Kodi install whittled down to bare minimum and hacked in several ugly ways to make it act only as a file manager. A bonus is that when browsing drives it can play movies and music itself for previewing purposes.

ExaDrive 2 Case: Apex MI-008 (Mini ITX) MB: ASUS P8H61-I Rev 2.0 CPU: Core i3 2120 @ 3.3GHz RAM: 8GB Dual Channel DDR3-1333MHz GPU: GeForce GT 1030 HDD: WD Blue 2TB 5400RPM/64MB Cache SSD: WD Blue 500GB SATA III Optical: Samsung 48X DVD+RW Slimline 802.3: Realtek Gb NIC 802.11: Rosewill 150-N USB WiFi Bluetooth: Targus BT 4.1 USB PSU: 230W ITX OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (Custom) Interface: GameEX v13.10 Inputs: (2x) Sony Dualshock 3 This is the continuation of a Linux based HTPC system I started last year (ExaDrive) and originally used Kodi and Mah!Cade for interfacing with games and media, even when switching to Windows 7 x64 as the primary OS. Recently I replaced that with GameEX. It emulates 33 systems in addition to running 80 DOS and Windows games currently. Games as recent as Skyrim, Bioshock Infinite, Doom 2016 and Wolfenstein - The New Order are all very playable at 720p on the budget level GeForce card it has. Also, despite the CPU being a budget level model that's over six years old as of this writing no MAME game I've tried runs less than 100% and PSP, PS2, Dreamcast and Saturn emulation is just as good. The OS is extremely ripped down and customized for speed. Using NTLite and dozens of manual tricks and optimizations I was able to patch the OS to current levels then rip its install size down to 6GB. It has no support for printing, international languages, entire classes of hardware the machine will never have, tons of core Windows features/components and many other things a typical PC would need. It also runs BBLean as its shell and has dozens of services disabled. POST to usability takes about 40 seconds. Used RAM on a cold boot is around 700MB. The Dualshock 3s are driven by SCP Toolkit, which presents them as XBox controllers to the OS. Rumble is fully supported, even for DirectInput games by using a passthrough driver for XInput rumble. Most things are controlled by them via a program called AntiMicro, which allows them to send keyboard and mouse inputs to the machine. Arcade, 8bit, 16bit, 32X, GBA and N64 games are 7zipped. ISOs and Nintendo DS games are NTFS compressed and Sega CD + Turbo CD games are in ISO+MP3 and ISO+OGG format, respectively, to further save space. Handling of decompression and running games is handled by a huge batch script I wrote that GameEX points to (It also supports Zip, RAR and NanoZip archives for ROMs). Web browsing and WiFi management are possible using gamepads in spite of the lack of both functions in GameEX via Antimicro and a few AutoIT scripts I wrote. It's kind of clunky, but it works! Emulated Systems PC Games

Multiple ROM paths for non-MAME stuff? I think it'd be neat to either have ROMs on the HDD or on something like an optical disk if HDD space gets too constrained, etc. Also re-requesting implementing simple file management. Seems most of what would be needed for this already exists, like the OSK and Media Library system. I think it would make tasks like adding media to a HDD a lot easier. *edit* Something like this hasty mockup, maybe?

GameEx uses VCD for its ISO functionality, doesn't it? And I figured out a stopgap measure in my case. Using Unlocker, it turns out GameEx was locking the virtual drive alright. Using PowerDVD to play DVD ISOs, I added this to the batch that runs them: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Elaborate Bytes\VirtualCloneDrive\VCDMount.exe" /l=Y %1 "C:\Program Files\Unlocker\unlocker.exe" Y: /S D:\Extensions\Cax.exe /WAIT:2 D:\Extensions\Cax.exe /RUXW "C:\Program Files (x86)\Cyberlink\PowerDVD\PowerDVD.exe" Y:\ This unlocks the Y drive just long enough (GameEx immediately seizes it again after this) for the new mount to apply, then uses Comandiux to wait 2 seconds until Windows/PowerDVD can see it.

After recently upgrading the hardware in my media PC, I went with Windows 7 x64 as the OS base for my setup. I've pretty much gotten everything ported over from the XP setup but have noticed a few problems, this one concerning GameEx and Virtual Clone Drive... Basically, using the Ripped DVDs function would only work once until I closed/respawned GameEx. I started looking into why this was and noticed that Virtual Clone Drive was mounting images, but the resulting emulated drive was not accessable by anything. Did a lot of research, and finally figured out this is a problem others have run into. The cause in each instance was some piece of software that was interfering with VCD in some way, so I started disabling services/startup programs to figure out what was causing it for me... Turns out it was GameEx. I can mount and image, have it not be accessable, and as soon as I kill GameEx the drive instantly works fine. Restarting GameEx will usually prevent it from working again if I unmount the image and attempt to mount to the drive again. It's almost as if GameEx is locking access to the drive in some way. I've tried disabling all DVD support in GameEx.ini, every compatibility/privilege combo for GameEx and VCD itself to no avail. It should also be noted that I tried another virtual CD program called MagicDisk and GameEx is breaking it as well. This seems to be an x64 specific thing from what I can tell, as the issue is present on XP x64 as well. *edit* I just tried a clean install of the latest GameEx and the problem persists. This should rule out my INI causing problems.

Thanks for telling me about the controls listing: I discovered a few things I didn't know about despite using GamEx for 2 and a half years now. I've finally figured out where the DVD rip option is, but I'm running into a problem with the DVD playback: The Alt+1 combo to jump to the root menu doesn't work with custom input enabled. I even went so far as to do a clean install of GameEx and it was still happening then. Is there some kind of entry one can put in custominput.ini to bind the DVD root menu to some key? I don't see an option for this in the Setup Wizard, etc.

Sorry for the late reply: Been busy. Yes, I've enabled this. But where in GameEx can you access the rip function, since GameExMenuEditor does not seem to have an entry for it? Is it some kind of option with the in-built DVD player (Which I never use since I can't figure out a way to make it access the DVD root menu or skip chapters)?

I can't seem to figure out how to enable the DVD ripping function: There's nothing in the Menu Editor in regards to it and I'm seeing nothing in GameEx.ini, even after putting Handbrake_CLI in the GameEx directory. Is there something I'm missing?

I updated my MPC's theme recently. Mostly layout fixes (For the 4:3 mode in particular), added a Daphne background and reduced the overall theme size by a few MB.

I do. However, it kind of sucks having the Jukebox cut off, the jarring switch from GameEx and having to use mouse emulation for an onscreen keyboard.

I was wondering if you would consider adding file manager functionality to GameEx. Perhaps something similar to the Library function, but could browse drives on the system (Instead of predefined media folders) with a context menu for things like Copy, Cut, Paste, Delete, etc. I currently have a file manager called NexusFile V set up on my media PC, but having basic file management would be very nice to have within GameEx itself.