What happens when an emulator is closed?

[rootnik]

I love gameex, but there seems to be a 4-5 second delay when exiting out of an emulator and returning to the game screen.

I've searched the forums on this subject, and read that this delay is normal. What is happening during that delay? What causes it?

[Tom Speirs]

I love gameex, but there seems to be a 4-5 second delay when exiting out of an emulator and returning to the game screen.

I've searched the forums on this subject, and read that this delay is normal.  What is happening during that delay?  What causes it?

Its mainly doing these things in this order for a custom emulator on exit of emulator.

1. Closing the emulator process, and waiting a couple a seconds for it to shut down properly.

2. Reinitalising DirectSound and the the Bass Audio Library (used for playing soundfx, music and radio).

3. If playing a radio station, reinitialising and streaming that station.

4. Shutting down DirectX DirectDraw.

5. Reinitialling DirectDraw

6. Loading the DirectDraw surfaces, ie the GameEx graphics and images, and creating the font graphics.

If theres any improvements that could be made, it would be with 1 probably and the coded delay.

[djrobx]

1. Closing the emulator process, and waiting a couple a seconds for it to shut down properly.

And I'm assuming you also forceably kill applications that don't shut down properly. Some emulators don't (ZSnes is a good example). GameEx gets back to the menu fairly quickly IF the emulator actually shuts down as requested. If its taking 5 seconds to get back to GameEx your emulator is probably not exiting properly.

ZSnes allows you to specify an exit key. So I assigned that to X, then added an exception to my custom application monitor to send "X" if the emulator running is ZSnes. I couldn't find any cleaner solution for ZSnes, unfortunately.

[Smiff]

if you start zSNES with "-m" ESCAPE quits it the downside for me is then i lose ability to right click and get the gui if i need to.

i'm interested what a "custom application monitor" is?

btw i don't agree it's apps (not) shutting down that makes it slow, even apps that quit clean on escape still take 5 seconds or so to return GameEX for me.. i'll do some timing later with zSNES to see if this makes any difference.

edit: ok it seems to quit quicker, and cleaner because you don't see the zSNES GUI.

here's my zSNES config:

[Emulator_2]

        Enabled=True
        StartPageName=Nintendo SNES games
        TitleText=SNES
        StartPageLogo=snes
        RomFilter=*.zip
        RomsInFolders=False
        ROMPath=C:\Games\ROMs\SNES-unsorted
        SnapPath=C:\Games\ROMs\SNES\pics\screens
        WorkingPath=C:\Games\Emulators\zSNES
        MapKeys=False
        WaitBeforeKeys=
        SendKeys=
        ReplaceDash=True
        ReplaceUnder=True
        Capitals=True
        RemoveBrackets=True
        AlsoLaunch=
        ShowDesktop=False
        Debug=False
        MapFile=
        OLDatZip=C:\Games\ROMs\!Tools\OfflineList0.7\datas\snes_OL.zip
        Command=Zsnesw.exe -m "[ROMPath]\[RomFile]"
	TitlePath=C:\Games\ROMs\SNES\pics\titles
	BoxPath=C:\Games\ROMs\SNES\pics\box
	LaunchBefore=
	LaunchAfter=
	CartPath=C:\Games\ROMs\SNES\pics\carts

note the LaunchBefore= & LaunchAfter= are cleared - the latter was "pause" before and that seemed to stop GameEX restoring on zSNES exit.

btw can anyone tell me what LaunchAfter=pause is for?

[Tom Speirs]

btw can anyone tell me what LaunchAfter=pause is for?

Nothing, example and testing only.

GameEx does wait a few seconds for the app to close down correctly as I said, and does other stuff too. We are all sacrifying these seconds for a solution that works very well, keeps running like duracel and works with just about everything

The alternative is constant 'GameEx crashed when playing...' posts.

[Smiff]

removing Launchafter=pause actually seemed to make it quit properly where before it hung, perhaps it was a freak.

sorry Launchafter=pause actually does make GameEx wait a certain length of time or no?

if the app actually shuts down quickly on escape there should be no issue?

there's a possible issue with zSNES that if you force close it, the SRAM may not be written to disk safely (although setting the option "check + save sram" may work around that!).

phew this stuff is complicated. i could think about this full time

[djrobx]

I posted my custom app monitor in this thread

http://www.gameex.info/forums/index.php?showtopic=388

It monitors the app and MCE remote. The next thing on my list is the ability to exit the game using the game controller (say with a button combo)

-- Rob

[Smiff]

edit: my bad, that config still works with 4.57. faster if anything?

(didn't know upgrading GameEx altered some emu specific config file settings)

[Tom Speirs]

edit: my bad, that config still works with 4.57. faster if anything?

(didn't know upgrading GameEx altered some emu specific config file settings)

It should not alter your config, unless you have missing settings.