nullPointer

Oh my gosh Riffman, I'm so sorry to hear that. It sounds like your mom was one hell of a fighter. I take some solace in knowing that both our moms no longer have to suffer through grueling medical procedures as a result of illness. They can be at peace now. My thoughts and prayers are with you and yours as well. Take care of yourself my friend.

Indeed there is my good man. The setting you are looking for is the Controls Path entry found on the Advanced Emulator Setup screen in the Setup Wizard. Specifically this setting is intended to display a picture of the controls for the emulator being launched. If we're talking about MAME, you'll want to have a look at the Enable Panel Viewer setting on the Enable / Disable Features screen or alternately the CPWizard settings (which take a bit more configuration, but provide some awesome results) all found on the MAME Settings screen in the Setup Wizard.

So cool that the sale has been extended! Thanks Tom!

For the purposes of this discussion I don't think it matters too much whether you use r136 or r150. If we're making a distinction it can be likened to MAME in which r136 is considered to be the most recent stable build whereas r150 could be considered as a "u build". I'm not on my machine at the moment, but I believe I'm still using r136 (mainly the result of being a bit lazy - I haven't taken time to build nullDC from source and I'm generally adverse to grabbing a pre-compiled dev build). At any rate I compared your nulldc.cfg against my own copy which I've verified as working. Other than small inconsequential differences the only thing that stood out to me was a difference in Broadcast Format. I have Broadcast Format set as 0 whereas I see that you have it set as 4 (I don't currently have access to nullDC so I'm not able to see what the difference is, but nonetheless it's a noteworthy difference). Also it may be worth considering that if you're forcing a certain Broadcast Format, you may want to adjust the System Region setting accordingly. As noted before, this may boil down to settings that work on one machine may not necessarily work well on another.

Hi cnells Just to double check, are you sure about that version number for nullDC? I believe the most recent compiled stable release is still nullDC 1.0.4 r136 (which is admittedly getting a bit long in the tooth at this point). Alternately there are SVN versions which you can build from source if you choose (the most recent being r150 which is still more than a year old). Are you using a version built from source using the SVN repository? It's probably not worth mentioning given that you're a bit of an emulation veteran at this point, but as always remember that PC processing power does not equate to a 1:1 level in terms of the processing power of the machines being emulated. DICE has more hearty system requirements than most other emulators that come to mind and it's a Pong emulator! (among other things) Having said that, I would agree that given your system specs it seems like you should be able to run nullDC without too much trouble. I'm guessing you're right that it has something to do specifically with the way you have nullDC configured (although that discussion can always get a bit dicey being that what works on one machine may not work well on another). Posting the contents of your nulldc.cfg might be able to shed some light on the issue (found in the same directory as your nullDC executable).

Thanks for sharing your solution Carny_Priest! I'm sure that this information may prove very useful to other users.

Happy birthday Stephen! Cool hat man!

I don't believe this error is complaining that it can't find the game itself, (otherwise it would simply be raidenb.zip that was missing (or whatever)). This error appears to be saying that it can't find the constituent parts of raidenb.zip. So for instance if you opened up raidenb.zip you would find that it consists of several smaller files many of which reflect specific hardware components from the original arcade board. I'm thinking more and more that this looks like an issue in which the version of your ROM set is not a match to your version of MAME. It would be a worthwhile exercise to audit your set using ClrMamePro, ROM Center, or similar in order to verify.

That looks awesome Krak! Brilliant attention to detail as usual.

Thanks for sharing a creative solution to a troublesome problem thurmansevolution!

If Steam is running and you are logged in at the same time GameEx is running I believe that GameEx will automatically list your Steam games. The ability to completely disable Steam functionality has been requested on a couple of occasions, but to my knowledge has not been implemented. FWIW I think it would be worthwhile to request this feature, although this may be something that comes included with Evolution right out of the box.

Thanks to each and every one of you for your kind gestures, condolences, thoughts, prayers, and positive energy. My mom had been battling an unusual form of inoperable lung cancer (BAC) for 6 years through chemo therapy, vitamin regimens, and various other means. She would have wanted me to point out that she was a non-smoker (or at least for many, many years). At any rate, it was a tough go of it and she put up one hell of a fight. In many ways, I would not be here on these forums if not for my mom (… beyond the obvious reasons). On Christmas morning of 1987 I received a shiny new NES console from my mom. It couldn’t have been easy on a single mom’s salary, but she managed it. I had been exposed to computer games in the homes of others, and had spent some time playing console games at friends houses (notably an old Atari 2600 at my best friend’s house), but it was this console that would open a virtual world to me. Along with the pack in titles of Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt (separate carts no less!), I also received ExciteBike and The Legend of Zelda that year. My mom and I found a common bond over the Legend of Zelda over the course of the winter. I would play in the evenings after finishing home work, and she would play later into the night after I went to bed. The next day we would compare notes on our in-game discoveries. She even went so far as having the pack-in overworld map laminated through her work so that we could use a dry erase marker to make notes. It’s funny how games become tied to memories like that, and through them that we share common experiences. Thanks once again to all my friends here on these forums, you guys really are like an extended family to me. An extended family of gaming that all started for me with my mom, and branched outward over the years in strange and wonderful ways. Thanks mom.

Happy Birthday Helpman!

No worries at all man. In truth I consider the staff and regulars around here to be something of a second family, and as a result I feel regretful if I'm away for too long. Unfortunately my Mom isn't doing real well at the moment, and so that's where my heart and mind has to be for the time being. OTOH you guys provide a sense of normalcy (as crazy as that sounds ), so it's nice to be able to retreat and lurk about on here as the opportunity presents itself.

Heh, pretty much man. I got back from vacation on Sunday only to immediately be knocked on my arse with some pretty serious RL stuff. I'll be back man, but yeah ... for now I'm kinda just the eye in the sky as it were.

Ugh. Yeah, all the more reason to be a bit suspicious.

Upon returning from vacation last night and turning on the computer I noticed that the Steam client immediately wanted to update. I'm wondering if this is an instance in which an update to the Steam client is having a ripple effect in terms of how GameEx needs to parse Steam data. It may of course be completely unrelated, but the timing does seem to fit. I'll see if I can dig up any information to that end.

Yep. Sorry buddy. Uh ... See you at the Christmas sale?

Hi Turkee32 Pinball Arcade is somewhat difficult to run through PinballX, but that difficulty is due to inconsistencies within Pinball Arcade rather than an issue with PinballX. I think these guys have come the closest to getting it to run somewhat predictably through PinballX, but even then you can see that the results are not quite perfect. Please refer to the linked thread for further details.

I can second Draco's suggestion as I use the same cooler on my rig (I5 650 Clarkdale OC'd to 3.9 GHz), with nary a heat issue (and my case is relatively cramped). Do you plan to OC at all? That can have some degree of impact as to what cooler you're looking at. That I7 of yours should have some great potential as an overclocker, but likewise may become a real hot tamale in the process.

In a general sense it is absolutely possible to create different emulators with different plugin settings, and group them together into the same game list using the Emulator Groups feature. But ... Project64 will not allow you to do this. The problem with Project64 (and other emulators like it) is that the plugin settings actually live in your registry. So no matter how many "installations" you have, modifying plugin settings in one will affect all of them. It's one (of several) reasons that I have a bit of bias towards emulators that store settings in this way. ePSXe is like this as well, but at least there you have the option of using ePSXecutor to manage per game settings. PCSX2 has PCSX2Lunch and PCSX2Bonus for the same purpose. But AFAIK there has never been a similar manager released for Project64. Having said that, Project64 isn't necessarily the be all and end all of Nintendo64 emulators either. I run three separate N64 emulators on my rig (Project64, 1964, and Mupen64+) grouped together using emulator groups and have had excellent results. I recommend the use of Bighead’s N64 Multiple Game Configuration List as a guide to determine which emulator/plugin configuration will work best for any given game.

Ya know I was thinking about this a bit more ... and there is another option. You could always burn your ISOs to physical media, and play them directly from disc (as delineated here). Not only to you forego some extra loading time, but you afford a certain "old school charm" in terms of manually loading game discs. (OTOH the physical space necessary for such a setup might become an issue, so naturally YMMV)

I honestly think those are the sum total of your options. Reduce size by reducing the number of files, or reduce size by means of compression at which point you'll have a slight delay while loading. There are ways to mask the delay to some extent. For one thing you can display your control mapping while the image is uncompressed. Just use the Controls path option to link up an appropriate image of your controller mapping. You can also display a message while the disc is being uncompressed. Use the Help Text feature to leverage this as well. In this case I might suggest that the text reads, "You're going to have to sit and spin while this disc is uncompressed. If you don't like it, please use this time to go home and make your own emulation system. Thank you for your patience."