Draco1962

Milesady - you can go here to see the most recent minimum requirements for GameEx. As you can see, you don't really need much to do a whole lot with this front-end. Likely you can find a decent used desktop system through the classifides that will provide you with more than enough capability. If you are so inclined you can build your own and add-on as you progress. If not, then get someone you trust that can look at the used offerings near you so you don't get scammed into buying something that will not meet your needs and cannot be easily upgraded. I would definitely pay-heed to Tom's suggestion of using an installed video card and not onboard (part of the motherboard) video. In some cases the motherboard may have additional RAM for the GPU for the onboard video, but you will find this mainly with higher-end laptops (in my experience anyways). My desktop is a quad core CPU with Windows 7 64-bit with 8 GB of RAM, with a512MB nVidia 8800GTS video card. It is actually overkill for most everything I use it for (web surfing, photo editing, GameEx, MCE, etc.). I also have an older Toshiba P4 with 512 MB RAM and onboard nVidia GPU with 256MB RAM and 32-bit XP Pro SP3 installed (which I may use as a "portable" to run GameEx for media center and emulating arcade & some older console ROMs only as the HDD is not big enough to house much more than that).

I agree with Tom regarding stripping down to the barest essentials with device drivers and services, regardless of the Windows version. with an HTPC, a dvd drive is a definite requirement, while running a game cab soley for emu gaming, you can probably get by with and external drive connected via USB when you need to make necessary updates. Other considerations are selection anti-virus/malware products that assume a smaller memory "footprint" without sacrificing effectiveness (assuming you are going for a full HTPC as opposed to a standalone cab with minimal or no web access - in which case, would negate the need for anti-virus/malware as any updates could be scanned and moved via an external drive to it). IMO, I don't know that there can be a one-size fits all installation as each person's needs vary. Variances may be dictated by OS, hardware, etc. That is why I was attracted to to GameEx as a frontend. I have flexibility built-in to make it whatever I want it to be (HTPC with ability to retro game, etc or stand-alone game cab with or without jukebox, or... well, I think you get the idea. It may be possible to come up with some basic configuration recomendations based upon broader build categories and more specific configurations within these categories based upon OS and/or hardware considerations. Such would make my job easier in developing my system, having spent quite a few hours pouring through the forum threads for ideas, workarounds, and troubleshooting advice.

Hi! I am thoroughly impressed! I must say that I like the new (darker) theme the best. The lines are very clean and the layout appears to have been given a lot of thought to function and ease of use. When you finish would you mind "zipping" your theme and placing it somewhere with a link so that others of us may give it a go? Any of the game systems you are so inclined to make screens for as well...

I have found it to behave even better with Win 7. A quick question for ya, what flavor of Win 7 are you running? I am running on Win 7 Pro 64-bit. You may find that there are 64-bit versions of emus that will run better, even though Win7 does a fine job of supporting 32-bit programs.r example, I use the GUI version of Mame (previously known as Mame32 but now under MameUI with both 32-bit and 62-bit versions). I haven't tried to shell it as this is my desktop I use for other things. I have an older Gateway system that I will likely make into my Mame cab PC once the children move out once again. I was going to use my Toshiba laptop as my Mame machine as kind of a portable console, but decided otherwise.

I am sure it is a fine system, however, Win 7 X64 has been out for retail since 10/2009. Did you do an upgrade to Win 7 x64 from XP/Vista or complete install due to an x386 version of one of these installed prior? In either case, there may still be some 32-bit drivers or the like that may be contributing to the slow exit as & switches back and forth processing data between 64-bit native and 32-bit emulated modes. Of course, I could be totally wrong... it happens!

I am not sure how well GameEx works with multi-core or x64 systems although I am sure Tom has tested it thoroughly on them. One thing you may want to try is running GameEx dedicated to one CPU core. If you google it there are quite a few links on the subject, and probably a program to do so. Otherwise, you can open task manager and select GameEx in the Processes tab, right click and then select "Set Affinity" and choose the core you wish to dedicate to it. I have found this to be useful on a few older programs and emus that do not play well with multiple cores.