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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

Is it possible at all in GameEx to enable game ICONS (those that show up besides the game name in menus) for emulated systems other than MAME? For MAME, you just need to define a path for your icons files in Setup Wizard, but can the same be done for other systems? It wouldn't seem to require anything different than from MAME, since this is a feature that depends only on GameEx, and not the actual emulators, right?

2 of my emulators when selected, the games list is coming up with GameEx icons with the title on top which makes the title hard to read all my other emulators are coming up with the text title but not "Future Pinball" or "PSP" can someone help? its not something I have knowingly changed.

Once again, i come with questions! 1. I have taken some snapshots of in-game experience from my roms. How can I get them to show up in the GameEx game select menu? I have them in the right Mame/snaps folder (they show up using mameUI), but not in gameex. 2. I reallllly hate the various icons that come up when I am moving around the gameex menus (like the DVD, and game system icons). Is there a way to shut those off? If not, can I just delete all the image assets safely? Thank you!