New user feedback

[chilly]

Hi, I've just spent the weekend messing around with frontends trying to figure out what I wanted to use as a frontend to my pending cabinet, and here's some really early initial feedback - since I think it's worth mentioning a complete newb's impression. FWIW, I've been playing with HyperSpin, MaximusArcade, MameUI, and

-I pulled down a TON of 'extra's for mame, and GameEx seems to be the best option to really take advantage of all that media that's formatted in a 'mame-centric' fashion (/snaps, /marquees, etc.)

-The installer has a lot of options and is a bit heavy for someone that's only interested in a minimal arcade system. The installer/config UI is a little confusing (the buttons on the bottom) so that you can't just click through it. But a little reading and you can click 'no' etc. to make it through.

-After installed, GameEx on my startmenu launched Windows Media Center. What's up with that? Had to navigate to the actual exe to launch it.

-The setup/scanning/launching went very smoothly, but I'm getting the impression it is only displaying ROMS that only have art associated with them, which is not a desireable default filter IMHO. I'm not 100% certain about this, but I don't see any items in the listing without art, and I know there are valid ROMS without art.

-The UI is very nice... but unfortunately not especially intuitive. I'd like to be using this as a shared open system, and I'm currently stuck in this mode where I can scroll through games side to side, but I can't figure out how to get out of this mode (ie. there are no longer any options listed along the top... I'm just stuck in a side-to-side nav across single games).

-The nag screen is horrid. I exited the system 3x before I figured out that I had to just sit there and wait. That's terrible. It's 100% acceptable that someone who puts this much effort into an app would expect to get some return... but you have to be clearer about what's going on. Worst nag I've ever encountered.

Anyway... still optimistic this is the best option out there. I need to figure out how to make it more intuitive for random users, as this is going to be a shared cabinet among non-tech users. I love the media integration options and hope I can get it to work out without having to fall back to Maximus, which seem to be limited to marquee and snaps.

[Tom Speirs]

Thanks for the feedback. A couple of points to help you (not disagreeing with your first impressions). GameEx is located in the start menu program group called GameEx. It does install as a media center app elsewhere though. Not sure how you got them mixed up, maybe windows in its wisdom decided to put it as a recently used app right on the root of the start menu but just go Start > Programs > GameEx. It does not just show games with artwork and there is no option to do that although it does a good job at matching artwork if the names are different or for MAME clones. You may have got yourself into a lite or limited mode by changing the theme. By default GameEx has a lot of options of navigation. Select the Default - Default theme and make sure you have not set it to launch as GameLauncher or Simple mode under display options. Otherwise select Change View. This might be towards the end of the list if your in the mode I think you are in. GameEx has various view options which are changed by selecting "Change View". I realise that is not too intuitive if you get to certain views. You can lock it down and disable that once you get it how you like it.

[chilly]

Hi Tom,

Thanks, that was exactly it with the navigation mode... at the end of the list (end/home/left), I could change back to a different view. If I can lock it down to a certain config, that should be fine. I guess that's similar to XBMC actually.

I landed on the media center thing by just typing in the start menu search box, so yes... if I navigated explicitly through the start menu, it launched the app itself. I have never installed/configured media center.. so I guess it was finding some hook to MC that was trying to launch that.

I'm still unsure about the artwork thing. It seems the example I was thinking of (Street fighter III - or any of the many versions).... they aren't showing up at all in GameEx, but they show up fine (and some run correctly) under other apps. Not sure why they are not showing up in the list. The png's under the snaps folder seem to match names (sfii3an, etc) OK.

I appreciate the feedback - and I can appreciate your having to walk the line between flexibility and ease of use... locking down the setup would really help - I'll have to look into that if I can get everything laid out how I want it.

[Tom Speirs]

Its probably because I designed GameEx to really filter and tidy up the MAME games list by default although its configurable. It sounds like you just need to look at the filter settings under Advanced MAME settings. Its a common question. Let me know if you need help with that.

Edited October 7, 2012 by Draco1962
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