Draco1962

I am interested! BTW, check out snaps from my latest themes in the user submitted themes thread and tell me what ya think!

I am almost finished with my latest theme "Carbon & Steel." It is in a widscreen 1680x1050 format. I decided to go with something a little more unified, simple, and crisp. I've gone for carbon fiber for the background with banner and frames having a steel appearance in foreground files. Most icons have been done using a "steel plate" upon which the game system logos have an embossed appearance, while others are from some icon sets I found using steel with black inlays. I have attached a few sample images - please take a look and tell me what you think. I hope to have everythng cleaned-up and ready to upload by the weekend.

Can you tell us what brand/model light guns you are using? Are you using an interface other than USB connected to yoru light guns? Also, since you are trying to use them through a 64-bit program, have you checked to see if the manufacturer has a 64-bit driver?

Any time you are ready, just drop a line in one of the forum threads and I will likely see it.

I've been working on a new theme. Since it isn't a variation on a previous theme created it is taking some time to get things set the way I want them to be. Learning new editing tricks and effects with GIMP (Thanks to Drakendoder) which has me going back and cleaning/re-doing a few screens. Experimenting with foreground images. I have put some emu screen examples in the User Submitted themes thread (please provide feeback!) and, since this is a WIP all are subject to change. Someone mentioned the Dark Side... can I join? What Jedi powers are required? Can we do the chokie-thingy? "That is not the frontend you have been looking for..."

Thanks for the tip - will try it out! I don't care for the white outline either. Also have it on the Pac Man character. These are mock-ups and not final product. Ultimately doing it all for myself (as we all do) but wanted some feedback. The top banners and character graphics on the lower-left are forground images and I am using the carbon-fiber (and eventually some other elements) as the background. .:. EDIT - I found a tutorial for the complete steps for those using GIMP located here.

Thanks! I have always had that feature on and never thought twice about it!

When you click on a game, you should have options to Play This Game, Marquee, Flyer, Cabinet, Title, View Controls, and Add To Favorites - hope this is of help!

Hey Celly, Not sure if you got an answer to your question, but if you click on the "Change View" a few times, you can cycle through having a video snap in the background, still snap view, Text List, and video snap view. Hope that helps!

Here are a few examples of emu screens I have been toying with (FINALLY figured out how to display foreground images so now toying with GIMP and Them Editor). I have to give some credit to Vsilvalopes for his theme. I like the idea of the top banner he has in his theme, so I am adopting the concept. I will likely do some different things with the image and list fields, but have yet to finalize the layout. Normally, I would take a theme that appealed to me and backwards engineer it some and then build it back up with my ideas. This time I am going to pretty much build it from scratch. As I progress I will post more. Let me know what you think so far. .:.EDIT Cleaned up the borders a bit thanks to the tips from Drakendoder.

Wha VM client are you using? VMs are generally OK for most things but they tend to be finicky with regards to video adn sound card drivers. I have had best luck with VMWare Player. The main problem I see is video drivers as they are not updated as often as they are in the native OS on an actual PC. You must also be able to "share" your PC's drives with the virtual machine and the C:\ path in the VM is not the same as the host PC. This will require you to map a drive to the location on the host PC and will likely be assigned drive E: or later (D: being reserved for the host pc CD-ROM drive or clone drive).

I checked out the links that GreatFlash posted and the pics are great! Again, the offer stands if you have any questions regarding Gimp. I think you will find it much more powerful than paint.net and, for free, it can't be beat. I am still learning myself but they do have a great online help secition and there are quite a few places where people that use it have created blogs and tutorials - that's how I picked up a lot of what I learned. There are quite a few great images found within the various user themes and downloads thrown together over the years. Some not so great and some you just have to dig like Hell to find them on the Web. You have a very ecclectic selection from what I have seen over the last few months and I am sure that there is a need out there for them!

Have you tried installing your programs within another path? I use Win 7 and found this was necessary due to UAC and installing to paths that Windows recognizes as protected so that I do not have to Run as Administrator.

The fine folks at Rogue Synapse have created a fully functional Last Starfighter game based upon the "training" game featured in "The Last Starfighter." It has been available for a while, but I thought I would put a link here for anyone wanting to add to their cabs. For those of you running Vista or Windows 7, you will need to "Run as Administrator" to install the program. Additionally, you will run into an error due to missing d3drm.dll - this file is no longer provided beyond XP. You can download a copy here and simply copy it to your Last Star Fighter game directory. I have to admit to being blown away by their recreation of the cab used in the movie (the original was destroyed in a studio warehouse fire that was also responsible for destroying the original "Back to the Future" outdoor set and robotic "King Kong"). They have plans, marquees, sideart, fonts, etc. for anyone wanting to create a unique game cab. They have also created "Space Paranoids" based upon the game written by "Flynn" in "TRON!" It is designed to run in a cabinet with a MAME type interface via iPAC accoridng to the site. They have also provided some information on the cabinet for the game along with side art and marquee Enjoy!

didn't have one - found one, cleaned it up a bit...

Yeah, what Adultery said.

I liked this one a little better .. and if you go back to my original TRS-80 response, I cleaned and center cropped the image.

TRS-80... .:.EDIT - Cleaned up and cropped to center

Some pics for those emulating the Atari XL/XE 8-bit Computers...

There are quite a few tutorials for the program. The main thing to remember is most images are single layer, so you will have to add an alpha channel for the transparency. There are several selection tools that are quite useful - fuzzy select (great for the initial croping of the areas surrounding an image (if a solid color), Magic Lasso whic allows doe more free-form trimming, and color select (great if there is a a lot of one color to be rid of - but have to be careful if colors in image are close to colors surrounding. Once you get a handle on it, cleanup is relatively fast with a good image with decent contrast between subject and background. Will be glad to help as much as I can. Celly uses Photoshop (as does Vsilvalopes) and both are quite skilled from what I have seen so I am sure either will jump in occasionally. I was going to use Photoshop, but have been on an open-source kick as of late (migrating from MS Office to OpenOffice. I won't go so far as converting to Linux (I'm a Microsoft kinda guy and used to dealing with it - warts and all).

Tom - I have been tinkering with using AVI files in place of a logo or background and have encountered a few crashes. The AVI does not display (a black box appears instead). It is happening intermittently and not generating an error log as such. The AVI files will run with other apps with no problems. Followign is the error message generated by Windows: Description: Stopped working Problem signature: Problem Event Name: APPCRASH Application Name: GameEx.exe Application Version: 1.0.0.0 Application Timestamp: 4c216bdf Fault Module Name: cdgvid.ax Fault Module Version: 0.0.0.0 Fault Module Timestamp: 4194dd28 Exception Code: c0000005 Exception Offset: 0000250b OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.48 Locale ID: 1033 I am running Win 7 Pro - 64-bit with latest updates on a Quad Core with 8 GB RAM and nVidia GeForce 8800 GT 512 MB with latest drivers. GameEx version is 11.07. Let me know if I can provide you with anything else that may be of help.

Here ya go - png file with alpha! BTW, I am still using GIMP (Open source equivalent to Photoshop). I have barely scratched the surface of what it is capable. Comes in both 32 and 64-bit flavors and is free!

I like how you think - maybe a GameEx screensaver is what I was actually thinking of. I haven't seen much recent action in the MAME screensaver forum. It would be nice to have one that features (on a screensaver scale, nmind you) the flexibility to select from MAME and other emus to match those that we run through GameEx.

Will the MAME Screensaver be updated to take advantage of the changes within GameEx regarding DirectDraw?

Once again, you pull one out of the hat! Thanks!