GameEx 4.97 Released

[Tom Speirs]

1st September 2005
- GameEx 4.97

• New Advanced MAME setting to
  bypass disclaimer and warning screens.
• Updated MNG/Snap Video
  player.
• Should hopefully fix issues
  with GameEx closing when launched from Media
  Center.
• Now uses -verifyroms instead
  of -verifysets (removed in latest MAME builds)
• Huge thanks to DJROBX for
  help with this release. 
  

---

http://tomspeirs.com/gameex

[emphatic]

"New advanced MAME setting to bypass disclaimer and warning screens" - WOW, that was fast! You rock!

Emph

[Smiff]

heh i need to get AdvMAME working

see a gameex window flash when exiting MAME in this release, dont think that was there before?

also rom loading seems to take longer, have they removed skip verify aswell? or something else recently.

thanks Tom

running out of increments before v5

[djrobx]

I think Tom meant "Advanced settings for MAME", the feature he's referring to automates typing "OK" for the disclaimer screen with the regular version of MAME.

also rom loading seems to take longer, have they removed skip verify aswell? or something else recently.

Mame 0.99 takes a fricken' eternity to load on my machine just from the command line. No idea what's up with that.

-- rob

[Tom Speirs]

I think Tom meant "Advanced settings for MAME", the feature he's referring to automates typing "OK" for the disclaimer screen with the regular version of MAME.

Mame 0.99 takes a fricken' eternity to load on my machine just from the command line.  No idea what's up with that.

-- rob

Because I'm playing around with the new MNG support, and did not want to compile, I got the latest intermediate build of MAME32FX. I have not looked at whats special about this build, but it seems to load games literally instantanously, and I mean literally. You should check it out.

Tom.

[Smiff]

MAME32fx - i see red screen, then green, then screen of mixed crap, then game

MAME32plus, i see red screen, then game

not actually sure which is faster, havent timed yet.

any thoughts on getting rid of the "screens of crap". i know this is more of a MAME q than GameEx q sorry.

edit: but rather more importantly, MAME32plus is not reading my arcade sticks! arg. back to MAME32FX

what a lot of kerfuffle

[djrobx]

The "screens of crap" are exactly what the real arcade machines do when turned on. Very smilar to how your computer goes through its paces on boot-up. At one point there was a feature in MAME to bypass the startup tests for some games, but that went against the project's philosophy - to document hardware and reproduce it faithfully. The MAME team doesn't even like the hiscore saving feature for similar reasons.

The only possible solution I can think of here is to save state on exit, and restore state on startup using the SendKeys and Send Keys to exit sequences. You'd probably need to set MAME up as an emulator to do that using tom's MAP maker, though.

[Smiff]

oh fair enough, im pretty new to arcade games. ok that's no problem then. if its like that on real system.. but mame derivitives can do something about it. i certainly wouldnt want to complicate things with a load state workaround.

[djrobx]

A MAME derivative could do it, but it's a lot of work. It involves basically hacking each ROM to determine where the startup sequence is and create a patch to skip it, hoping that it won't have strange, undesirable consequences because the hardware isn't in the state it was when the game was in production.

Might be possible/easy to let the emulation run at full, unthrottled speed for the duration of the test though. That would at least get through it quicker.

-- Rob

[Smiff]

no i mean mameplus already doesnt show the "screen of crap". but that derivitive seems to have broken controller support in some way.. maybe someone should report that to him :/ it was the only one with Scale2x etc.

[emphatic]

?? Doesn't ZetaMAME support Scale2x?

Emph

[Smiff]

sorry, my bad - its the only one i'd found with graphics effects thats competitive (regular updates etc). although that one does look like it could be a goodun? hopefully now with v.100 more alternatives will be updated for us

http://www.mbox32.com/zeta/