Bunch O'Questions

**Wombat** · April 18, 2008

Having (nearly) completed the physical build of my cabinet I'm now turning my attention to software.

Playing around with setting up a few more options/emulators in GameEx (registered... previous experienced user of Mamewah) and I just have a few, hopefully simple, questions to be answered or a confirmation of my understandings of how things work is correct and that's just the best way there is for now.

1) Visual Pinball - Method Of Loading

Using the supplied setup (either it was internal or came from the "101 Reasons" thread) I altered it to my pathways. Seemed to use vpinball_loader.exe as a GameEx control shell. Never could get it to work (mainly AutoIt errors)... eventually shifted to the method that uses vpauto i.e.

AlsoLaunch=[apppath]\vpauto.exe

Command=VPinball.exe -play -"[ROMPATH]\[ROMFILE]"

Now, this only appears to work when I have

ShowDesktop=True

otherwise VisualPinball doesn't appear as the program "on top" (it's hidden behind the black GameEx screen)

I realise this probably has more to do with the way Visual Pinball (I'm using the latest 8.1 version with Pinmame 1.59 and latest scripts etc.) is coded rather than GameEx but is there a better way/loader? Currently I've set my desktop background to black and devoid of icons but I'm trying to hide even the "writing/reading animations to/from cache" for a more seamless look.

2) Visual Pinball - Focus

On tables that use pinmame you can right-click on the DMD to change certain things (mainly I just sometimes double-size it before moving it). Quite a few other tables also may include additional key press features (like 'R' to display a popup window of rules). When I do these solely in Visual Pinball they work fine but when I do them when governed by GameEX (or perhaps more correctly vpauto) the resulting popup window "disappears" into the background. Is vpauto trying to keep focus on the table? Using my "quit" key (my universal ESC key which I've just purely mapped to ENTER so quit Vpinball via the dialog box that pops up) in these cases returns me to GameEx but still leaves the table running in the background. If I never attempt to use these features (and I now usually adjust the DMD outside of GameEx first) then things work fine.

3) Daphne - Why a separate section?

I haven't "grown up" with GameEx so I can only assume that Daphne gets its own "different" section to the other emulators purely for historical reasons. I certainly can't see why I can't setup Daphne under "Emulated Games" using batch files to drive the emulator list and pass parameters to daphne.exe (in fact this is the setup I used to run under Mamewah). But I did use the existing Daphne section of GameEx and, after manually editing all the slots to get things in alphabetical order and putting my desired control arguments (for dipswitch and latency etc. settings) in the framefile lines, I have things working fine.

The only problem/missing feature that I see in this section, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that there appears to be no flag to set so that Daphne games, unlike MAME, PC Games, Visual Pinball etc. appear in the MOST PLAYED and LAST PLAYED lists. Did I miss it?

4) MAME listing of BIOS

Noticed that some BIOS entities (can't remember which ones at the moment) seem to appear in the full MAME lists. I assumed that GameEx might have filtered these out automatically.... maybe it does but maybe not all of them? I know I could add these to the filter list under MAME but is this the way to go?

5) SEARCH FEATURE includes folder name?

The new search feature I quickly played around with and noticed that when searching media (for 'Dire' say) not only are all of the songs by Dire Straits displayed but also the "folder" line (folder.jpg) which presumably only gets in because it's stored in the Dire Straits folder. IMHO that looks ugly and is perhaps unnecessary... could folder/folder images not be reported?

6) SEARCH FEATURE - Distortion?

Is it my imagination or are the album covers displayed next to the songs after a search "squished"? When displaying in the normal jukebox section they appear square (and most of them are) but not so in the search results (I'm using the Default - New theme if it matters)

7) EBOOK READER

I threw a "How To Win At Donkey Kong" PDF into a folder and enabled the ebook reader to set how it works. After waiting for a fair while (IMHO on a 3.0 GHZ machine) it did display... I've since read the rendering threads to see why this is so. However I was a little stymied by the apparent lack of options (or my lack of knowledge) in that each page was done so that only a portion of it was visible on my 1920x1200 widescreen monitor and I had to use the up/down buttons to "read" the whole page. Couldn't figure out if there was any "fit to screen" button (maybe like the video section) that could be used.

Having used Comic Book Reader (CDisplay) before I then added a bunch of comics into the same folder and tried to display one. After a longer "rendering" time (files are bigger I guess) the exact same style of output appeared.

Of course, having used CDisplay before I was supremely hopeful that each (double) page would be rendered beautifully and displayed perfectly on my widescreen monitor.

Did I miss something here in the setup? Of course I know I can install setup CDisplay 1.8 and configure it to my needs and then just setup CDisplay under GameEx as another "emulator" with rom filters of *.cbr/cbz but I kinda just assumed from the registration blurb that it would already be there.

8) GAMEEX VERSION

Really thick question... Version 9.19 came out very soon after 9.18 and I duly updated (I was hoping Tom listened to my plaintive cries to permit GameEx alpha-page navigation using a keyboard button with an Ultimarc 360 joystick handling the directional movement (you can only have custom joystick OR keys - not both)) but I still don't see on the main page (http://www.gameex.net/) what happened in this version (info for 9.18 is still displayed). Being a curious fellow I'm intrigued.

9) WHAT THE?

I swear this happened to me last night... I was navigating through the GameEx menu when the system paused for a coupla seconds and suddenly the screen rotated -90 degrees. Quit GameEx and when into the Advanced Configuration and sure 'nuff, the -90 degrees was set.

Is there some form of "hot key" combination that could have possibly turned this on? I don't know how/why it happened so I can't replicate it.

10) UltraStik Plugin

One for Oggalz I guess. I installed PlugInUltraStik.zip from the plugins thread and am mostly impressed. However I did not that sometimes the joysticks were left/set to mouse mode when exiting Mame so that when I entered my PC Game section I could no longer have it function as a joystick... no harm, no foul... I can see I have some my setup work to do.

My question is more that this version appears to 1.0. If I follow another forum thread you appear to be on a 1.3 version primarly for use under Windows Vista(?) On the assumption that this still would work for Windows XP and not knowing where to find versions 1.1 and 1.2 I downloaded the 320.79kb package on page 2 and a later SetControls.zip I thought I needed but that never worked for me so I reverted to version 1.0

I'm not on Vista but I'm still interested in using the latest applicable version, testing and identifying bugs and improvements if I can work out what package I should have.

Okay, that's enough questions for now... myself and my son will thrash it some more on the weekend.

**Brian Hoffman** · April 18, 2008

Having (nearly) completed the physical build of my cabinet I'm now turning my attention to software.
Playing around with setting up a few more options/emulators in GameEx (registered... previous experienced user of Mamewah) and I just have a few, hopefully simple, questions to be answered or a confirmation of my understandings of how things work is correct and that's just the best way there is for now.
1) Visual Pinball - Method Of Loading
Using the supplied setup (either it was internal or came from the "101 Reasons" thread) I altered it to my pathways. Seemed to use vpinball_loader.exe as a GameEx control shell. Never could get it to work (mainly AutoIt errors)... eventually shifted to the method that uses vpauto i.e.
AlsoLaunch=[apppath]\vpauto.exe
Command=VPinball.exe -play -"[ROMPATH]\[ROMFILE]"
Now, this only appears to work when I have
ShowDesktop=True
otherwise VisualPinball doesn't appear as the program "on top" (it's hidden behind the black GameEx screen)
I realise this probably has more to do with the way Visual Pinball (I'm using the latest 8.1 version with Pinmame 1.59 and latest scripts etc.) is coded rather than GameEx but is there a better way/loader? Currently I've set my desktop background to black and devoid of icons but I'm trying to hide even the "writing/reading animations to/from cache" for a more seamless look.
2) Visual Pinball - Focus
On tables that use pinmame you can right-click on the DMD to change certain things (mainly I just sometimes double-size it before moving it). Quite a few other tables also may include additional key press features (like 'R' to display a popup window of rules). When I do these solely in Visual Pinball they work fine but when I do them when governed by GameEX (or perhaps more correctly vpauto) the resulting popup window "disappears" into the background. Is vpauto trying to keep focus on the table? Using my "quit" key (my universal ESC key which I've just purely mapped to ENTER so quit Vpinball via the dialog box that pops up) in these cases returns me to GameEx but still leaves the table running in the background. If I never attempt to use these features (and I now usually adjust the DMD outside of GameEx first) then things work fine.
3) Daphne - Why a separate section?
I haven't "grown up" with GameEx so I can only assume that Daphne gets its own "different" section to the other emulators purely for historical reasons. I certainly can't see why I can't setup Daphne under "Emulated Games" using batch files to drive the emulator list and pass parameters to daphne.exe (in fact this is the setup I used to run under Mamewah). But I did use the existing Daphne section of GameEx and, after manually editing all the slots to get things in alphabetical order and putting my desired control arguments (for dipswitch and latency etc. settings) in the framefile lines, I have things working fine.
The only problem/missing feature that I see in this section, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that there appears to be no flag to set so that Daphne games, unlike MAME, PC Games, Visual Pinball etc. appear in the MOST PLAYED and LAST PLAYED lists. Did I miss it?
4) MAME listing of BIOS
Noticed that some BIOS entities (can't remember which ones at the moment) seem to appear in the full MAME lists. I assumed that GameEx might have filtered these out automatically.... maybe it does but maybe not all of them? I know I could add these to the filter list under MAME but is this the way to go?
5) SEARCH FEATURE includes folder name?
The new search feature I quickly played around with and noticed that when searching media (for 'Dire' say) not only are all of the songs by Dire Straits displayed but also the "folder" line (folder.jpg) which presumably only gets in because it's stored in the Dire Straits folder. IMHO that looks ugly and is perhaps unnecessary... could folder/folder images not be reported?
6) SEARCH FEATURE - Distortion?
Is it my imagination or are the album covers displayed next to the songs after a search "squished"? When displaying in the normal jukebox section they appear square (and most of them are) but not so in the search results (I'm using the Default - New theme if it matters)
7) EBOOK READER
I threw a "How To Win At Donkey Kong" PDF into a folder and enabled the ebook reader to set how it works. After waiting for a fair while (IMHO on a 3.0 GHZ machine) it did display... I've since read the rendering threads to see why this is so. However I was a little stymied by the apparent lack of options (or my lack of knowledge) in that each page was done so that only a portion of it was visible on my 1920x1200 widescreen monitor and I had to use the up/down buttons to "read" the whole page. Couldn't figure out if there was any "fit to screen" button (maybe like the video section) that could be used.
Having used Comic Book Reader (CDisplay) before I then added a bunch of comics into the same folder and tried to display one. After a longer "rendering" time (files are bigger I guess) the exact same style of output appeared.
Of course, having used CDisplay before I was supremely hopeful that each (double) page would be rendered beautifully and displayed perfectly on my widescreen monitor.
Did I miss something here in the setup? Of course I know I can install setup CDisplay 1.8 and configure it to my needs and then just setup CDisplay under GameEx as another "emulator" with rom filters of *.cbr/cbz but I kinda just assumed from the registration blurb that it would already be there.
8) GAMEEX VERSION
Really thick question... Version 9.19 came out very soon after 9.18 and I duly updated (I was hoping Tom listened to my plaintive cries to permit GameEx alpha-page navigation using a keyboard button with an Ultimarc 360 joystick handling the directional movement (you can only have custom joystick OR keys - not both)) but I still don't see on the main page (http://www.gameex.net/) what happened in this version (info for 9.18 is still displayed). Being a curious fellow I'm intrigued.
9) WHAT THE?
I swear this happened to me last night... I was navigating through the GameEx menu when the system paused for a coupla seconds and suddenly the screen rotated -90 degrees. Quit GameEx and when into the Advanced Configuration and sure 'nuff, the -90 degrees was set.
Is there some form of "hot key" combination that could have possibly turned this on? I don't know how/why it happened so I can't replicate it.
10) UltraStik Plugin
One for Oggalz I guess. I installed PlugInUltraStik.zip from the plugins thread and am mostly impressed. However I did not that sometimes the joysticks were left/set to mouse mode when exiting Mame so that when I entered my PC Game section I could no longer have it function as a joystick... no harm, no foul... I can see I have some my setup work to do.
My question is more that this version appears to 1.0. If I follow another forum thread you appear to be on a 1.3 version primarly for use under Windows Vista(?) On the assumption that this still would work for Windows XP and not knowing where to find versions 1.1 and 1.2 I downloaded the 320.79kb package on page 2 and a later SetControls.zip I thought I needed but that never worked for me so I reverted to version 1.0
I'm not on Vista but I'm still interested in using the latest applicable version, testing and identifying bugs and improvements if I can work out what package I should have.
Okay, that's enough questions for now... myself and my son will thrash it some more on the weekend.

1. Your visual pinball isnt being lauched full-screen and is behind hideos.exe. Make it run fullscreen and the rest should fall into place. Perhaps the VPauto isnt being launched properly.. It should take care of all dialogs that require user input. There is a post that I will link to shortly explaing how to set it up.

2. See #1

3. Because most emulators are run using the emulator.exe / rompath romfile method.

Example nestipia.exe c:\romsmario.nes

However Daphne requres alot more input.. Daphne.exe (obvoius) -vlpd (virtual laser disc player) -fullscreen and resolution are defined.

Those always stay the same. then you need to pass the romfile which is easy enough but then you also need to pass framefile information that is game specific. Gamex builds the command based on the values you input. So since daphne is special it gets its own section. When you configure daphne youll see the need.

4. Make outputs this when generating the games lists. It happens on most FE's now.. Its a mamedev issue... Although you can choose to exclude those roms in the config and they wont show.

5. I dont have these issue as I dont use gameex for my music

6. I dont have these issue as I dont use gameex for my music

7. I dont think there are any options to have the display of the pdf's diffrently.. But it should load alot faster.. Mine does on my laptop.

8. Use may be able to use Xpadder do map your joystick buttons to key presses and then configure the custom key presses. that way youll have the best of both worlds.. As far as the versions go... History has shown intermediate builds that dont have specific notes with them are bug fixes and alot of time never make it to the main pages text.

9. I believe there is a hot key to rotate the screen. Perhaps you inadvertantly triggered it.

hope this helps

**Tom Speirs** · April 18, 2008

6 is fixed for the next release.

The hot key to rotate is TAB. However Ive had a few reports of it inadvertadly being triggered, so its going to be changed for the next to shift-tab or ctrl-tab

**Wombat** · April 18, 2008

1. Your visual pinball isnt being lauched full-screen and is behind hideos.exe. Make it run fullscreen and the rest should fall into place. Perhaps the VPauto isnt being launched properly.. It should take care of all dialogs that require user input. There is a post that I will link to shortly explaing how to set it up.
2. See #1

Yep... I understand that but I have ticked the fullscreen option from within the Visual Pinball video options and I assume from the threads I've read that I'm using vpauto correctly (as per my original post extract). I'll await the link you post but I want to compare apples with apples... some one got this working the way they want with latest GameEx/VisualPinball (version 8.1.1)/Pinmame? Most (if not all) examples I remember seeing had Show Desktop = True and I assumed this was why.

For 2, vpauto is the one as delivered with GameEx right? (which I understand to be a compiled AutoIT script... I don't have AutoIt installed (yet... I probably will but don't have the need just now) so I can't attempt a decompile to see what it's doing and I assume I don't need it to run a compiled script). What, if anything, is the vpinball_loader.exe for or is it just old stuff that hasn't been cleared out? It does do it job otherwise (passing the "are you allowed" to screen etc.)

3. Because most emulators are run using the emulator.exe / rompath romfile method.
Example nestipia.exe c:\romsmario.nes
However Daphne requres alot more input.. Daphne.exe (obvoius) -vlpd (virtual laser disc player) -fullscreen and resolution are defined.
Those always stay the same. then you need to pass the romfile which is easy enough but then you also need to pass framefile information that is game specific. Gamex builds the command based on the values you input. So since daphne is special it gets its own section. When you configure daphne youll see the need.

I think you missed the question I asked (my fault for being too wordy). I know it takes a lot to configure Daphne. I did it for Mamewah using batch files for each game and I know I could do the same for GameEx. My question is... when using the explicit Daphne item (as opposed to an emulator slot), where's the option to have the game just played appear in the "Last Played" section (and possibly "Most Played" if I play it often enough)... if I play a MAME, PC or Visual Pinball game (all I've bothered to setup so far) I can see a configuration option to choose to have it appear or not... not so (not that I can find) for Daphne.

4. Make outputs this when generating the games lists. It happens on most FE's now.. Its a mamedev issue... Although you can choose to exclude those roms in the config and they wont show.

Understand.... And I used to contructs my own lists in Mamewah and exclude them from there too. I'm just not sure I saw all of them there in the GameEx lists and wondered if Tom automatically filtered some but not all and (if he does) whether he wants to know the ones missed. I'll check closer on the weekend what does/doesn't appear.

6. I dont have these issue as I dont use gameex for my music

To be honest, I probably won't either. I use WinCab as my preferred jukebox player (which I have under the PC Games section although I may yet make it its own entity to stand out more) as I've collated personal "Best Of's" of each artist and they're just stored in Artist folders and not "Albums" per se. None of the genres are right either (in fact, I've set them all to Wombat)... I just wanted to see what GameEx offered.

Back to GameEx.... Ah... I'm not seeing things... Tom's chipped in with a reply saying it's on the cards to be rectified. Yay!

7. I dont think there are any options to have the display of the pdf's diffrently.. But it should load alot faster.. Mine does on my laptop.

Hmm... Intel Duo Core 3.0GHz.... you'd think that'd be up to the task. More important than the speed for now though is the way it displays so it was configuration options I was looking for (mainly fit to page/height/width).

8. Use may be able to use Xpadder do map your joystick buttons to key presses and then configure the custom key presses. that way youll have the best of both worlds.. As far as the versions go... History has shown intermediate builds that dont have specific notes with them are bug fixes and alot of time never make it to the main pages text.

Yep... heard that reply before and I have downloaded (although not played yet) with Xpadder.... I'm just hoping to tweak Tom's ears to see if he can "open" the code a bit to check (notice how I'm just about to repeat myself again to press the claim ) for alpha page keyboard button AND (joystick direction or keyboard button left/right)... I'm still stubbornly refusing to wire my UltraStiks to the IPAC or my buttons to the joystick harness.

Plus I'm still wondering how to load Xpadder JUST to navigate GameEx, unload it before launching a game and then reload it (or load it with desired/empty "maps" at these points) when returning to GameEx. Seems a lot of overkill and another program running in the background

9. I believe there is a hot key to rotate the screen. Perhaps you inadvertantly triggered it.

As Tom has replied, the TAB key! Ah hah... not surprising then as I have this for MAME configuration (although it's a shifted key on my IPAC) mapped but I can't figure out how I activated it at the time (my IPAC shift button is a fair way away from the other buttons. Or maybe I put my foot on the keyboard that was laying on the floor (connected by USB for setup purposes only when I need a full keyboard layout to type stuff). Anyhoo, good to know Tom's thinking about changing it to stop me fat-fingering (fat-footing?) it in the future.

**Brian Hoffman** · April 18, 2008

Well then,

If you want to setup Daphne as an emulated game you can. you stated you already made batch files..

Do this

Rompath= Your batch file directory

workingpath=Your batch file directory

Rom filter= *.bat

command= "[rompath]/[romfile]"

Then it will work like all the others.

I guess the real awnser to you quest is Daphne has its own section because most alot of users dont understand DOS Thats whay faphne even come with a loader.

I guess if you came from mame wah your forced to learn thes techniques or your screwed. hehehe... See gameex wizard makes it simple for the novice user to configure by pluggin in info.

Not that mamewah is a bad FE.. Im just shamelessly plugging gameex

**Wombat** · April 18, 2008

Well then,
If you want to setup Daphne as an emulated game you can. you stated you already made batch files..
Do this
Rompath= Your batch file directory
workingpath=Your batch file directory
Rom filter= *.bat
command= "[rompath]/[romfile]"
Then it will work like all the others.

Yep... I know how to do it (believe me if you can get Mamewah to work, GameEx for the most part is comparitively simple to setup).

Initially that's what I was going to do (and may go back to doing since I still have all the batch files). I'd just thought I'd try the inbuilt one to see if it offered anything extra (it doesn't appear to) although I wonder (without justifiable reason I admit) if GameEx will successfully track the completion of the batch file's execution (I'll have to check this to satisfy my own curiousity if nothing else)

Taking my Daphne question for what it actually was then (i.e. played Daphne games do NOT appear in the LAST PLAYED section) I just want to point this out to Tom to include a flag sometime to control if they appear there or not (or direct me to where the current one is buried)

**Tom Speirs** · April 18, 2008

Yep... I know how to do it (believe me if you can get Mamewah to work, GameEx for the most part is comparitively simple to setup).
Initially that's what I was going to do (and may go back to doing since I still have all the batch files). I'd just thought I'd try the inbuilt one to see if it offered anything extra (it doesn't appear to) although I wonder (without justifiable reason I admit) if GameEx will successfully track the completion of the batch file's execution (I'll have to check this to satisfy my own curiousity if nothing else)
Taking my Daphne question for what it actually was then (i.e. played Daphne games do NOT appear in the LAST PLAYED section) I just want to point this out to Tom to include a flag sometime to control if they appear there or not (or direct me to where the current one is buried)

This is actually a bug, it should appear (and theres no way to turn it off currently). This will be fixed for the next release.

It should work with a batch file. What yourll lose over the built in GameEx is the ability to exit with the gamepad combo or back button on MCE remote.

**Brian Hoffman** · April 18, 2008

Visual pinball config.

http://www.gameex.info/forums/index.php?s=...ost&p=37551

**Wombat** · April 20, 2008

Visual pinball config.
http://www.gameex.info/forums/index.php?s=...ost&p=37551

Hate to be pedantic but doesn't that link have "ShowDesktop=True" which is what I was questioning in the first place?

Don't get me wrong... if that's the way it has to be then so be it... I have Visual Pinball working but ONLY if this is on (and thus looks ever-so-slightly "unclean"). I also have VisualPinball 8.1.1 set to run fullscreen in its video settings.

If ShowDeskTop=False then it never "shows" (it's hidden behind what I assume is the black hideos screen).

Even with these settings on I still have the problem where if a popup window is requested to appear (i.e. you press "R" to read rules on some tables) then that window is not kept as the foreground window until you close it. So you can't read it and when you close the table down that window is still there in the background.

If you're telling me you run VisualPinball 8.1.1 , PinMame 1.59 using vpauto loader with SHowDeskTop=False and you have no problems whatsoever then fine... I'll go crawl back into my box and see what else I have wrong or at least see if it's just localised to just a few particular tables.

**Brian Hoffman** · April 20, 2008

Hate to be pedantic but doesn't that link have "ShowDesktop=True" which is what I was questioning in the first place?
Don't get me wrong... if that's the way it has to be then so be it... I have Visual Pinball working but ONLY if this is on (and thus looks ever-so-slightly "unclean"). I also have VisualPinball 8.1.1 set to run fullscreen in its video settings.
If ShowDeskTop=False then it never "shows" (it's hidden behind what I assume is the black hideos screen).
Even with these settings on I still have the problem where if a popup window is requested to appear (i.e. you press "R" to read rules on some tables) then that window is not kept as the foreground window until you close it. So you can't read it and when you close the table down that window is still there in the background.
If you're telling me you run VisualPinball 8.1.1 , PinMame 1.59 using vpauto loader with SHowDeskTop=False and you have no problems whatsoever then fine... I'll go crawl back into my box and see what else I have wrong or at least see if it's just localised to just a few particular tables.

Wow. Yep that's it. Thanks for finding that topic. As you can see in my working config showdesktop=true is needed.

So knowing that. It appers there is no other way. Unless newer versions use a rendering method that will display ontop of HideOS.

I didn't mean so decieve you into thinking it could be done anyother way. I guess I lost focus after reading the barrage of questions.

You may want to lookinto FuturePinball. Its more resource intense but perhaps it will feel better in your cab.

Happy gaming

**Tempest** · April 21, 2008

Just so you know, I have a 2.4GHZ celeron, and Future pinball runs slow for me...That's why it's called Future Pinball, maybe someday in the near future I'll get a better computer

Also, It was suggested to me that If I were to get rid of the icons on my desktop, and make my background black, that the showdesktop=true wouldn't be a big deal. Of course I'm not to that point yet...

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