Need Help With A Few Things.

[KRC]

Hey,

I need abit of direction in a few areas of gameex. I would rather put all my questions in 1 topic rather than open up several.

Some of the questions may seem a bit abit simple but as im a new newbie it would be a great help to me.

1. Whats the quickest and easiest way to set up SSF saturn emulator, I have the most recent SSF emulator and D.Tools lite. If someone could do a quick step by step guide/command line etc? ( I have Sonic Jam ISO and an alternative MDF/MDS file as a test file)

2. What exactly are map files and wrappers and where do they go and what am i supposed to do with them?

3. How exactly do you add executables to GameEx?

Thanks

[hansolo77]

1) ask somebody else, I haven't setup a saturn emulator yet...

2) map files are are lists. they have the rom name and the actual title. So when you see SMB3, it will actually be Super Mario Brothers 3 in GameEx with the map file. It just makes your romlist cleaner and easier to understand, so you don't have a bunch of stupid rom names. This is particulary helpful in cases like MAME where they limit the filenames to standard 8 characters.

Wrappers are little app/programs that wrap the emulator/rom into a simple launcher. For instance, there is a wrapper for Visual Pinball that takes the name of the table, launches Visual Pinball, injects the table name into the command line, does some clicking etc to bypass warnings and popup dialogs, then allows for an easy exit back into GameEx when you're done. Wrappers were handy a few years ago when GameEx was new, and there weren't as many options for command-line launching of games directly. Nowadays, wrappers aren't needed as much. Mostly they're used for emulators that, as I said, don't have direct to game access via GameEx and something is needed to automate the launching process.

3) theres a section of the gameex setup wizard called External Applications. You find everything you need there. Basically you ENABLE it. Setup a name (ie; "Launch Notepad"). Give it the path to the executable (is; "C:\Windows"). Then the CMD (ie; "notepad.exe"). Snap/Logo is whatever you want, for our example, a picture of a notepad, called notepad.jpg (the snap filename must match exactly with the file). Show Desktop if you want. Map Keys if you want to exit the program with a specifc keystroke. Wait/Send keys if you need to. Enable mouse emulation if you need. Launch Before/After if you need to run something along with it (like your popup keyboard display, etc). Help Text will display whatever you write after you click to start the program, and before the program actually launches. It's all pretty self explanatory. You just need to make sure you ENABLE it.

[nullPointer]

1. Whats the quickest and easiest way to set up SSF saturn emulator, I have the most recent SSF emulator and D.Tools lite. If someone could do a quick step by step guide/command line etc? ( I have Sonic Jam ISO and an alternative MDF/MDS file as a test file)

It's been a long time since I set up SSF. Perhaps this thread might be of some use to you. Short of that there's always a full on forum search, and then there's always Google. Not a lot of help, but I did notice some promising hits in that Google search. I bet we've also got some other users that are a bit more up to speed on setting up SSF (or at the very least have a better memory than I do )

2. What exactly are map files and wrappers and where do they go and what am i supposed to do with them?

Good question, although you see these two concepts frequently mentioned in the same sentence, they serve very different purposes. Basically a Map file maps an arbitrary display name to a ROM file. This comes in very handy for emulators in which the ROM name does not really indicate the underlying game. MAME is the best example here, although it's certainly not the only one. So while

skykid.zip | Sky Kid

is passable

sf2ceb.zip | Street Fighter II - Champion Edition (USA rev B. )

is considerably less useful. So in the above example if you added those lines to a map file the name on the right is what will be displayed in your frontend while the file on the left is what will be launched by the frontend.

A wrapper on the other hand acts as a surrogate launcher for an emulator that doen't fit well into the frontend model. This could be due to the fact that the emulator cannot be launched from the command line, or it might display info screens before launching a game (requiring the user to click through), or any number of issues that one may want to address for seamless frontend integration. In the case of a wrapper, the wrapper itself is launched from the frontend (which in turn launches the emulator).

3. How exactly do you add executables to GameEx?

You may need to provide additional details here, as I'm not sure what exactly you're asking. An emulator is itself an executable after all. Perhaps you're asking about launching other external programs (external video players and the like)?

[KRC]

In regards to my Questions earlier in the topic.

1. Got this working now, I downloaded the emulator again and followed a guide.

2. Thanks for the advice.

3. Again thanks for the direction, I think I overlooked the setup wizard. I was going to add XBMC,Gimp,and the Epsxe memory card manager.

[KRC]

Also I tried Cassini Saturn Emu, even though it did work I will stick with SSF.