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It's time once again to celebrate the natal anniversary of one of our elder statesmen in the GameEx community, the one and only Krakerman! You may know him from his tireless dedication to various iterations of his fantastic GameRoom theme, or you may simply know him from his long tenure here on our forums. What you may not know is that Krakerman is a fantastic baker - I mean world class stuff. Krak - dude I bet those artisan breads make one mean hoagie amirite!? I can't wait to see what you made yourself for a birthday cake. Remember to share with your GameEx homies! All kidding aside though, I hope you'll join me in wishing Krakerman a very Happy Birthday. Here's to another great year my man!

Thanks for sharing your work around Junky! Nice detective work! Persistence pays off in the end.

Glad to hear everything worked out for you Vacheatuba!

I have to apologize Krak as this is not something I run (no second monitor), but if it were me I'd start with this post to see how far I got with that. (Granted this is for PinballX, but the Launch Before stuff should be the same I would think). Have there been any drastic changes to Future DMD between versions 1.3 and 1,4?

@conundrum2k - Thanks so much for taking the time to post this information. I know that this aspect of GameEx has occasionally been tough for users to get running in the past. I'll likely be referring users back to this thread for the purpose of future troubleshooting. Thanks again!

Heh, yeah Han pretty much summed it up. Don't let that talk you out of watching the show though! It's a brilliant program (and at the very least it cleverly ret-cons that awful third movie completely out of the cannon - that alone is worth the price of admission ). Heck it's good enough that I don't mind just imagining what happened after the second season.

Hi Vacheatuba, and welcome to the GameEx forums I don't personally have a Blu-Ray player in my system, so we may need to get a few further details from someone using this functionality. I imagine you'll want to refer to the DVD and and BLURAY Settings section on the HTPC / Multimedia Settings screen in the Setup Wizard. Try setting Enable DVD-BLURAY From Disk to Yes and be sure you installed ISO support when installing GameEx. Please note that this is a registered feature of GameEx. This may also depend on the codecs you have installed on your system. Several of us use the Shark 007 pack. Short of that you could still probably tinker with the Use External Player setting and make it work through VLC.

Ooooh ,,, S as in Sound FX. I took you to mean S as in Special FX. All that vigorous eye rubbing must be starting to effect my brain. I guess it really did blow my mind ...

I tried to feed GameEx some birthday cake ... but it just got smeared all over my monitor. sigh ... Happy Birthday Anyway GameEx!

Probably the best suggestion yet. It can be a pain to roll back MAME along with your entire ROM set, but in the end I imagine you'll have the most satisfactory results.

Multiple SFX while browsing GameEx? You could always try rubbing your eyes really hard after loading GameEx. That should produce some nice glowing bursts as well as an interesting "fade in and out" effect. It'll blow your mind. Sorry - couldn't resist. Seriously though I have no idea whatsoever.

Yeah I'm more or less the same way. And yet the wives never seem to understand that there's a perfectly logical answer to the question, "How many frickin' computers do you need?!"

I think your recommendations are pretty much spot on. I suppose it depends on which component of the system is actually responsible for the lag, but there's really no way of knowing that. I would say with a processor of that vintage I'd probably just upgrade rather than replace it with a slightly better processor of the same vintage. My guess is that you're only ever going to get so far with that socket anyway. Upgrading the CPU would pretty much mean a complete system upgrade, but I still would rather do that than throw money down on a new CPU for an aging legacy socket. I realize that replacing the system is probably not an option (hey none of us are made of money ). But I've gone gone down the road of trying to keep an aging system afloat by replacing aging hardware, and to my mind you reach a certain point where it stops being cost effective. So speaking personally I'd probably be down for replacing RAM and maybe GPU depending on price (I'm guessing this is an AGP slot at which point I'd have to give it the same sort of scrutiny as a replacement CPU - is it cost effective and/or worth it?) This isn't to say I'm some sort of "you must have the newest and best gear" snob. I still have operational legacy systems in active duty, they're just more relegated to file storage and retrieval than they are for gaming and media.

Well more RAM is never a bad idea per se (at least until you start getting close to the allowable limit of your OS/architecture), and RAM tends to be fairly cheap these days. I'd say it's a good idea to get more with one caveat (more on that in a sec). You'll want to make sure you're getting RAM that's compatible with your motherboard. So make sure that your RAM matches the slot(s) on your mobo, and further you'll want to be sure that your mobo and/or CPU supports the speed of RAM you select (I mention both your mobo and your CPU since sometimes the memory controller resides on your mobo and sometimes it's in your CPU - I'd need to look at the documentation on your specific CPU to determine which is the case). So the caveat ... I'm pretty sure you mentioned you're using integrated graphics on your motherboard. If that's the case the integrated graphics are most likely sharing a common memory pool with the rest of the system. In that case more RAM will definitely help. If you're using a graphics card with dedicated graphics memory, then it may be your graphics memory that needs a bump up (read: you'll need a new graphics card).

Awesome! Glad to hear you got everything sorted coinheaven. Well done! Driver problems are just the worst.

I split this topic from the User Submitted Configs, Map Files, Wrappers and Databases thread so we wouldn't drive too far off topic. Rather than using a map file, I believe that by default the MAME list in GameEx is populated via the [Arcade] Arcade (Mame) database located in the ...\GameEx\DATA\EMULATORS directory.

Hi Felix I would suggest taking a look at one of the quality Map File generation utilities available. It always seems like I forget one or the other when I offer this advice, but the two that I always remember are Map File Magician by Tempest, and Map File Maker by Adultery. Apologies to anyone I might be forgetting here! These utilities will automate the process of generating your own map files, and will give you a granular level of control over the contents of the those files.

Awesome News Mike! Well done man. You got this!

I think it's mostly still current. I would swap around some of the suggestions, but I like weird stuff, so I might very well have swapped around some of the suggestions even at the time. Also bear in mind that for some systems (IMO) there's actually no one best emulator, so you wind up using a few different ones depending on the game (N64 is a big one here, but I also use a few different PSX emulators as well). Plugin systems throw a whole new wrinkle in terms of these suggestions (again I have to mention N64 here). Here's the modifications that I myself would make to the above list as of today. [Arcade] Arcade (ZiNc) - No Rating: As of today MAME emulates ZN-X systems just fine on modern systems. ZiNc no longer has a home on any of my systems. It's still good for older systems. [Console] Atari 5200 (kat5200) - Good: (if not Best) This is what I use for 5200. It's got a couple hiccups here and there, but that's pretty much par for the course. [Console] Atari 7800 (ProSystem) - Best: Hands down my favorite 7800 emulator. [Console] NEC TurboGrafx 16 (MagicEngine) - Good [Console] NEC TurboGrafx 16 (Mednafen) - Best: I swapped these ratings. There will definitely be those who disagree with this swap, but that's my experience. Seems to me Mednafen receives more regular updates and development, making it at least as good if not better than MagicEngine. All other factors being equal, the fact that MagicEngine is not free puts Mednafen in the lead for me. The only thing MagicEngine offers over Mednafen is (an admittedly pretty cool) GUI interface (not a factor when run through GameEx) [Console] NEC TurboGrafx CD (MagicEngine) - Good [Console] NEC TurboGrafx CD (Mednafen) - Best: Same swap as above, for the same reasons. [Console] Nintendo SNES (ZSNES) - No Rating [Console] Nintendo SNES (bsnes/Higan) - Best: Yeah, I drank the kool-aid on this one. It might be tricky to configure correctly, but it has cycle accurate emulation. It's pretty rare that any other emulator offers that at all, SNES aside. From what I understand ZSNES is pretty well filled to the brim with game specific hacks. [Console] Sony Playstation (ePSXe) - Best [Console] Sony Playstation (pSX) - Good [Console] Sony Playstation (Xebra) - Good: At the time this list was originally compiled ePSXe hadn't received updates in many years. Now ePSXe is two full versions ahead of where it was when this list was made. It's pretty much the best Playstation emulator available right now (even giving Xebra a run for the money). pSX is still (and probably always will be) easier to configure. [HandHeld] Atari Lynx (Mednafen) - Best: I guess I'm kind of a Mednafen fan, but it simply emulates the systems it handles very well. Heck it even handles PSX emulation reasonably well (although it can't yet touch the ones mentioned above IMO). It is better than Handy for Lynx emulation at this point. [HandHeld] Nintendo Virtual Boy (Red Dragon) - Good [HandHeld] Nintendo Virtual Boy (Mednafen) - Best: Sounding like a broken record here ... There are also some changes I'd probably make to some of the emulated systems above that don't yet have ratings, but the above represent the changes I'd make as of today for the emulators with ratings.

Dude you're a genius! Well done. I'll have to plug your configuration into my system and give it a shot. I'm really glad to hear it's working! If you keep this up, you're going to have to change your name to Fix-it-Felix!

Thanks buddy! You're too kind! I've sent you a PM regarding beta testing. You're basically a project team member on SwitchDisc (test lead), so I really should have gotten this to you sooner. As always, thanks for helping me make SD better! That's awesome about your success with nullDC! I haven't looked at the SD thread yet so I'll have to check the details.

I definitely second Draco's suggestion of checking your mobo documentation. Many times the motherboard manufacturer will have a dedicated web page for all motherboards they manufacture from which you can download associated drivers. If you are unable to locate your motherboard documentation (and are unable to determine the model of your motherboard fro some reason), you might give CPU-Z a shot. I find that it displays system information in a more intuitive fashion than the Windows native utilities. If that doesn't work you could also try GPU-Z. It's another great utility, although it's very specialized so I don't use it all that often.

In the Steam client go to Steam > Settings (in the upper left of the screen). On the settings Screen you can modify Steam so that it doesn't start at boot up. I'd be curious to hear whether this problem is affecting a lot of users.

Too bad. I knew that ePSXe needed a SCSI, I couldn't remember with Fusion. Are you opposed to using Fusion to natively load discs? My disc images are all cue/bin but (to my ear) the audio sounds fine when I load them directly with Fusion.