Does the Nestopia menu bother you? here's a fix

[Inigo Montoya]

I've been setting up gameex for my mame cab and it is a great program. I have sucessfully set up nestopia as my NES emulator and it works perfectly. One thing has bothered me since I've been using it. Upon escaping from nestopia and returning to gameex the nestopia full screen menu shows up for a split second. I feel this breaks the illusion that i'm not actually in windows. I've figured out a way to keep this menu from being seen when exiting. This fix assumes you are using the windows default color scheme. Inside nestopia go to options/preferences. And change the default fullscreen menu color to black. Now instead of the menu showing up while exiting, it will momentarily show a black bar. I'll take a black bar over an ugly windows menu any day. I did a search on this subject and couldn't find anything similar. Just thought I'd pass some info along.

edit:

Another thing i did which i forgot about is I opened up nestopia.cfg and changed the key that shows the menu. The default key is ESC. I found that by changing the menu key to some other key reduces the duration of the menu while exiting. I used CTRL+M. This change coupled with the prior fix makes the menu near invisible unless you're looking for it.

[Brian Hoffman]

Thanks for passing along the info.

[headkaze]

An interesting way I solved a similar problem with Visualboy Advance before it had an "auto hide" menu option was to use Resource Hacker. You can either completely remove the Menu using it (only standard Win32 form menus though not custom drawn ones) or you can remap the ESC key to ENTER so closing the emu won't show the Menu. It won't work on all emulators though.

Eg.

VK_ESCAPE, 40002, NOINVERT, VIRTKEY
VK_RETURN, 40263, NOINVERT, VIRTKEY

Another way to remove a menu system is to use FindWindow() to get the hWnd then SetMenu() to remove it. I'm sure there would be AutoIt equivalents to those. On a side note SetWindowLong() with GWL_STYLE flag will remove the borders of a window. In most circumstances there are ways to hack an emu to be cab friendly. Fun stuff

[Nologic]

Well there is sort of a way to do it in AutoIt...tho I had to ask around as I had no clue.

Update

Loader can now be found in the 101 Reasons thread