GAMEEX LITE PETITION

[favian]

A few friends of mine and myself have been experiencing problems with the speed of gameex. Its a bit clunky eveny with a gig of ram and fast processor.

Is it possible to make a 'lite' version of this program that doesnt have much of the features as the fully featured version.

for example, a lite version would focus just on mame, and not on dvd, which would make the program less bloated.

anything the programmers could do to make loading quicker and faster and better for slower pc's is a potential idea.

does anyone concur?

if i wanted to make a mame cabinet with gammex, the dvd features are a bit useless in that context because no one is going to watch a dvd in front of a mame cabinet.

[Tom Speirs]

A few friends of mine and myself have been experiencing problems with the speed of gameex. Its a bit clunky eveny with a gig of ram and fast processor.

Is it possible to make a 'lite' version of this program that doesnt have much of the features as the fully featured version.

for example, a lite version would focus just on mame, and not on dvd, which would make the program less bloated.

anything the programmers could do to make loading quicker and faster and better for slower pc's is a potential idea.

does anyone concur?

if i wanted to make a mame cabinet with gammex, the dvd features are a bit useless in that context because no one is going to watch a dvd in front of a mame cabinet.

If you disable the features you dont need they wont be used. You will not get any benefit in speed with a 'LITE' version. Only possible benefit would be saving about 2mb of hard disk space. You also would not get any benefit with RAM usage with a lite version. Just disable everything you dont need. You will notice the biggest difference with disabling HTML apps, the jukebox and ICONS.

Perhaps you can explain in detail where and how GameEx is slow, and that would give me something better to work on.

[Tom Speirs]

If you disable the features you dont need they wont be used. You will not get any benefit in speed with a 'LITE' version. Only possible benefit would be saving about 2mb of hard disk space. You also would not get any benefit with RAM usage with a lite version. Just disable everything you dont need. You will notice the biggest difference with disabling HTML apps, the jukebox and ICONS.

Perhaps you can explain in detail where and how GameEx is slow, and that would give me something better to work on.

I kind of feel like I am repeating myself on the concept of bloat.

I would like to confirm on initialisation GameEx does not:-

Initialise the DVD Player, Initialise the web browser conponent, Initialise Videos, or anything specific to Radio, pictures, Weather etc etc

It does initialise the bass Audio library, and does initialise Windows Media player if you have the Juekebox enabled. It also initialises DirectSound and DirectInput

It also Loads every single MAME ICON, and saves this to a bitmap, if you have not launched GameEx within the last 3 hours, and if you are using MAME ICONS.

It loads all images for your theme, but not the logos. It also creates fonts dynamically all as DirectDraw surfaces.

Prety much everything else it does on initialisation is just setting up variables and configuration settings, and just loading the form.

I think you will agree these are all core requirements, and nothing more.

I am not saying memory could not be optimized or load speed further improved in the future, and I am not even ruling out there is a mermoy leak somewhere but if these are an issue for you, me removing functionality will not help you one bit. Just make everyones use and my development of GameEx more complicated and time consuming. I do my best and try hars to make GameEx work with as many systems and OS's as possible, and this takes a high priority with the project, BUT you not being able to afford a better PC, better CPU, or bigger Hard Disk is NOT my problem.

If GameEx runs slow on a farily modern good system, it's likely a bug or some kind of incompatibly, and should be dealt with as such.

[BlueBull]

A few friends of mine and myself have been experiencing problems with the speed of gameex. Its a bit clunky eveny with a gig of ram and fast processor.

Is it possible to make a 'lite' version of this program that doesnt have much of the features as the fully featured version.

for example, a lite version would focus just on mame, and not on dvd, which would make the program less bloated.

anything the programmers could do to make loading quicker and faster and better for slower pc's is a potential idea.

does anyone concur?

if i wanted to make a mame cabinet with gammex, the dvd features are a bit useless in that context because no one is going to watch a dvd in front of a mame cabinet.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

If you have the time and money to build a cabinet, it shouldn't be a problem for you to get the best hardware.

I think a petition is the wrong way to go about your problem. Upgrade your hardware. Run it on a raid partition. Have you tried a defrag. Maybe your video card is slow as dirt. Correct me if im wrong but doesn't direct draw use the video subsystem?

Just a thought but if you download a free program shouldn't you do atleast everything you can to make it work on your end before complaining.

Besides, I think the features are what separate it from other things. Anyone can write a simple program to launch thier mame games. But when I can check the weather get a mame screensaver and listen to all of my music from one program I'd pay money for it...

[djrobx]

The OP states that it's slow even with a gig of RAM and a fast processor. I agree to a certain extent, it's fairly slow on my p4 3.0ghz w/ 1gb RAM. I don't, however, think the recent DVD. media functions and other "feature bloat" items are the culprit. GameEx has actually gotten faster due to other optimizations since those features were added.

"Petition" has such an angry, confrontive connotation to it. Politely request a feature if you want it, but this is free software, take it or leave it. There are lots of other front ends out there. I haven't seen sources, but it's clearly been developed using .NET components which focus on ease of and speed of development, rather than fast, lean and mean end user code. If that's what makes Tom happy and keeps the features and updates coming, more power to him.

[Ressurection]

I seriously think that as Tom said the problem is all in the configuration and not in GameEx.

My dedicated cabinet machine is a XP1700 with 256MB of RAM and I have no problems whatsoever running GameEx with jukebox enabled, video backgrounds and more than 10 emulators configured including an entire mame set.

There are so many configuration optimisations within windows itself that you should be looking at.

[Tom Speirs]

The OP states that it's slow even with a gig of RAM and a fast processor.  I agree to a certain extent, it's fairly slow on my p4 3.0ghz w/ 1gb RAM.    I don't, however, think the recent DVD. media functions and other "feature bloat" items are the culprit.  GameEx has actually gotten faster due to other optimizations since those features were added.

"Petition" has such an angry, confrontive connotation to it.    Politely request a feature if you want it, but this is free software, take it or leave it.  There are lots of other front ends out there.  I haven't seen sources, but it's clearly been developed using .NET components which focus on ease of and speed of development, rather than fast, lean and mean end user code.    If that's what makes Tom happy and keeps the features and updates coming, more power to him.

Thanks for the backup everyone.

djrobx,

GameEx really should not be slow on a P4, .net actually runs pretty fast in most cases. Could you please explaing how and when it is slow. Thanks.

[djrobx]

Primarily the initial startup time ("GamEx is loading..."), and the time to return back to the UI after a game exits. The UI itself is very snappy and responsive once it's up. It's not something I would consider unacceptably slow, but most other programs fly on this machine comparitively. I'm not using icons, nor the Jukebox.

Another example of slowness, is not in GameEx itslef, but the config applet. Changing pages is laborious (to get up to Emulator #9 for instance). It's just a screen with a few text boxes, I can't help but think that it really shouldn't be that slow. I don't need it that often so I wouldn't normally complain about it, but you asked.

We did a lot of work with C# .NET. While we very much enjoyed the language and framework features, for most things the end result was extremely slow compared to doing things the traditional way in C. That was just our experience, it didn't stop us from using it. Maybe things have improved some with newer frameworks and/or VS.NET 2003. We stuck with the original .NET.

-- Rob