u-man

FEATURE REQUEST: Support of icons based on game type. The icons that exist for MAME games are pretty much useless IMHO. Most of the time, they dont reflect the character or genre of the game and there are ten-thousands of them. Because they are "bound" to the game list, they will look extremely bad on low-res themes and even with hi-res themes, they barely represent something, because they are just to small, if they are "bound" to the game list / font. PLEASE seperate icons from the game list / font and add a extra icon field in the theme-editor for them. So that theme-creators can choose a icon-size (16x16, 32x32 etc.) and where to place them. GameEx can read category lists and therefore it would be way more useful, to show icons that are category based. This way, you would only use a handful of icons, based on game type / genre. It would be also a huge benefit for low-res themes. It would be a lot easier for a user to "read" the game list. Basically Tom did that already for the MAME (genre) selection menue (Lightgun, Trackball, Spinner etc.). Here we have the option to use logos that will do that. However, we dont have that in the game-list. It would be great, if we could see a racing car or wheel icon for a driving game or see a gun / crosshair for lighting gun games etc. That would be a great addition to icons that would make a lot more sense.

FEATURE REQUEST: Support of (Multi) coloured Fonts. Examples: https://www.fontspace.com/search?q=color font https://www.myfonts.com/de/search?query=chromatic&page=1&toggle[has_free]=true Browsers, Photoshop, Font-Editors... they all do support colored fonts (sometimes called chromatic fonts). If GameEx would support them too, theme-creators could use different colors for different things like menue bar, titles etc. This would also solve all this problems and would eliminate extra coding to achieve that:

Yes, i did setup the image field properly. All videos use the same size (1440x1080 4:3 aspect) and GameEx is running at this resolution (see video). Mind you, that the error/bug comes from the background video, where i have no options at all, except telling GameEx, use this video as background for the choosen section. It is the background video, that is oversized and has then bad quality. If i use the same video for the image-field, it looks better and is properly scaled.

Yeah, lets wait and see what Tom will say. I think he will understand the video and if not, i will share the theme, no problem. The bug is not related to my theme. You can repeat the same with any theme, you just need to setup one videofile that is used as background and has the same size/resolution as your theme and use the same video in image-field 1, which is also setup the same size (x=0, y=0, width and height= theme resolution). So basically you have 2 video-layers. Image-field 1 has higher priority and overlays the background, but whenever Image-field 1 is "filled" with a new video and GameEx needs to load the new video, you will see the background video until the new video is loaded, which then overlays the background again. So in the above posted video, whenever you read "update" in the marquee (but without the update icon), you are actually witnessing the background video for the MAME genre menue. Anything else shown in the marquee, are Image-field 1 videos that are loaded. Depending where you are scrolling in the list, a different video is loaded into Image-field 1. In my example, this are fullsized videos for "update game list" and "MAME all games". Thats why i have switched between the two categories all the time. I hope its easier to understand now.

Hello GameEx Staff , The following video will show you the bug. Please pay attention to the corners and the big update title in the marquee. GameEx_Arcade_All Arcade Games_60_60_ 2024-11-06 15-19-59.mp4 I am sorry for the big video, but it is needed to better visually see the bug. So what is happening here: We are in the MAME-Categories-submenu. A video was picked (via Theme-editor and the video-option menu) as background for the MAME-Categories-submenu shown here. The picked video contains all theme elements (arcade cab, menue, bars etc. BUT on a black background). If you now choose a category, then a video is shown that is related to this genre. This video uses image-field 1 from the theme editor and is set to full screen resolution. This video also contains all theme elements, but this time it has a genre related background included. So if you scroll through the list, the entire screen will change and adapt to the choosen genre. So far so good, but if you switch from one genre to another, then there is a time gap, that is filled with the video that we have chosen as the background for the MAME-Categories-submenu and here you will see that this background-video is slightly overscaled, probably just by only 1%, but it is noticeable. It is bigger then the image-field 1 video, which should not be the case. This is also bad for the image-quality of the video, as it is not shown in its native resolution. This results in a slightly blurred video, losing its sharpness and including artefacts. You can notice the degrading in carefully observing the area around the joysticks in the video. Summarize: There is something wrong in the theme-editor video-option menu and it has to do with scaling. Any video you choose here, will be displayed as a full size background, slightly overscaled and not in his native resolution. Any video that you set for the image-field in the theme editor, is properly displayed. If you set the image-field 1 properties to the native resolution of the video, then it is shown as this. Any questions? Feel free to ask . GameEx ini and log files attached. log.txt GameEx.ini

I am sorry for the bad description. The only reason why I mentioned the logos and marquee is because someone could mention those to solve the problem, but I want to know if we have control over the (in my example the game screen of the arcade cab) image field that GameEx uses to show a random videosnap of the selected MAME genre.

Hi Draco 🙂, I am currently not on my setup, but you can watch the 2nd video from my last post: https://forums.gameex.com/forums/topic/30223-resolved-two-possible-bugs-found-with-gameex-1875/?do=findComment&comment=218914 Just imagine that instead of the game names in the list on the left side, the MAME subcategories would be there. Every subcategory has a own logo-file that would appear in the marquee of the arcade cab. And for every subcategory, GameEx picks randomly a videosnap that fits into this category and is shown as the gamescreen on the arcade cab. The question is now, if we can create a videosnap for these subcategories. For example if lightgun is selected, showing a video containing only lightgun games.

Hello guys 🙂, Tom is right, I am looking for Category/Submenu. If it is possible to have videosnaps for the sub-categories, then how would I need to name them, so that GameEx can identify them? Keep in mind, that I already use all Logo-media provided for the sub-categories. I want to use the „image“ field that GameEx uses to show the random videosnaps. This way I could create my own videos for subcategories, assuming I know the naming for the videos.

At default GameEx randomly picks videos from existing videosnaps that fits into the MAME categories like Lightgun, Multiplayer, Trackball etc. I am curious if any category videos exists 😁 Any help appreciated 🙂

Both bugs seems to be gone with GameEx 18.81. Now i can only ask kindly, if you can make the sorting of the menue different. In that way that after name/title, the year appears. 1. Name / Title 2. Year 3. Category / Genre 4. Publisher 5. Developer Since Publisher and Developer give the same result, i would leave one of them blank, but this results also in cutting off the "year" option. It would be really nice if the sorting would be as shown above 😇☺️

Thank you very much for the fix .

Hi Tom, as far as i can tell, at least one of the two bugs here are gone with the latest 18.80 GameEx version. So the scrolling game info bug is resolved, thank you Tom 👍💖.

Hello gentlemen After updating GameEx yesterday, I am not able to set a specific resolution with the setup wizard in the display settings. GameEx starts, switch to the resolution for a second and then switches back to desktop default resolution and does not start like it should. It runs in the task manager, but beside this, nothing happens. I need to kill the process and tell GameEx with the setup wizard, to not change resolution. After this GameEx will start normally, but will use the native desktop resolution. I did not change anything resolution wise before the update, only working on my 4:3 low-res CRT theme (800x600). If I now want to see, how it will look, i need to manually set the desktop to a 4:3 resolution (800x600, 1440x1080 etc.) prior starting GameEx. I attached log and .ini files, from a "switch" situation. Hope it helps.log.txt GameEx.ini

Hello Draco, Updated to v18.77 and attached all new .ini and log files. Nothing has changed, my previous post still valid GameEx.ini log.txt

Hello Gentlemen , I am sorry for the late reply. I recorded the bugs, so you can have a look for yourself. My Theme.ini is telling me that the theme is a v4 theme. Sadly i forgot what the differences are between all these versions and AFAIK from the past, there was a point where GameEx would support only v4 themes, but i could be very wrong here . Now coming to the first bug: If i sound harsh then i am really sorry, it is not my intention (seriously). So Tom is saying this "bug" has always being the case for "trimming" the menue. If that is the case, i would really be happy, if the sorting of the menue would be different in that way, that the "by manufacturer" and "by developer" options would be the last items in the menue. Currently the "by year" option, is the last item in the menue and if you trim "by manufacturer" or "by developer", you will also automatically trim the "by year" option. At this point i also want to mention that in the case of MAME, the "by manufacturer" or "by developer" options lead to the same result. So I dont see a point, why i need to have both sorting options in the menue. Not only that, it also contains a bug where clicking the "by developer" item, is acting like you have pressed the "Home" button. Just observe carefully the end of the bug 1 clip. It will only show up, if the "game info" menue is enabled. IMHO Tom should rework the "game info" menue. It should not contain any sorting menue items, because it is not really needed (you can always go back one step and do the sorting there.) and should focus more on the "game info". Also the sorting menue that shows up with the "game info" screen cannot be trimmed , no matter what you do, it will show up in its full glory.... eh mmh length . The Bug 2 Clip is showing the "scrolling through game info" bug. The only way to scroll through it, is to enable the loop function (see first post) and do a reverse scroll (from end to start), by pressing the "arrow up" key on the keyboard. Thats all so far GameEx_Bug1_ 2024-09-18.mp4 GameEx_Bug2_ 2024-09-18.mp4 Theme.ini