[RESOLVED] gameex game listings are not correct

[CharlesLam]

Greetings once again. last time i was on here i was way more angry at life and probably twice as rude. moving to Texas has helped with my patience and overall mood. but regardless i am having issues with gameex on my media center and this time around i will be a bit nicer. Integration with WMC has made this very easy but two issues:

playstation 1 games are showing up in playstation 2 game list. pcsx2 is loading the ps2 games correctly when launched outside of gameex. i triple-checked the directories, they are assigned correctly. I have even renamed the default "C:\Roms\Playstation 2\roms" to "C:\Roms\PS2\roms" (Since ps1 roms are in "C:L\Roms\Playstation\Roms") to see if it would fix things. to which it has not. and i am certain i did not select the wrong emulator as pcsx2 pops up and says it cannot load the game.

The other issue is that none of my mame roms are showing at all. zip zilch nada. I made sure to change the rom directory from the demo to "C:\Roms\Mame\Roms" and it is almost like it refuses to search that specific directory.

As history has proven to me, im still going to tinker with it more and see if removing and possibly trying different emulators might fix my issue, but it appears to me that gameex is not searching the directories i am specifying.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

GameEx.ini

log.txt

LogArtWorkDownload.txt

[CharlesLam]

Well through a quick trial and error i have figured out the mame problem. when selected under emulators and not the main screen, my roms are displayed.

[CharlesLam]

completely removed the pcsx2 from the system and reinstalled it. its working fine now. still trying to figure mame out now. for some reason mame in demo\mame and the one in the emulator download page does not like working. i had to replace it with an older version i had lying around. when it found the roms would not load them. just blank screen then back to the page. after i replaced it with an older version, loads them up fine. troubleshooting this mame issue is far from over. all the roms show up by filename and not by title name.

[nullPointer]

Glad to hear that you got your PS2 problems sorted out.

It's not an altogether uncommon misconception, but GameEx does not come with a demo version of Mame (I believe that doing so would violate Mame's distribution license), but rather it merely includes demo videos of Mame. Overwhelmingly the most common advice with Mame is to not set it up as a 'standard' emulator in GameEx (as you have it now), but instead to use the dedicated Mame Setup functionality. Mame offers a lot of special functions that will be unavailable to you in GameEx when it's setup as a standard emulator (among other things it will alleviate your ROM naming issue). Just remember that you'll need to rebuild your Mame list anytime you make changes to your Mame config. Good luck, and be sure to report back with your progress or temporary roadblocks you encounter.

[CharlesLam]

I tried doing the uninstall/reinstall deal with mame and unfortunately it is stuck showing only the demo videos. i would really hate to have to do an uninstall/reinstall when everything else is set up except for mame. i will continue to try to tinker with it, lets hope it jostles something back into place.

[DazzleHP]

Hi Charles,

I think you may have missed nullPointer's... point The reason you are experiencing these issues with MAME is that you currently have it setup as a standard emulator which is not the recommended way to use MAME in GameEx. MAME has it's very own dedicated section in GameEx, separate and very different from standard emulators.

You can find it here:
Setup Wizard> Custom > MAME Settings

You will most likely see that, when you load this section, all the paths are pointing to the Demo files. You need to change all these to point to your own MAME.exe, roms, media etc. Once you have done this, you need to boot GameEx, navigate to the real MAME section and click on Update List. This will take some time, but once it has finished all your MAME dreams will come true (including the list containing game titles instead of rom names).

To avoid yourself any confusion i would also disable your MAME setup in the standard emulator slot before loading GameEx after your changes, otherwise you will have two mame lists. I believe it is emulator slot #1 in your setup, so go to:

Setup Wizard> Custom > Emulator Setup,

In Select Emulator, choose which slot you have MAME set in (like i said i believe you put it in slot 1),

Change Enabled to No.

If you can follow all that then you'll be on track to getting MAME alive Of course, don't hesitate to call back if there's anything you don't understand. Good Luck.

[CharlesLam]

hmmm. well now mame isnt showing up in the emulator setup page. I first disabled the show mame on start page. i tried putting it back to default and now i cant find mame anywhere.

*le sigh* i wish more people used the chat thing here.

[tthurman]

If you followed Dazzle's direction above, it shouldn't be in the emulator setup page anymore. To echo some of the above posts, you want to take advantage of the mame function built into GameEx, as the emulater portion of the wizard is really more tailored towards more unique emulators, not someting as mainstream as MAME.

Are you in the MAME settings as shown here? This is really where you want to be with MAME, and unless something really dictates otherwise, use vanilla MAME, and a source of it compiled to your preferences, in either 32 or 64 bit version, based on your operating system.

[Adultery]

Sounds like the perfect time to use the new remote Help feature :-)

[CharlesLam]

i did follow the steps it is no longer in the emulator selections page. but it isnt showing up on the main page either. I also changed out the demo locations with the "C:\Emulators\Mame" directory. where is this remote help you speak of?

[CharlesLam]

something just seems off with this installation. im going to try to reinstall. there are just some odd problems here i havent seen before.

[CharlesLam]

well reinstalling game ex didnt help much as i believe it kept the config file. mame is now showing up in the main menu again. when i select to update the list, it does. but still doesnt show the roms. Now im running into the issue of sega cd bin files not loading correctly. kicks me back to the screen. i didnt have it working from the beginning, it was something i added to the mix, but fusion and gens+ refuses to load them correctly, but will run outside of game ex.

[Draco1962]

You may want to provide updated copies of your gameex.ini and log.txt files so others can take a look.

[CharlesLam]

well mame roms are showing up now. i decided to default the options in the setup wizard, and i think that might have gotten things working, because after that the mame roms directory changed, and i was able to set it correctly. some roms still arent showing up, but they may just need to be renamed. i need to find a good utility for that. still i thought the default settings would change more things than just mame settings. all my other configurations for emulators, etc. stayed the same... i had a set of .149 mame roms and .151 mame roms and just added them together. worked for alot of what i wanted, but that was a while ago and now some of my favorites arent showing up (cadillacs and dinosaurs, tmnt, etc.)...

here are the files requested.

*update* this is kind of strange. i performed an update list. it took a rather long time. saved successfully, things looked good. then i noticed my favorite roms missing. now they are slowly starting to appear in the list. a good example is cadillacs and dinosaurs. It did not show up in the "All Mame games" list when i first started showing my girlfriend the arcade games. about 45 minutes later as im showing her how the categories works, it shows up in the capcom games.

Now that all is fixed for the original problems of directories fouling up, this thread can be marked as resolved. when in doubt, remove and reinstall the emu, and when that doesnt work go for defaulting to original settings.

I will start a new thread over my sega CD woes.

log.txt

GameEx.ini

[DazzleHP]

The following settings will determine what shows on the MAME list (Setup Wizard> Custom> MAME Settings):

And for future reference you really shouldn't be mixing your romsets like that, at least not without using a rom manager. MAME is not like most other emulators - you should really be only using one set and using the exact matching MAME version to run them, so if your romset is 0.149 then you should be using MAME 0.149. If you mix any of this (exe's, roms) you will be causing yourself many headaches down the line, and i suspect are contributing to your current woes.

But at least we have you on the right track!

[CharlesLam]

yeah i dont really understand why games are being added *after* i selected update list. it was my understanding at least with mame that when you update the rom list it creates a database file with all the roms listed...and thats it. it was my understanding it doesnt continue to search for games in the rom folder, but goes off of that database file. i swear gameex is made of witchcraft and russian roulette. i have used the same setup in 3 different rigs. every time its a new issue. well as long as i have my cadillac and dinosaurs, im happy.