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Game sound bites are pretty much standard for menus, but here's a way to personalize them. I try to create 25 second music clips that relate to the the style or content of the game or table. I also try to find alternate versions of in game music when other options don't work. It really helps make navigation and attract mode more exciting. Here are my current menus for my hybrid build. My Audio Files on FTP: /-PinballX-/Other Uploads/HanksLounge/Hybrid/audio/custom/ Cheers!

I don't really like the default Sounds that play when navigating menus, and I'd like to change them, at least if it's possible. Can anyone help me out with this? I basically want sound effects from the first 6 Megatouch games to play in the Pinball X Menus. Any files I should replace, or are there multiple ways to go around this? I'm not sure what else to add since I think it may be very simple and easy to do simple audio replacement.

Custom Menus: The Basics In light of this thread i decided to make a simple tutorial on using the custom menus in gameex. Once you have a grasp on it you will soon realize just how versatile (and simple) custom menus are. And you will be able organize gameex menus anyway you see fit! Sound good? Then read on... PLEASE NOTE: You must have your emulators and apps setup in GameEx before you attempt configuring custom menus - the reason being if you did this before hand you wouldn't have anything to customize! There are two things you need to know the difference between: "Menus" and "Items". It may help to think of a "Menu" as a folder, and "Items" as files. So, you can put a Menu in a Menu (folder inside a folder) you can put an Item inside a Menu (file into folder) but you can't put a Menu inside an Item (folder into a file!). It may seem confusing at first but essentially all you are doing is arranging files (Items) into folders (Menus) An example would be helpful right now i reckon so here we go! I've decided, for the sake of this guide to arrange my main GameEx menu into 4 categories: Arcade, Console, PC and Handheld - with the relevant emulators in each category. Let's see how we achieve this: Open the Custom Menu app (Start>Programs>GameEx>Configuration>Custom Menus). Check the box "Enable Custom Menus": NOTE: For this guide i deleted all existing entries but you may, and probably will have entries already here when you first launch the app. You may use the "Delete Item/Menu" button to remove all entries if you wish - and don't worry about messing up, just uncheck "Enable Custom Menus" to revert GameEx back to default Menus On to creating our first Menu (which is basically a folder, right? ) First highlight "Start" in the lefthand tree-list, this is our top-level or "Main" menu. Then click the "New Menu" button: Now we have a new basic Menu or folder which needs some editing. The "Item/Menu Name" entry, which is how your menu will appear in the list and "Item/Menu Properties> Title" which is what will be displayed as the Title text, the big text at the top of most themes. So we change these: And repeat for the other 3 categories: So now we have 4 empty Menus to organize our emulators (Items) into. The obvious one to put under the "ARCADE" Menu would be MAME! So we highlight the "ARCADE" Menu in the lefthand tree-list and this time click on "New Item". MAME has it's own entry in the "Item Type" dropdown list so that's what we select, also editing the Name and Title as we did with the menus, only now you may want to choose a logo from the dropdown list, in this case "mame": Now, for the rest of the items we do the same but instead of "MAME" we choose "Emulator" in the "Item Type" dropdown and then the desired emu from the Properties section, in this case Neo-Geo: Rinse and repeat, editing Menu Name's and selecting logo's as you go: That is essentially it! Just create Menus (folders) and put Items into them. You really can organize GameEx in any way you want using custom menus and i'll bet you'll get great satisfaction in using them! I hope that was easy enough to understand and will help some of you on the road to "pimpin yo GameEx". Have fun and here's a vid of the example Custom Menu in action: http://youtu.be/zfgMgMj7u7s

Here we start a community project for creating GAME ICONS that can be eventually used by GameEx in a variety of places. SITUATION GameEx already uses game icons for MAME only, and a complete set of icons for all MAME games already exist and can be downloaded from here: http://www.progettosnaps.net/icons/ In GameEx, you can enable MAME icons from the SetupWizard by simply going to the MAME Settings page and define a value for ICON path, that matches to your local folder containing MAME icons. These icons will then automatically be shown in the GameEx MAME menus along with the game title. There is currently no support yet in GameEx for game icons for emulators other than MAME, but a feature request has been created. So in a sense this community project is a bit looking into the future PURPOSE The objective of this community project is to create as many non-MAME game icons as possible for a variety of retrogaming systems. The ultimate target would be one day to have an icon for each game, but given the unbearable number of games in every possible systems, this is not a target achievable in a reasonable time, and therefore it is not really on the table. More modestly, the general purpose will be broken down in smaller targets, which can be undertaken by project participants on a voluntary basis. A reasonable target might be for example the complete set of game icons for a single system of choice. REQUIREMENTS These are the project requirements in a nutshell: 1) One icon per game. If the game exists in multiple variants, one icon per variant would be best (this is the approach chosen by the MAME icons project), but this can be deferred to a later time. 2) Icon files must be of the appropriate .ico type. 3) Icons must be of a resolution supported by Windows. The MAME icons project uses only 32x32 icons, but for many game systems this is too small to get a nice-looking icon. Conversely, larger resolutions are useless for the oldest game systems. In addition, the largest format 256x256 results in excessively large files. We can discuss together if we should stick to one default size for all icons or if we can allow ourselves some flexibility, but my personal preference would be to always create either 32x32 or 64x64 icons (maybe even 48x48 can be allowed). 4) The image used for the icon must come from the actual game graphics. It can be a screenshot of the player's character, or any other sprite or part of the screen that looks very recognizable (or should I say "iconic"?) with relation to the game in question. 5) Icons look best when transparency is used, although not all MAME icons used it. This is mostly up to you to decide, depending on the result. SUGGESTED PROCEDURE Making an icon shouldn't take more than a bunch of minutes, but sometimes it can of course take much longer if you want to do some fine-tuning in order to get a perfect result. Nevertheless the core procedure is truly simple. Here is a breakdown list of how I created the first few sample icons: 1) Start the game in your emulator of choice, pause it at a good point to capture the sprite or image you intend to. Take a screenshot. 2) In basic MS Paint or any other image processor, paste the screenshot, and crop/resize* down to the wanted size. Delete the background around your wanted sprite (for best transparency results, make the whole background a funky color that is not already used by any of the pixels in the sprite). Save as .png. 3) If your image processor doesn't itself support transparencies, there are many online tools to make the background transparent in a matter of second. For instance I have been using http://www190.lunapic.com/editor/ which allows you to "pick" a color by clicking on the background area, and will automatically turn all pixels of that color into transparent. 4) Convert the .png file into a valid .ico file. Again this can easily be done with online tools such as http://www.aconvert.com/icon/ * WARNING: resizing usually distorts the image. So rather than resize, I suggest you only ever crop, see how large is your cropped picture, and based on that decide what icon size to use. If it's still smaller than 32x32, try retaking the screenshot while running the emulator in windowed mode; if larger than 64x64, then try taking the screenshot in fullscreen mode. Here attached are a few samples for games from different systems. defender_of_the_crown64.ico ik+64.ico rick_dangerous48.ico space_taxi.ico spy_vs_spy.ico agent_usa.ico bc's_quest_for_tires.ico boulderdash.ico bruce_lee.ico keen4_64.ico gobliiins64.ico

Hi, I am looking if it is possible to have an alternative button for menu and launch, I searched and saw multiple old requests but not sure if this is still on the wish list. I like having the menu enabled so I can look at flyers, instructions, etc. But I would prefer a single button launch of the game, rather than menu>launch. I was hoping to assign the menu to a second button (Extra Ball for example) Is this possible, or is it still a requested feature? Thanks, Wob

I recently switched to custom menus and I noticed that favorites and most played games aren't showing any snap / videos on home menu. If I disable custom menus, they will load again when hovering on the menu item (fav, most). How can they show even in custom menus? Also, I've noticed a new shaking effect while scrolling the gamelist up and down on last gameex, is there a way to disable this?

Hello I am a newbie to Gameex and I am trying to get daphne working. I am using version 14.54 and have configured Mame successfully and I believe that I have Daphne configured correctly using the Advanced configuration. My issue is that I cannot get Daphne to show up in the Menu when I start Gameex. Is this because I have not paid for Gameex and therefore do not receive the customized Menu option? I have used the custom menus under Gameex and added Daphne but it still does not show up when I start Gameex. Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong? Thank you, Paul

I am wondering if anyone else has experienced this. For most themes, when you go into an emulator other than Mame, you will see the Menu Ribbon which contains options to sort 'By Name', 'By Category', 'By Publisher', etc. I do not usually use these options, but I noticed today that they are mostly unresponsive. I found that I had to press a ket 5 or 6 times before the 'cursor' would move to the next selection on the list. I have two Windows 7 64-bit machines and it does the same on both.

Hey guys, I'm learning to tweak PinballX and I currently have 58 tables loaded and can see them in the wheel. However, I can only access (click through) approx. 16 of the tables. It's strange because I can see some of the others in the wheel, but just can't get to them by clicking with either the left or right flipper buttons. Is there a setting I need to change so I can scroll and access all loaded tables? Thanks in advance!

Hello there, I would like to make use of the VPM feature in PinballX on a two monitor cabinet. When I configure this in the settings and also the game manager by selecting a rom name etc. Pinball X launches the rom fine however it does not use the roms registry setting x.y coordiantes or size parameters but seems to stretch the vpinmame DMD right along the bottom of the screen and off the edge. Playing with the DMD size option in the settings menu allows this to be corrected somewhat but it seems to be a bit hit and miss based on what rom gets loaded. The other thing I noticed is that if a rom is not configured for a particular game, the default PinballX DMD video is rendered in place of this which I assume is by design however if I choose to hide the dmd game settings for a particular table, this built in menu is still loaded. I was wondering if it would be possible for the software to use the same registry settings vpinmame generally uses when rendering on a monitor in preference to a real DMD display and also if this default PinballX DMD video can be hidden by default even when a game does not have the rom configured in game manager but "Use DMD" is turned on in settings (For a 2 screen setup). Thanks in advance, and also thanks a million for this software, it's an excellent front end I've almost got working perfectly Dozer.

So I've run into a bit of a snag and not sure what to do about it. On my old Guitar Fighter PC, I had the Guitars control the menus and the dance pads did nothing by using custom keyboard keys and using the Xpadder plugin. I upgraded computers, (meaning Game-Ex was also upgraded after a year of not being connected to the internet) and had it set up exactly the same (imported old config files over.). The problem I'm having now is that the Guitars won't work on the menus, even though I have the plugin set to load a blank profile for the dance pads and the default profiles for the guitars. the keyboard works, just not the guitars. If I turn on the joystick support for the gameex menus, the guitars have their own control scheme and the dance pads push buttons (that i dont want them to) and still dont seem to work with x-padder. Now in game, everything functions like it should, just wont work for the menus.

Sorry Tom, But the off-centre wheel image issue hasn't disappeared after all Cheers Rusty

Hello, Working on making my own skin to match my cabinet theme. Question: How do I make the menu size different than the rest. It seems to be global. In the ini I changed "MenuFontSameSize=false" however nothing changed. It still changes to the same global font size as list, menu, etc.. Cheers, Captain Picard

Hello All, I'm new to the Game Ex community and have been working on a bit of a project recently. Basically I'm working on an NES PC and I'm trying to use the standard NES conrollers to navigate back and forth through the menus. By default Game Ex uses Button 2 to select menu options and Button 4 to navigate back to the previous menu. The only problem I have is I need to map Button 1 to navigate backwards through the menus. I can use a USB SNES controller and it works fine, but all of the USB ports are hidden and I have the 2 standard NES controller ports wired to USB headers. Now in game everything is fine, all buttons function normally and I also have "Up" and "Select" set to exit the emulator, but I cannot for the life of me figure a way change the one navigation button. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Allo Allo! Gotta quick question...well two of them. 1. Is it possible to boot GameEx directly into a page other than the start page? (Like maybe an emulator page perhaps? ) 2. General question...actually was a bit of a brain fart: If a joystick can be configured to emulate a mouse, and a 360 degree steering wheel works basically off a spinner (which is somewhat mouse related in the eyes of windows), would it be possible to take a steering wheel like a logitech G25/27, and make it emulate a spinner device? Lol, I know this probably sounds like a noob question, but it's one that kinda makes sense in a way...need some enlightenment on this subject lol. Thanks! LC

Crash during custom menu transitions after recent update. GameEx keeps crashing when either going into or coming out of menus. It's usually when backing out of, but not specifically, and it happens at random. It's happened at least 8 times since recent update. Theme.ini log.txt

Custom Menu Starts with GameEx then turns black after loading. After recent update custom menu turns black after loadeing. GameEx is still funtioning properly but it is not showing images in start menu or emu menus. It shows bacground only in game menus. Hopefully someone can help me.

As the title says. How do I prevent Steam from being an option inside GamEx? Thanks.

I've been a paid user of gameex for a while now and recently decided to attempt making things more to my liking. I'm going to try and hold my frustration to a minimum in this post and hoping someone can give me an answer that is helpful. I will say that i believe gameex is a good tool for a frontend, more specifically i am just using it for mame and visual pinball and daphne. My rant is the configuration is convoluted and anyone can easily get lost in the maze. I've just about run out of patience going in and out of the software, making one config tweak after another only to waste hours getting no where, well, maybe accomplish 1 thing every couple hours. At this rate I'll have lost most of my hair and will never get gameex setup the way i want. Here is my wish list: 1. when i start gameex i want to see just, VIDEO ARCADE (which is a group of mame and daphne), PINBALL (which is just virtual pinball), and the obvious EXIT. 2. under VIDEO ARCADE i want to see my favorites, ALL MAME, JUST DAPHNE (or something like that) 3. i had visual pinball showing snaps and flyers at one point, now i don't see flyers anymore,... they are there, the path is correct. 4. this could be related to item 3 above. Loosing my mind on how to set the view the way you want it and lock the damn thing. as of now it appears to be locked by i want to change some views and then lock it back. 5. going back to 1 and 2.... since i've paid for the software i supposedly have the ability to really custom the menus and menu structure even more, have played around as stated earlier with the config menu app but seems to have no affect. Probably more issues but at the moment figured i see if i get a useful response first. Thanks in advance to anyone out there reading this and who has something to contribute here.