gamepimp

I just wanted to say that this program is saving me tons of time trying to rename movies and other artwork to match the MESS SoftList names of my roms. I have yet to find a program from Tempest that wasn't immensely useful. And this is no exception. Great work sir!

Congratulations!

Thx a million!

I have. But I'm not sure if MM can be changed to resolve this issue. I guess I just wanted to prepare for the worst case scenario that it can't be...

Wow! That's a bummer. Basically I won't be able to display artwork on those extra monitors until I find a solution to this problem. I looked at creating a .bat file to run MM. But I'm not sure how I can pass the variables of the template name and rom name to MM when the .bat file runs. Any thoughts?

I will ask Tempest about MM stealing focus. If nothing can be done about that program, I will consider the batch file option with delay that Tom mentioned. In the meanwhile, would I be able to get a copy of the previous version of GameEx.exe so I can swap that in and go back to when everything was working ok? LMK. Thx!

Is my only recourse to go back to the previous version of GameEx then? Unfortunately Marquee Magician is really my only option for displaying artwork on the additional monitors...

But wouldn't this have been an issue all along? Or is it possible that the latest changes in GameEx could have made it more susceptible to having the focus stolen?

I'm sad to report that this latest update is wreaking havoc with my setup. My computer boots into GameEx. Aside from my main monitor, I have a monitor for my marquee and one in my control panel. I launch Marquee Magician upon startup of a game to display artwork in those two monitors. Prior to 12.92, MM would load the artwork fairly quickly, usually before the emulator started running the game. Now, when I launch a game, the emulator will come up quickly and MM will take forever to load the artwork. Unfortunately, during the time that MM is doing its thing, the main monitor will go black with only the sound from the emulator coming thru. And in some instances, the emulator will actually minimize. Could this be a side effect of the new caching system? One other thing I've noticed about this issue is that after I exit out of GameEx, it's not running explorer.exe to bring up my desktop. I've attached my ini and log files to help with any triage. GameEx.txt log.txt

In MAME, you have to apply a patch the source code and then compile it for hi scores to save. It is the same patch that removes the nag screen from the intro of each game. It can be found here. I have successfully applied this patch to the MESS source code (which is actually now combined with the MAME code in a single package as of build 0.147) in order to remove the nag screen. So hopefully you could apply the patch to get the hi scores to stick as well. It's worth a shot, even to remove that darn nag screen. Mr. Do has a guide on compiling MAME/MESS here. Headkaze also has a pretty neat utility to compile here.

Yup, that did the trick. Changed that value to "false" and now I'm passing the name of the zip file (minus extension) by using this command: ume64.exe pce -cart [ROM] -joy -now. UME does not require unzipping of the archive to run the game. So this works like a charm. GameEx and Marquee Magician will both display the correct artwork as long as it matches the software list name of the rom. Unfortunately, there's no "easy" way for getting the Download Service Utility to recognize the software list name when matching up the artwork. But I have a relatively easy way of converting the games to the name of the actual rom file inside the archive for matching purposes and then converting them back when I have all the art downloaded. Thx Frequency and Null for ur help w/ this issue. I greatly appreciate it! BTW, my sets are "non-merged" so they only contain all the roms necessary to play that particular game (which is typically just a single rom).

So I played around with some variations in the command line. I tried "[ROMPATH]\[ROMFILE]", [ROM], "[ROMPATH]\[ROM]", and "[ROM]". The commands that contained "[ROMPATH] caused the system to unzip the rom first. The only functioning command was "[ROMPATH]\[ROMFILE]" which had the roms full file name alien crush (japan).pce. The [ROM] command just passed the file name of the rom inside of the archive minus the extension. So in this case, it was alien crush (japan). The .7z file that contains the rom is called acrush. I need the system to pass this name in the command line so that it will appear to UME as ume64.exe pce -cart acrush -joy -now. I've included the various runitgame.bat files and my cfg file. ROM.txt ROMquotes.txt ROMPATH-ROM.txt ROMPATH-ROMFILE.txt GameEx.txt

Ok. I just realized that u have to specify the location of the custom map file in the setup wizard. So I renamed the file to something unique and then told GameEx where to look for it. So all is good there. Now I realized a new issue. The typical command line when using UME with games in the software list is "ume64 pce -cart acrush" where pce is the system being emulated (pc engine in this case), -cart is the format of the software, and acrush is the name of the zip file containing the rom. The actual rom inside the archive would be "alien crush (japan).pce". I need GameEx to pass the name of the zip file (minus the extension) in the command line so that UME can associate the cheat with it. Is this possible? Right mow, the actual name of the rom is being passed according to runitgame.bat. It would seem that GameEx does this for MAME as that's how cheats are associated to those games. Thoughts?

I am using UME (a combo of MAME and MESS) to emulate quite a few systems in my cab. The reason I use UME instead of other more advanced emulators is that I prefer the scanline effect filter with my larger format monitor. The scanlines on most other emulators are really thick and obvious. The scanline filter in UME is way more subtle. Up until now, I was running Good or No-Intro roms. However, in order to use the cheat system for UME, the roms have to be in the software list format. The problem with that is a) the games show up by their software list abbreviated name in the GameEx menu and all my artwork was named using the old Good or No Intro rom names and not the software list name. And the download service utility for EmuMovies can't really match too well off the software list name. To work around issue "a", I actually created a custom map file that had the software list name along with a corresponding No Intro name. This worked great the first time I ran GameEx. All the games showed up by their full names. But on subsequent runs, the program rebuilt the map file and now I'm back to the software list names in the menu. Is there a way to prevent GameEx from updating the map file? Or should a custom map file be placed somewhere other than the "DATA" folder? To work around issue "b", I used a batch file to rename all the roms back to No Intro format. And then I used the download service utility to download all the artwork for those roms. I created another batch file to rename all the artwork to the software list name. This works great for GameEx. All the artwork shows up when I select a game. However, I'm using marquee magician to display the box and title artwork for games and it seems that the system gets hung up trying to find the proper images prior to launching the game, and then the game never loads. I looked at the information in the "runitgame.bat" file and it appears that MM tries to match the artwork based off the name of the rom inside the zip file and not the name of the actual zip file itself. Any thoughts on how I can remedy this issue? The only thing I can think of would be to have one set of artwork for GameEx to display that is named the same way as the zip files and then have another set of artwork with the names of the actual roms inside the zip files. I feel like this is "mission impossible", but as the old saying goes "where there's a will, there's a way". LOL!

Awesome update Tom. Thx!

Thx guys!

Thx for the update Tom. Great work as always!

Thx Tom. I love Instant Sheller. It makes booting right into GameEx a breeze!

So the only programs that startup as the computer boots are the NVIDIA control panel for my video card and the ASUS AI Suite II program with utilities for my motherboard. The AI Suite has the My Logo program for changing the boot screen image (which I would like to do at some point). On a whim, I decided to uninstall the AI Suite to see what happens. Well, for 3 attempts in a row it seems that GameEx stays up w/o minimizing. I've had the AI Suite installed for about a year now and it hasn't caused any problems like this. But perhaps it got updated with my last round of Win 7 updates or updated on its own. Needless to say, at this point it would appear to be the culprit. I will see what happens for the next cpl of days. If the minimizing no longer occurs, one of the moderators can mark this as resolved.

I appreciate the sentiment and I guess this falls under the "different strokes for different folks" category. I use IS because I want my cab to feel as much like a true arcade machine as possible. I have not changed the boot screen yet, although that is on my list of things to do. Lol! I've been running IS for along time now w/o issue. So I can't believe that one's to blame. The only recent changes on my PC were some software updates for Win 7. Since IS was created by Tom, maybe he can weigh in on whether it might be having an impact...

Lately GameEx has been minimizing on computer startup more often than not. Here's a little background on my setup: I use Instant Sheller on my cab to hide Windows and boot right into GameEx. I recently redid my CP and now have added a trackball and spinner to my system. I also have added a 3rd monitor in my CP that displays an image using Marquee Magician. I haven't installed any new programs on my PC that would be loading at startup and might cause GameEx to minimize. Not sure if this is an issue created by a recent update to GameEx or perhaps something caused by one of the new devices. Any thoughts? I have included my log as well as .ini file in case these might be helpful. log.txt GameEx.ini

Congrats Bigby!

Thx guys!

Awesome job gentlemen!

Great work. Thx guys!