Atari2600guru

Thank you, Draco1962! So far that has worked perfectly using the Windows Task Scheduler!

One other clue: if I wait for 60 seconds after starting windows before launching GameEx, then it always works fine. If I launch GameEx in the first 20ish seconds after windows starts, then it fails as stated above.

thanks! That worked well. I was thinking you had to be connected to the internet to update the game list.

Background: I have a dedicated arcade cabinet running GameEx Arcade. It is disconnected from the internet because I don't want various distractions like pop-up windows and things like software updates to happen and mess things up. I just want to power on and run games with it largely transparent that it is running windows. I have about 200 hand-selected MAME games. Here's my request: I would like to be able to have some option of hiding the adult games from the game list without having to connect to the internet and download a new version of the game list. (I think that is required now, please correct me if I'm wrong.) Most of the time I want them there, but occasionally young kids from conservative parents will be using the machine and I'd like to have some software setting where it will just hide those titles from the existing list. Thanks for your consideration! John

Ok. Here are the GameEx Arcade files. Behavior is slightly different in GameEx Arcade: When I power up and launch GameEx Arcade things look okay for about 15 seconds. Then the screen just goes black. I can still move my joystick and hear the sounds of the menu scrolling and selecting things, but the screen is black. If I hit Alt-Tab then I get two options: One that is "GameEx hide OS" and one that is "GameEx Arcade". If I use tab to select GameEx Arcade then it shows me the menu again. Everything will then work fine until I restart windows. Test cases I've tried: 2 out of 2 times it did this when power cycling 1 out of 1 times it did this on windows restart without power cycle When I used the technique above to recover and then just exited GameEx Arcade and relaunch GameEx Arcade it worked perfectly 3 out of 3 times. So it seems to be correlated with windows starting up. thanks for your help, Draco1962! GameEx.ini log.txt

I got sidetracked with getting all my hardware built and am back to getting all the software kinks worked out. I followed the advice above: moved mame to c:\mame and installed the latest version of GameEx arcade to c:\. I still get this issue. I did notice that sometimes if I jump straight into mame after a power cycle (bypassing GameEx), the MAME window minimizes itself spontaneously a few seconds after it starts. This will only happen once (per power cycle I think). When I hover the cursor over it on the task bar it says "MAME: No Driver Loaded [___...". Maybe this is related to why GameEx Arcade is doing the same thing. Is there a log file from MAME I could post that may help debug this? Thanks, John

Thanks! I'll attempt to do that as soon as I can.

GameEx.inilog.txt The error may have changed slightly with the new install. This time the screen went black, but I could recover by doing a alt-tab and selecting GameEx. A second problem has plagued me lately and it happened to also show up in this instance. The menu scrolls rapidly as soon as the menu appears. Any idea how to fix that one too? Thanks, John

GameEx.inilog.txt Hi. I have an intermittent issue (happens roughly 50% of the time) where I turn on my computer, launch GameEx Arcade and everything is fine where I can see the menu for a few seconds, then everything goes black (completely blank screen). From that point on the screen is blank, but I can hear menu navigation sounds. ctrl-alt-del brings up a visible screen, but if I use task manager to switch to any screen they all create a completely blank screen. The only way to recover is to reboot the computer. This may or may not be related to a similar issue I'm having when I launch MAME (also ~50% intermittent). A second or two after launching mame UI and seeing the list of games, the MAME window will suddenly minimize. If I then just double click on the minimized icon in my task bar everything works fine. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, John

Ok. Thanks, guys.

Hi. I have a unique control panel layout. If I create images of my control panel with the proper buttons identified for each game, can I have GameEx Arcade show the images I created when loading each game? I can create one image per game manually. I watched the videos about CPWizBiz and that looked a bit more complicated than I wanted. I have already defined all my button mapping in MAME.

Hi Tom. I was able to figure out my issues with the game list. I have to say after playing with GameEx Arcade for a few hours I'm now liking the interface a lot. I don't think I'd change anything even if I could! Clearly you put a lot of thought into the interface and setup wizard. I do have a few open questions: 1) My understanding is that in order to get Dragon's Lair and Space Ace working I'd need to get the Daphne emulator. Is that correct? If so, would those games show up in my regular list of games in GameEx Arcade? 2) I have a few games that are being misclassified. Is there a way for me to fix that? For instance "Elevator Action Returns" and "Bubble Bobble" are showing up in the spinner games list, but they use joysticks. 3) I am running MAME version 222. In the MAME GUI there are about 5 of my favorite games that are showing up grayed out, but they run just fine. These games that are grayed out in the MAME GUI do not show up in the GameEx Arcade GUI even though I selected the 2 options in the setup wizard to use every game even if they are imperfect. Do you know what might be wrong? Thanks, John

Hmm. Is there a way to tell it which games to put into each category? On a related note: I'm getting some games showing up in my list that are not MAME ROMs that I've installed in MAME (and they don't show up in the MAME GUI). Is there a way to remove them?

I'm setting up an arcade cabinet and installed GameEx Arcade. I had read that GameEx lets you customize the theme and had many user-created themes that could be chosen from. Somewhere I had read that you could do this after registering. I'm now a lifetime member, but I'm unable to find any of the theme editors or download theme options in the setup wizard. I have ~200 mame ROMS that are working in mame and I just want to create a GameEx interface with my own categories and change the circular wheel style game selection to something like a vertical list. Any help on this would be appreciated. Thanks, John

Oh, so embarrassing! Stupid mistake on my part. While transferring data from my test PC to my cabinet's PC I accidentally left the ROM .zip files out of my MAME directory. Did that right before trying GameEx for the first time, so I thought my issue was with GameEx. GameEx works beautifully once I got the ROM .zips back in the right spot.