GameEx 3.48 - Now Out!

[Tom Speirs]

4th April 2005 - Version 3.48 of GameEx
available

• Should fix MAME game list
  corruption
• All available MAME lists can now
  be enabled or disabled
• Alpha paging for the game lists
  has been implemented
• Loading and creating a game
  image/video is now handled on a thread. This should improve responsiveness
  in most cases. It works great with dual, HT or dual core
  systems/processors.
• Can now navigate the music play
  list queue with a Game Pad. See the docs page for the updated
  controls.
• Cabinet, Panel, Marquee and Title
  images can now be selected and shown full screen.
• GameEx is now a bit more
  aggressive when closing the MAME processes in attract mode.
  

---

http://gameex.net/

[RSAntilles]

Hehe and I just upgraded to 3.47, lol, oh well here comes 3.48.

I did notice on 3.47 that my fav lists had no saved again. Ill let you know how this new one goes.

Thanks as always.

EDIT Do you have a link Tom? Website still has 3.45 available and Google shows nothing yet.

[cupid]

Great improvements (especially the Fullscreen-Flyer). I will install this on my cab as soon as possible!

Thanks Tom for this great piece of software!

[Toonces]

Hehe and I just upgraded to 3.47, lol, oh well here comes 3.48.

I did notice on 3.47 that my fav lists had no saved again. Ill let you know how this new one goes.

Thanks as always.

EDIT Do you have a link Tom? Website still has 3.45 available and Google shows nothing yet.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I downloaded it last night at http://www.gameex.net/

Maybe your browser has the old page cached?

[RSAntilles]

Hang on clearing my cache let me see the 'NEWS' that 3.48 is available but the Downloads section still shows 3.45. Cache is cleared, so what now?

Same problem in both IE and Firefox.

[Ruby-Rube]

Looks like the attract mode problem is solved!

[RSAntilles]

Were ARE YOU getting it from, the download link still says 3.45 and Im not likely to click on that, unless its a typo and the download is actually 3.48.

EDIT: right, just for a giggle I clicked on the German flag at the top of the page and guess what, it said 3.48 for download, so Im guessing my page in English which still says 3.45 may have taken me to the same file as it has the same name gameexsetup.exe

All is well.

[jr9770]

Tom,

I've downloaded and played around with 3.48 and have a few questions / problems. I have my cabinet, control panel, marquees, and title images all saved as zip files. The help text in the ini file says the program can still recognize these as zip files (only icons must be unzipped). When I specify these as zip files in the config they do not show up in the program. When I unzip all of these artwork files they do show up. Is the help text wrong? Do these need to be unzipped in order to work properly? If so then is there any way you can fix this so the program can still recognize the images in the zip file. The snaps.zip file still seems to work properly however.

Also, can you explain to me how the alpha paging is supposed to work? I have it enabled but it doesn't seem to do anything. When I use the page up / page down arrows it's not jumping to the next alphabetic letter. I'm not sure how this is supposed to function.

Finally, when clicking on the marquee, title, etc. to make the image go full screen it'd be nice to be able to exit back to the previous screen via a left mouse click. I navigate GameEX with a mouse and I left click to make the image larger, but in order to go back to the previous screen it looks like I have to use either space bar or backspace on the keyboard. I think clicking the mouse should have the same effect. Can that be added?

Thanks!

Jeff

[acroberts]

Hi,

Nice to see you're addressing the issue of responsiveness whilst using video snaps (although implementing it with a timer would be more efficient than spawning threads...).

Anyway, at the moment the delay between selecting an item and the video/snap being show is WAY to high. It's something like 5 seconds at the moment I think. A half a second would be enough to allow users to quickly skip over items whilst experiencing a timely reaction for the items their actually interested in.

I suppose the solution that would make everybody happy would be to make the delay configurable.

Keep up the good work!

/Ant

[Toonces]

Hi,

Nice to see you're addressing the issue of responsiveness whilst using video snaps (although implementing it with a timer would be more efficient than spawning threads...).

Anyway, at the moment the delay between selecting an item and the video/snap being show is WAY to high. It's something like 5 seconds at the moment I think. A half a second would be enough to allow users to quickly skip over items whilst experiencing a timely reaction for the items their actually interested in.

I suppose the solution that would make everybody happy would be to make the delay configurable.

Keep up the good work!

/Ant

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I don't think there's any kind of delay in the videos. My video snaps come right up when I select a game. One thing you might want to do is turn off Alpha Blending for videos. I had a sluggishness issue with videos in general until I turned that off. I can't say I notice a difference either other than now the videos are fast.

Toonces

[rd1979]

Looks like the attract mode problem is solved!

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Thanks for going through the troule of fixing it TSpeirs, it looks like all IS well.

And thanks to Ruby-Rube for confirming the issue.

[Tom Speirs]

I don't think there's any kind of delay in the videos. My video snaps come right up when I select a game. One thing you might want to do is turn off Alpha Blending for videos. I had a sluggishness issue with videos in general until I turned that off. I can't say I notice a difference either other than now the videos are fast.

Toonces

Yes, Toonces is correct. There is no delay. Your PC is doing it as fast as it can. The Thread does the work of opening/processing the image/video. The purpose of this is two things, to make use of newer cpu's such as dual core and hyper threading, and at the same time improve 'responsivness'. In other words you should be able to select another game without the app freezing up waiting for the video or image to open.

I have a dual processor machine, and dont notice a huge difference, but do notice a little. On my single core athlon XP, it was pretty rapid before, I dont notice an improvement, but theres certainly no delay.

I find it hard to believe it is taking 5 seconds, but as I said there is no delay going on, and a timer is deffinitly not the correct approach for this.

I would be interested to hear from Dave, and see how it works on his 800Mhz machine. If its really adverse for him. Ill look at it some more.

Thanks,

Tom

[Tom Speirs]

Tom,

I've downloaded and played around with 3.48 and have a few questions / problems. I have my cabinet, control panel, marquees, and title images all saved as zip files. The help text in the ini file says the program can still recognize these as zip files (only icons must be unzipped). When I specify these as zip files in the config they do not show up in the program. When I unzip all of these artwork files they do show up. Is the help text wrong? Do these need to be unzipped in order to work properly? If so then is there any way you can fix this so the program can still recognize the images in the zip file. The snaps.zip file still seems to work properly however.

[ive remove this feature temporarily unil I get a chance to 'optimize' and improve performance of the zip code. The ini file is out of date in that respect, although as I said its just been removed temporarily]

Also, can you explain to me how the alpha paging is supposed to work? I have it enabled but it doesn't seem to do anything. When I use the page up / page down arrows it's not jumping to the next alphabetic letter. I'm not sure how this is supposed to function.

[it does not affect normal page up/down, but adds new features for keyboard and GamePad, where if you hold down CTRL or Button 1 and then left or right it will Alpha page]

Finally, when clicking on the marquee, title, etc. to make the image go full screen it'd be nice to be able to exit back to the previous screen via a left mouse click. I navigate GameEX with a mouse and I left click to make the image larger, but in order to go back to the previous screen it looks like I have to use either space bar or backspace on the keyboard. I think clicking the mouse should have the same effect. Can that be added?

[Yes, I take your point deffinitly. I have already looked at this. What i was thinking was making the 'Right' Mouse button do a Navigate 'Back' in GameEx. This would be of benefit anyway i think, and will address this]

Thanks!

Jeff

[RSAntilles]

Ok feeback time from me now I finally got 3.48 :-)

Loving the majority of Game Ex, its running so fine and my machine is 4 years old with no real upgrades.

P4 1.8Ghz

512 Rambus

GeForce 4 Ti4600

The Jukebox, pretty funky but the ability to simply double click and play that song would be nice as opposed to it being added to the current play list, or even single lick for that matter.

Video, when I choose a music video to play it plays fine, but simply repeats itself, I thought it would be like the Jukebox where it could randomly play another from my list. Also when I return to the video menu the video I was watching is still playing (which is good) but if my cursor moves to another in the list it stops and shows a new background, if the video could keep playing perhaps until I 'liked' another one thatd be sweet.

Not finding anymore problems right now, all is cool. Keep it up.

Oh, my fave list isnt updating (or saving) either, still stuck with the first 3 favs I choose back in 3.45.

[jr9770]

Tom,

I've downloaded and played around with 3.48 and have a few questions / problems.  I have my cabinet, control panel, marquees, and title images all saved as zip files.  The help text in the ini file says the program can still recognize these as zip files (only icons must be unzipped).  When I specify these as zip files in the config they do not show up in the program.  When I unzip all of these artwork files they do show up.  Is the help text wrong?  Do these need to be unzipped in order to work properly?  If so then is there any way you can fix this so the program can still recognize the images in the zip file.  The snaps.zip file still seems to work properly however.

[ive remove this feature temporarily unil I get a chance to 'optimize' and improve performance of the zip code. The ini file is out of date in that respect, although as I said its just been removed temporarily]

Also, can you explain to me how the alpha paging is supposed to work?  I have it enabled but it doesn't seem to do anything.  When I use the page up / page down arrows it's not jumping to the next alphabetic letter.  I'm not sure how this is supposed to function.

[it does not affect normal page up/down, but adds new features for keyboard and GamePad, where if you hold down CTRL or Button 1 and then left or right it will Alpha page]

Finally, when clicking on the marquee, title, etc. to make the image go full screen it'd be nice to be able to exit back to the previous screen via a left mouse click.  I navigate GameEX with a mouse and I left click to make the image larger, but in order to go back to the previous screen it looks like I have to use either space bar or backspace on the keyboard.  I think clicking the mouse should have the same effect.  Can that be added?

[Yes, I take your point deffinitly. I have already looked at this. What i was thinking was making the 'Right' Mouse button do a Navigate 'Back' in GameEx. This would be of benefit anyway i think, and will address this]

Thanks!

Jeff

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Thanks Tom! It all makes sense now!

[David R Hilgendorf]

I find it hard to believe it is taking 5 seconds, but as I said there is no delay going on, and a timer is deffinitly not the correct approach for this.

I would be interested to hear from Dave, and see how it works on his 800Mhz machine. If its really adverse for him. Ill look at it some more.

Thanks,

Tom

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

To, just had a quick chance to play with 3.48 and here are my observations:

1) Yes it does take longer to load the avi files (I don't have the 4GB MNG to test). I would say approximately 2 seconds, where it was virtually instantaneous before.

2) Alpha paging is broken for me, when I hold button 1 and press left it alpha page ups, but pressing right selects the H or X buttons at the top right instead of paging down (the same as if I wasn't holding buton 1 at all). I am sure this is a simple fix and thanks so much for adding this feature.

Anyone know where to get a larger selection of avi or mng files for MAME? I love them, but I only have a couple hundred I think! To time consuming to make them individually.

[Tom Speirs]

Hi,

Nice to see you're addressing the issue of responsiveness whilst using video snaps (although implementing it with a timer would be more efficient than spawning threads...).

Anyway, at the moment the delay between selecting an item and the video/snap being show is WAY to high. It's something like 5 seconds at the moment I think. A half a second would be enough to allow users to quickly skip over items whilst experiencing a timely reaction for the items their actually interested in.

I suppose the solution that would make everybody happy would be to make the delay configurable.

Keep up the good work!

/Ant

Ant,

Running on a thread will be optional in the next version (new setting).

As I said before there is no delay going on.