Completed Feature Requests (Moved)

[Smiff]

its only the part where you press left or right axidently and then they start pressing buttons because its not going up or down??

yes that's the #1 problem ive seen

ive given this some more thought, i think the neatest solution is to let us set a time in milliseconds that the input has to be held for the cursor to move out of a game list (left or right, basically). im guessing somewhere in the 500-1000ms range will be enough, but i'd like to experiment (on children, naturally

anyone have better ideas?

here's another idea: have a different sound effect for moving to a game vs moving to a gameex control. that could help navigation too?

[Tom Speirs]

ive been watching kids using gameex, and navigating the game lists is just too hard and error prone.*

people nearly always end up moving right onto the gameex icons for "return to start page" and "exit" (and they do not know what these do). (i have to shout at them not to press anything). as it stands, the only thing they can see how to use is the up and down arrows on the bottom right. stuff like "hold button 3 and press right to jump letters" is just too damn hard for normal people to understand/remember. its never going to work.

i don't know exactly how to fix this. its quite major. some ideas:

1) restrict movement in the lists to one dimension - up and down. maybe require something like a quick double or triple press, or hold for period of time, to move out of the game list left or right. the basic point is that it needs to be harder to slip out of the game list than moving within it.

2) put favourites for each system at top of list? favourites as its own item on the homepage is not being used, because people are already being pushed into thinking in terms of systems(consoles) from when they first see gameex.

3) maybe put a list of letters across the top so people who like using mouse can click "d" for games beginning with d .. people seem to like the mouse, even though we know its slower, they like it! perhaps there are other ways to improve mouse navigation like modulated scrolling speed or (Revolutionary!) scroll bar!

4) allow substring searches. this is a big feature i know. so if they want "super bomberman 2" for snes, they go to SNES and type "bomb" and its narrowed the list as they type... a common search feature in many apps. maybe even have this global across all game lists.

5) maybe put something on the exit button so pressing once does not exit, nor pressing several times on the same button. e.g.: press once, a prompt comes up saying press something else to exit.

those are the first 3 things i can think of, will try to add more later.

other ideas? some of these are not stupid kids either. its just awkward and i know can be made better.

this is not a criticism theres nothing buggy about gameex, its just a human-machine thing.

* hell, if im drunk or silly its too precise for me either.

Try this, and let me know what you think.

GameEx 6.29 - EXE only

Hey Tom..

Is there anyway to configure GameEx to store all your emulator's rom's into a text/ini file? I think the MAME part does this, which really helps as far as keeping the loading times down. But if you could somehow enable a feature to do this for all the other emulators, that would be great. You wouldn't have to get spiffy with the names either.. just something like emu1.txt, emu2.txt, emu3.txt.....emu25.txt. I think that would help out a lot.

Keep up the great work!

It already does this, there called map files, and GameEx automatically creates them in the data directory. Copy the files and use the map file setting.

GameEx.zip

[Tom Speirs]

I don't know if this has been requested earlier, but possibility to use multiple gameex.ini files as a command line option.

Say that you have a cabinet with rotatable screen, just save two different .ini's, one for your vertical and one for your horizontal. Make two shortcuts, one with "gameex.exe -ini vertical.ini" and one with "gameex.exe -ini horizontal.ini".

Or for other uses, use one shortcut just for htpc only use and one for gaming only. I'm sure people can come up with a lot of cool stuff.

Emph

That functionality has been been there over a year. Look at the command line options on the docs page.

[emphatic]

That functionality has been been there over a year. Look at the command line options on the docs page.

Oops, my bad! Thanks.

Emph

[Smiff]

Tom thanks v much for reading - but i'm not seeing difference with 6.29 exe sorry? what have you done

thought of something else simple: an option to remove those two buttons at top right might really help.

[Tom Speirs]

Tom thanks v much for reading - but i'm not seeing difference with 6.29 exe sorry? what have you done

thought of something else simple: an option to remove those two buttons at top right might really help.

Try pressing up/down when accedently moving to the hor or exit button from either the game list or menus.

Already done: Show Buttons setting.

[lali0022]

Hi Guys,

i currently have a xbox 360 and use the mce extender to watch all my videos on my tv. what i want to know is if you guys are going to make it possible for the gameEx software to also be extended to the xbox 360.

i have already tried to see if it works and it doesnt

is this feature on the drawing board?

[emphatic]

For the theme editor/GameEx:

Text alignment Right/Left/Centered (just click on a text object, say 'list/num' and select centered)

Emph

[Michael]

currently im playing around with TV in gameex and i have had an idea

would it be possible to add a section to the menu called tv

with options like the emulator options onlanuch after launch on exit etc

so people can use there own tv software with a greater control

im using wintv and a mce remote im able to use the remote to record tv and playback im thinking this could save (tom) a lot of problems as there is so many difrent tv cards etc and this will allow freeview Sky tv etc on gameex

comments welcome

[Adultery]

I like what you've done, but I have one tiny little request...

Your database files open up with my Microsoft Excel but I can't edit them. Would it be possible to make them easy to change? I noticed alot of the ROMs in my games list don't have descriptions and some emulators don't have a DB at all.

[gerble1000]

I like what you've done, but I have one tiny little request...

Your database files open up with my Microsoft Excel but I can't edit them. Would it be possible to make them easy to change? I noticed alot of the ROMs in my games list don't have descriptions and some emulators don't have a DB at all.

i agree we could do with more databases/woh actually does the databases anyway.

gerble1000

[headkaze]

This idea sort of coincides with some recent GameEx features, namely the auto update feature and config website. This idea involves the creation of an area on the GameEx update server that has a database of Emulator config files. In GameEx a feature is added that allows you to browse these configs and download them into GameEx. After selecting which Emulator section to download the config into (eg. You select Emulator_1 for an N64 config - the N64.ini file is downloaded and placed into the GameEx.ini file) and then an Emulator Setup Wizard is started.. The Wizard could have an option to auto-dowload the N64 emulator and then start auto-installing it. The Wizard would then go through and let you browse/setup the directories for the ROMs and executable.

[Smiff]

This idea sort of coincides with some recent GameEx features, namely the auto update feature and config website. This idea involves the creation of an area on the GameEx update server that has a database of Emulator config files. In GameEx a feature is added that allows you to browse these configs and download them into GameEx. After selecting which Emulator section to download the config into (eg. You select Emulator_1 for an N64 config - the N64.ini file is downloaded and placed into the GameEx.ini file) and then an Emulator Setup Wizard is started.. The Wizard could have an option to auto-dowload the N64 emulator and then start auto-installing it. The Wizard would then go through and let you browse/setup the directories for the ROMs and executable.

nice idea, but the gameex config must be done in conjunction with the emu config. simple example, if i set the emu to Exit on escape, then disable mapkeys in gameex. since we (gameex) can't get the emu configs right (without lots of work like writing ini/reg editor for emus) i don't see this working reliably. and if it doesn't work reliably, is it going to help? not sure

[gerble1000]

how about

an option to set gameex to create avi video's whilst in screensaver?

gerble1000

[Michael]

how about

an option to set gameex to create avi video's whilst in screensaver?

gerble1000

when i made video snaps i could see a preview of what it was recording this would be the same as what you want on the screen saver?? and also when making picture snaps of Video's

[gerble1000]

does the avi video creation resume if you exit it and try again the next day ,

or does it start over again

gerble1000

[Tom Speirs]

does the avi video creation resume if you exit it and try again the next day ,

or does it start over again

gerble1000

Yes, and please post in the right place.

[gerble1000]

Yes, and please post in the right place.

sorry

gerble1000

[gerble1000]

hi

i have a lot of roms i.e 5000 megadrive/genesis roms

but a lot are copies of themselves like japanese or just slightly different names.

to delete thes manually would take a long time

and i dont know what ones work, some dont work at all

is there a way for you tom to syphon out the bad ones and the copies?

it takes up a lot of room i estimate about 20gb on all the emulators.

what ive been doing to syphon them myself is using create snaps, and the ones with a blank

snap i will delete.

but that aint effective and very time consuming.

or is there a site to get a complete set of good roms all zipped up and not download individually

thanx gerble1000

[amos_82]

How about an option to defragment selected drives, I dont have a cab, but it sounds like people of cramming as many games as they can into them. It might be useful & could speed up GameEx, you could maybe start a defrag manually, or at a certain time.

[Michael]

How about an option to defragment selected drives, I dont have a cab, but it sounds like people of cramming as many games as they can into them. It might be useful & could speed up GameEx, you could maybe start a defrag manually, or at a certain time.

lol you can just use windows defrag not like you need to do it much realy

[amos_82]

Maybe your right, but i thought some cab users would find it easier to launch it from gameex, as not all cabs have a keyboard/mouse, besides the less you see windows the better surely.

[Michael]

Maybe your right, but i thought some cab users would find it easier to launch it from gameex, as not all cabs have a keyboard/mouse, besides the less you see windows the better surely.

ok, heres a way of doing it

make a BAT file containing

@echo off

defrag.exe c: -f

c: can be changed to other drive letters

this will defrag the chossen hard drive, you can add this to programs in gameex

although it runs with no front end it does work

[daveortiz2004]

What a program you have created! It's the centerpiece of the cabinet I'm building. Well worth the donation.

When I scroll through the list of Mame games I have, most games feature a nice text description that tells you about the game.

I am wondering if something like that could happen for visual pinball. It'd be great if the text file for the table's rules could be implemented in a similar fashion as mame.

And what about being able to categorize pinball tables by genre, year, etc.

I guess these ideas could work for other emulators too but pinball is my angle.

Thanks

[hansolo77]

That would be a nice feature, but I don't think it's something Tom would be responsible for creating. The descriptions of the roms come from a database file compiled from somebody else. I think it's called history.dat. I think that file is updated whenever MAME is, and Tom's program just calls it. For pinball the same would be true here. Somebody would have to make a database for Tom's program to call. It's not something internal to the program.