damnit, just when i'm done.

[katuuuz]

dudes,

trackball came in today, got it together with a breeze, works like a charm. played golden tee and virtual bowling, and shuffleboard game for like an hour and a half. then switched it up now that my cp didn't have a hole where the old trackball was, to get the polished cp feel of x men 2 player. me and my buddy froze up at level 3, with audio skipping. then it came back to life for a minute and did the same thing, but never came back, and had to do a manual shut down. (ctrl alt del, nor esc worked). after reboot, i reprogrammed my ipac, and jumped into a street fighter alpha 3 game with my boy and not even past the character select screen it froze unsavabley again. what does this mean? all this hard work and i can't play the roms?

i won't be able to sleep tonight, again. hit me with any suggestions.

[headkaze]

Well first thing you should always update GameEx. There is no problem doing this I have been doing it every new release for a long time. The recent update requires you to do a manual install, so download the latest binary and just run the exe. It will not mess with you current setup. Also, the Setup Wizard will not change anything unless you change it yourself.

The freezing problem you describe may be a Mame issue, so perhaps you need to try running a few games in plain Mame32 to find out it crashes then. One you illiminate a few things it will be easier to solve the issue.

[katuuuz]

Well first thing you should always update GameEx. There is no problem doing this I have been doing it every new release for a long time. The recent update requires you to do a manual install, so download the latest binary and just run the exe. It will not mess with you current setup. Also, the Setup Wizard will not change anything unless you change it yourself.

The freezing problem you describe may be a Mame issue, so perhaps you need to try running a few games in plain Mame32 to find out it crashes then. One you illiminate a few things it will be easier to solve the issue.

ok, i'm gonna try running them in 32, then update gameex, i am eager to see the setup wizard, but new i would be done with the project tonight and didn't want to risk it.

[katuuuz]

ok, i'm gonna try running them in 32, then update gameex, i am eager to see the setup wizard, but new i would be done with the project tonight and didn't want to risk it.

kaze, [enable keyboard direct input] was off. i turned it on after highlighting it because it said "is faster and allows multiple keypresses." do you think it was freezing from me and the 2nd player bashing keys with this feature off? like the buffer overloaded? he's not here anymore to test with 2 players, but things were running smoothly on mame32k with just me playing. (i don't have plain mame32).

my current mamepgui (what i use in game ex) version is .106. is the command line version of mame better?? what mame would you suggest using for the best results? I always jused the gui version because i had it before i discovered gameex, and didn't know commands.

[headkaze]

Not sure why you PM'ed me a copy of your post above, but I'll answer you here anyway.

I have no idea about the enable keyboard direct input feature. That's a question for Tom. None of the core stuff is written by me, that's all the brilliant work of Tom, and I haven't got the faintest clue how he's implemented Direct Input in GameEx.

In regards to the Mame vs Mame32, it's a common question.

Mame works fine in GameEx as does Mame32. I use the command line version because you are not using the UI when running it in GameEx so I don't see why you would need it. Mame32 includes a UI and still has support for command line arguments so there is practically no difference except for saving a few megs of memory by using Mame.

I used to use Mame32fx but the author discontinued it I believe. I used that build because it had code to normalise sound. With Direct 3D support in the Mame core, I don't bother with any other custom builds anymore.

I use a Pentium 4 custom compiled version of plain old Mame with auto-skip disclaimer. But I include a custom P4 version of Mame32 in the same directory in case I want to do some testing from it's UI.

[Will]

i can't think of a reason NOT to use direct input. It is much more efficient than the normal windows input handler. It buffers much better and responds more quickly. I think it should be defaulted to on, and just be an option to troubleshoot. Of course there probably is a good reason for it to default to off--I just don't know it

[katuuuz]

thanks kaze, and will.