Using steam as a "frontend"

[Mute64]

Ok so ild say im relatively new to gameex and front end and cmd lines lol...

Anywho I have a few mates coming around tomo and I havnt fully got my gameex setup... infact I just updated it and lost most of my progress lol...

Now I have steam and have added a few "non steam games" to my list before its realy basic, so this then got me thinking. ... how could I individualy add n64 games to steam. So I googled around and came across how todo it by creating my own bat file to launch with steam, with these basic lines

( start c:user\shaun\desktop\pj64\project64.exe c:user\shaun\desktop\pj64\roms\Goldeneye.v64 ) . Now this is all probly pretty simplez to you guys lol.

But anywho all I wanted to do is add like 5 n64 games into steam with this process, just a couple games that we will play this weeknd. So I did this and got it all working

Then I was like cool now lets try it in steam big picture mode! Ild then go to launch the game and yea the game would work but the steam big picture would always be on top... so that got me thinking what is going on here? ?

So what I found out by my self was that for example when you launch a game/application in big picture the game/app loads and is always on top then once you close the game steam big picture is on top, so what was happening was big picture would load the BAT file then the game would start on top only for a second because the BAT file auto closed wich then made big picture then be on top and made the emulator minimize.

So I was like shiet... I got no knowledge of cmd lines or anything how am I ment to make a CMD not auto close.. so I googled around with ppl sugesting type pause at the end of your line and a few other things, after trying these processes and failing I was like what happens if I delete the " start " part on my line. .... and bam now when I open up the BAT in steam big picture it stays open then launches the emlator then closes when I close the emulator and back to big picture. ..

Just thought ild share my experience ; p

[nullPointer]

Thanks for sharing Mute64! Yeah as slick as Big Picture mode is, it's actually not all that sophisticated in terms of launching external applications. GameEx is much more well suited for such endeavors. Steam has a lot of market presence and certainly has the talent to make Big Picture mode more robust, but unfortunately I don't see that they really have the motivation to do so. They're motivation is to promote Steam apps and games rather than whatever other apps users are interested in launching from Steam. Having said that, I could definitely see a huge benefit to importing GameEx itself into Steam as an external application. You wouldn't even necessarily have to wait until you had everything configured before doing so. In many ways this would expand on Big Picture mode in several advantageous ways.

All the same it's pretty cool that you got some individual emulated games launching directly from Steam. Well done!

[Mute64]

Oh also while I was at it finally manged to work out how to launch 1964 with comand lines.... the spaces in my Roms name was stuffing me up