Marquee Magician

[nullPointer]

I have always disliked the black boxes on the edge of the screen in MAME for verticals or the marquees that only cover 3/4 of it and I think it would be cool to put this on either side of the game portion in a vertical marquee setup or any artwork on the vertical sides would work.

Have you used bezels in MAME? Bezels do much of what you describe, and are relatively easy to setup in MAME. You can even setup a default GameEx bezel in MAME through the setup wizard (bearing in mind that it will override all other MAME bezels).

EmuMovies has a great set of MAME bezels. Definitely worth checking out.

[MNMax21]

Yeah, I have pretty much all of the artwork from emumovies.com. I signed up for the subscription awhile back and love it. The problem I have is that I use a 32" flat panel LCD TV as my monitor. I was given some information on how to change the config file in mame to stretch the side artwork and not the game itself. I like that and it works well, but the only issue is that you end up missing most of the artwork on non-vertical games. It stretches it to a point where you only see the center of the bezels on the non-vertical games. ie.: SSF.... It still actually doesn't make it all the way to the side of the TV either. It leaves about an inch or so of black on the sides. That's why I was wondering if I could somehow just have this program open and have two windows open at a time making them vertical on the sides. Basically have it showing the marquee on either side in every game.

[Tempest]

I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't work. Why not give it a try?

[gamepimp]

For each system, I have 3 windows that display different images when I'm playing a game for that system. Currently I have it setup so that in the first window, I display the box for the game. In the middle window, I display the name/logo of the system. And in the third window, I display the title screen for the game. Lately, I've been finding different images of the logos for the various systems. I would like to edit the systems so that they will use the new images. When I use the "edit configuration" option, I have to go through the whole process of identifying the images to be used in each window. Is it possible to specify which window I want to edit so that I could maybe update the middle window without changing the other windows? This would also be handy in the event that I might decide to display different images in the other windows like pics of the game cartridges or even a pic of the game system itself. I'm hopeful this is possible and I'm just not figuring out how to do it from the GUI. I suppose I could always specify this information directly in the .ini file. But given the fact that I have like 20 emulators with 3 windows each in the .ini file, sometimes it takes awhile to find the system I want to modify.

One other question, is it possible to display videos in a window? For example, if I had an intro vid for a game, would MM support looping that video in the window?

[gamepimp]

Any thoughts?

[Tempest]

Videos can not be used with MM. Have you looked at Adultery's iMagic, Or Headkaze's CPWizard? Maybe one of those will handle videos?

At this point in time, I am not doing any updates to MM. It's possible that I will get back to it in the future.

[Adultery]

iMagic has been on the back burner sorry... Never got around to trying to get it where I want it. I'll pick it back up after my well of ideas runs dry.

[gamepimp]

No worries Tempest. MM is an awesome program that is very simple to use and my digital marquee makes my cabinet 100% cooler than if I didn't have one. That's the first thing ppl notice when they see it. Lol! And soon I will be adding an 8" monitor to the CP. MM will let me use all 3 monitors in tandem which should knock people's socks off.

And I am keeping an eye on ur program Adultery. It wouldn't work for my setup in its current state. But assuming u keep working on it, it just might someday. Thk goodness for all u programmers. I really need to learn how to write code so I can develop some of these cool programs. Any advice on where to start???

[Adultery]

The beginning? LOL!

It's hard to say where to start. Give yourself a project, hit your goal. Then give yourself a harder project and hit your goal. Ask lots of questions, google stuff, hang out on MS Social. Eventually you'll be doing something and be like "Oh, I know what I need to do here! I did that earlier!" Then before you know it you have 50 plugins and a few apps out. LOL!

[Tempest]

I'm finishing up something else that I have been working on. I will take a look at MM when I get a chance.

[gamepimp]

Adultery: Yes the beginning would b the best place to start. Guess I set myself up for that. Lol! I guess what I need to figure out is the best programming language to start learning. I took a look at Java awhile back. Our new system at work runs on a Java frontend that interfaces with a PL/SQL DB. So I thought it might be cool to check that out. But then I hear about alot of programs being written in C. What r most plugins written in?

Tempest: I am very excited that u might continue working on MM. Plz let me know if u need any kind of user testing. I'm ur man for that. Thx!

[nullPointer]

I’m going to jump right in uninvited here. I certainly don’t have the plug-in writing experience of either Adultery or Tempest, but I do work with code on a daily basis. Choosing the correct programming language really boils down to choosing the right tool for the job.

Java is a great language for enterprise solutions. One of Java’s great selling points is that it’s not dependent on any one platform. The exact same java program can be run on Windows, Linux, whatever. That’s because Java applications run inside a virtual machine (a JVM). So for business that’s a great asset. “Write once, run anywhere,” means that the business only has to pay once. The trouble with Java is that platform independence means that it’s not optimized for any one platform, and thus can suffer performance issues (although this is not as much a universal truth as many would have you believe).

So getting back to the question, GameEx is written on a .NET (pronounced Dot-Net) platform (i.e. Windows), and thus many plugins are also written in a .NET language. The two main .Net languages are C# (pronounced C-Sharp) and Visual Basic. Both of those languages are great languages to start with and basically go as deep as you want to take them.

I believe Adultery writes most (all?) of his plugins in Visual Basic. It’s a bit older than C#, but it’s still a perfectly valid language (and the syntax is a bit more like English in many cases). Also remember that Adultery put together a GameEx plugin template written in Visual Basic, so that would probably be the best place to start IMHO.

Tempest on the other hand has written several good plugins using AutoHotKey which is a scripting language. Scripting languages can be niche languages, but as you can see from Tempest’s work you can really produce some great results with a little ingenuity (and AutoHotKey is fairly robust at this point).

TLDR: Use C# or Visual Basic for GameEx plugins. If you go this route you'll want to pick up a good IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for the job. Here you go: Visual Basic Express 2010 or Visual C# Express 2010

[Draco1962]

I have to agree with null on this as well regarding Java. Java can be a bit of a bad dog in the browser environment for apps designed around it. I have seen too many times where a web-based application was upgraded and dependent upon a new version of Java and would crash other apps that were opened in a tabbed browser environment that were not compatible with the latest java version. The only workaround, if you are lucky, is to open a separate browser instance and run the apps separately instead of a tabbed browser instance - thus defeating the purpose of a single browser instance. I say only as many companies will only support one browser (usually IE). In those that will allow installing Firefox or Chrome, then that will often work better.

[Tempest]

Somebody at AHK just asked the question of what language he should start his 12 year old son with, and the reply was Ruby. I've never even looked at it, so I have no idea.

[nullPointer]

I checked into that thread as I was curious. I think there's a lot of good stuff there. It got me thinking, if I were to recommend a programming language to a complete novice, I would probably take into account the availability of a good IDE.

A good IDE is going to go help out a lot in getting over that initial hump of understanding with features like auto-complete, help documentation, error highlighting, step-through debugging etc.

I'd also go so far as to recommend a strongly typed language (although this is likely due to personal bias). Seems like you'd want to learn the rules of strongly typed variables before you learned how to break all those rules. This would come in particularly handy when the new programmer starts delving into concepts of Object Oriented development.

/my2c

Wow - this has delved pretty far from discussion of Marquee Magician. Sorry about that!

[Draco1962]

I read a little about Ruby from the website and I could actually follow some of the simple examples without knowing much about any programming language.

[Tempest]

Python was also mentioned. Again, I know nothing about it. Here is a link to that post:

http://www.autohotkey.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=88632

[gamepimp]

Sorry that I sort of "derailed" this thread inadvertently with the ? about programming languages. But I do very much appreciate the feedback. I think I'm going to look a little closer at VB. I know Java is a pain. We have an Oracle program at work that has lots of issues, many of them caused by not always having the correct Java plug-in. And since we're a rather large company (at least > 5k employees), updating all the computers with the plug-in can be a nightmare. I've heard some good things about VB. And if many plug-ins have been written using it, then it sounds like it might b the best way to get started. Anyway, thx again for all the info. Plz feel free to IM me if u have any other thoughts or resources that u think might be useful for my foray into coding. :-)

[Tempest]

Tempest: I am very excited that u might continue working on MM. Plz let me know if u need any kind of user testing. I'm ur man for that. Thx!

I'll make you a deal. You beta test the new program that I have been working on, and I will work on MM.

[Tempest]

I read a little about Ruby from the website and I could actually follow some of the simple examples without knowing much about any programming language.

My Grandma's name was Ruby. I wasn't aware that she had a website.

[gamepimp]

Tempest, I can prob help test ur new program. What does it do?

[Tempest]

Upon execution is deletes all roms and emulators from your system, and your friends systems. I'm still working on deleting friends of friends. LOL

It is Skinny Match V2. It helps to match artwork to roms. I am not worried about the matching part of it per se, just that it runs as expected, and that you find it easy to use and understand.

[gamepimp]

Plz don't let my wife know about this program that deletes roms and emulators. I think she's been looking for one ever since I finished my cab. LOL! I don't think she realized she had so much competition for my attention.

Actually, it sounds like ur Skinny Match is exactly the kind of program I need right now. The names of the artwork from Emumovies tends to be different than the roms I have. I think it's a "No Intro vs. Good" naming convention issue. I've been using a program called "FuzzyRename" to try to match things up. But it's a long, drawn out process. I would be happy to give ur program a go. Just let me know what I need to do to get started...