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I split this post from the thread in order to maintain the focus of a single topic per thread. The new thread can be found here.

Congratulations on this well deserved promotion Zeenon!

Congratulations tthurman! You're a first class citizen and representative of our fine community. It's now my distinct honor to welcome you aboard as an esteemed team member. Welcome to the team!

It's actually SQLite ... Check out this thread for some useful database editors.

IMGBurn is awesome. I've never specifically done what you're describing, but I have created CUE/BIN images from physical discs using ImgBurn. Generally ImgBurn will create a matched CUE/BIN set, depending on the format of your source disc (which is to say, if it creates a CUE/BIN image at all the separate files should be sympatico). You might check the file creation time stamp on your images to see whether they are the same for the BIN and CUE. If they are, I would say you're golden.

I'd like, if I may, to commemorate this day with a good ol' show tune. I mean ... who doesn't like show tunes!? (murmurings of, "Everyone that's actually sane ). Happy Birthday Darren, enjoy your day, may it reign in epic-ness for eternity!

If it doesn't support launching games from he command line (and it doesn't appear to from what I can tell), it's going to be significantly more difficult. Some sort of wrapper might not be out of the question, but I'm relatively certain no such thing currently exists for this frontend. I notice that in several places the author of DosBox Game Launcher mentions that it's heavily based on D-Fend Reloaded, which actually is fully compatible with GameEx. Is it an option for you to switch? I think you may be looking at a lot of work trying to integrate DosBox Game Launcher from what I can see. It's another example of trying to integrate a frontend into a frontend.

It should also be noted that updating your version of GameEx will not affect your settings in anyway. Your hard work is safe! Having said that, I suspect the problem you are describing likely has more to do with your installation of Mame than it does with GameEx (as B2K24 suggests). Category.ini is directly responsible for sorting your roms into their associated categories. If you're having problems with your categories parsing correctly it will likely be directly related to this file, or more accurately the relationship between this file and your version of Mame. Bear in mind that Category.ini will (and does) change over time from one version of Mame to the next. You'll want to be sure that you have a category.ini that is appropriate for your Mame version. It's not so much a question of whether GameEx should use it, as it is that GameEx does use it. It's definitely worth a shot. Even if it doesn't fix your issue, we will be able to more effectively help you identify the problem (as Draco points out). Without updating, our most reliable answer to this question will be, "maybe?". Don't worry though, updating GameEx will not impact your settings that you've worked hard on. The other thing I would strongly consider is trying it out with a different version of Mame. To me, pre-compiled versions of Mame are always a dicey proposition, partly because you don't know what changes were made to the source code before compilation. If you're definitely interested in the benefits of using a custom compiled version, I would strongly suggest looking into compiling your own. Mame Compiler 64 is a great place to start. Compiling Mame is something that sounds big and scary, until you actually do it, at which point you'll wonder what all the fuss was about (particularly when you leverage a tool like Mame Compiler 64).

Heh, wouldn't you know it; u-man already summed up the topic of using RetroArch Mame through GameEx right here. Some of what he says covers the ground we've already discussed in this thread, but among other things, it's interesting he contends that the hlsl shaders available through regular ol' Mame are every bit as good if not better than those available through RetroArch. It's definitely worth a read if you're interested.

That was my first initial thought as well, but RetroArch really is a bit of a hybrid between emulator and frontend. It runs other 'emulators' so to speak, but the emulator cores bundled in with RetroArch also can't be run independently of RetroArch (if that makes any sense). In some ways RetroArch is most akin to MESS except that it's built from separate emulator modules that rely on RetroArch for functionality. Each emulator core bundled in with RetroArch is actually something of a custom build for that emulator. That's how and why RetroArch is capable of enabling special functionality not included in the 'standard' builds of those emulators. In some cases this also allows bug fixes to be built into the RetroArch emulator cores that are not present in the normal builds. Indeed based on the OPs comments it sounds like RetroArch Mame is capable of using hlsl shaders not supported under standard Mame. I suspect that since there's no actual mame.exe, GameEx may have some difficulty with this one using Mame integrated functionality, but I might also be way off base. ... Or it may be able to run games, but not verify ROMs and that sort of thing. Or maybe the Mame dlll core can be used as a surrogate for the mame.exe. I really have no idea.

@DazzleHP: Well FWIW I'm not entirely sure that RetroArch actually can be treated like a standard MAME distribution, so I think your answer is as good as any at the present time. At the very least it's going to be a bit of an oddball Mame config to configure via the integrated Mame functionality. How much so (or if it's even possible) remains to be seen ...

I was curious about this as well, and I may have to give it a shot. RetroArch doesn't come packaged as/with a Mame executable, but rather a "Mame core" which is invoked through a RetroArch command. TBH I've never tried the Mame component of RetroArch though, so I'd be somewhat interested to have a go with it.

CCleaner is awesome, as is Revo Uninstaller for cleaning up registry settings immediately following uninstalling software.

Hi Sigma I don't believe there are any settings to choose what Codecs to use. The codecs are part and parcel of your system itself. So if you install the Shark codecs, PinballX will be using the Shark codecs. In fact everything on your system will be using the Shark codecs (or at least everything that requires media playback). If you uninstall the Shark pack your entire system will revert back to using default codecs. Shark is pretty great about leaving the system exactly how it found it upon uninstalling (and not every codec pack will do this, so it's definitely a nice feature). The Shark codec pack itself has quite a bit of internal adjustments that you can make, but TBH I've never had issue with the default configuration.

It's a bit of a tricky question to answer and still stay on the proper side of the rules. There's never been an official release or port that I know of, but there have been a number of recreations. I'm afraid the best answer currently available on this one is the old "Google is your friend" reply. Sorry to be slightly less than helpful!

Seems like my last couple of posts have consisted primarily of click bait, but this article looks like it may be of valuable assistance to you Han: Fix a Failed WHS System Drive In that article he recommends my personal favorite cloning software CloneZilla. I've both backed up and recovered my systems using CloneZilla images, and I've never hit so much as a hitch. I know Acronis and Norton Ghost are perinnial favorites, but CloneZilla really is awesome, and even better it's totally free. I generally package it up with a live Linux distribution like TuxBoot, but it's just as easy to make a bootable disc out of it and boot from that. Hopefully that article contains some valuable nuggets of wisdom for you; I found it fairly interesting in its own right.

Your GameEx.ini would indeed provide a bit of useful information. Being that I'm not an LEDBlinky user, I'm getting rapidly out of my depth. I think we have a few LEDBlinky users who frequent the forums regularly, but your quickest means of resolution may indeed be communicating with arzoo directly. Just to confirm, have you double checked that you've configured the plugin correctly?

If the command works through a command console but fails to run via GameEx, you may have something misconfigured in GameEx. In this case it will be extremely helpful to take a look at your GameEx.ini, a copy of your GameEx log after having encountered the error, and possibly a copy of your runitgame.bat. This thread has the details on accessing that information. That information will reduce the amount of guesswork involved if GameEx is causing an issue. Thanks man!

So far I've had one huge score with it although admittedly it solved a problem that's fairly unique to my own setup. For a while now I've had Assassin's Creed II earmarked to start playing after Halloween. I use a Logitech F710 as my preferred controller. Among other things the F710 can change seamlessly between DirectInput and Xinput. At any rate, Assassin's Creed II would not recognize the controller as an Xinput device. And not only would the game not register the analogue component of the triggers, it wouldn't recognize the triggers at all. Even had that not been a huge issue, the default in-game mapping for the F710 was an absolute nightmare (and an irreconcilable one given that the R2 and L2 triggers are rather crucial to the gameplay in this game). So here I saw the perfect opportunity to put PGP through it's paces. PGP offers a larger number of pre-configured profiles, that ostensibly are supposed to auto-magically configure your controller for a given game. So I downloaded the Assassin's Creed II profile, and well ... it worked perfectly! Like beyond perfectly, I didn't have to remap anything within the game, and the triggers were even mapped as analogue inputs. So I gotta hand it to PGP, I was extremely pleased on that front. I'm still learning the ropes of the software, and I haven't spent a lot of time with it, but so far so good. The one thing that I'm still on the fence about is that I often prefer software that is weighted towards increased user control as opposed to automation. I probably just need to work in the program some more, and it really is a small knock, particularly when everything is working the way it should (which it currently is).

I've been curious about Pinnacle Game Profiler for a while. I'm a diehard Xpadder fan, but we have a few vocal supporters of PGP here on the forums (Krak I'm looking at you here), whose comments have piqued my interest on a few occasions. Namely I've long been interested in mapping the home button on my controller, which as you may know Xpadder does not (and likely will not ever) do. So as luck would have it, I happened to check out the PGP web site tonight and noticed that the profiler is currently 50% off. 20 bones always seemed a bit steep to me, particularly when Xpadder had me covered, but for $10 I'm more than willing to take this profiler for a test drive. I enjoy trying new tools and integrating them into my system, so who knows, maybe PGP will become my go to controller mapping software! At any rate I figured I'd pass it along for anyone else that was curious but like me was scared off by the price. I should note that the software is also available for free on a 20 day trial basis.

Hopefully we have some LEDBlinky users who might be able to provide some additional useful information, but in the meantime this thread seems extremely pertinent to your question (disregarding the HyperPin part). Based on the contents of that post you should be able to configure the audio animation as you desire, then enter the following command as the Launch Before setting for your external application "c:\some path\ledblinky\ledblinky.exe" audio.lwax This is as good a time as any to mention that the author of LEDBlinky (arzoo) is a pretty regular contributor over on the BYOAC forums. You might be able to be advised directly by him if you pose your question over there.

Hi hypomonk, and welcome to the forums! When you copied over your existing setup, did you rerun the registry key you received with your purchase of GameEx? If not, you'll need to do that. If you did do that already, you may need to contact Tom directly. There have been some significant changes to GameEx registration process, so it's possible that you may have hit a wrinkle somewhere. If that is the case, Tom will get you sorted out in no time flat.

Looks great Draco! It's great to see you breating some life into a long running project like this. Well done!

I haven't tried it out yet, but I know DazzleHP has been over the moon about this game lately. Uh ... pun intended I guess? Any hoo, I bet Dazzle will have a few choice words about this game.

Glad to hear it worked out for you!