a few questions for your lovely people

[chriss]

hey guys,

1. i spent some time on zinc today. I like to play "joggle games" and so i decided to have a look why hyper athlete is not working.

now i tried out evrything possible and i just don't get it to work with zinc. zinc just crahes. all other zinc games work fine... hyperathlete plays fine out of mame plus

does hyperathlete work for you with zinc 1.1?

2. is there a way to tell gameex to only show the chd games i have? i have like 10 chds but atm gameex shows all the chd games. is there a specific filter to only show the ones you have?

[Adultery]

Hi.

You have ZiNc set up as an emulator or to run native with MAME? If its the latter, it should just show the ROMs that work if you have verify sets turned on.

I have ZiNc running semi-smoothly using a loader, since the way it handles CHD ROMs leaves a bit to be desired. Also, CHD games don't work with Winterblast's plugin.

[chriss]

thanks for the hints adultery!

i'm using winterblasts plugin, so that must be it!

what alternatives are there to map my x-arcade to zinc without winterblast?

where do i switch on verify sets? zinc is set up in gameex through the zinc menu.. so i guess that means native...

Hi.

You have ZiNc set up as an emulator or to run native with MAME? If its the latter, it should just show the ROMs that work if you have verify sets turned on.

I have ZiNc running semi-smoothly using a loader, since the way it handles CHD ROMs leaves a bit to be desired. Also, CHD games don't work with Winterblast's plugin.

[bkenobi]

To remap the X-Arcade, you will need to write an AHK script. It's pretty easy, so just ask if you need help.

[chriss]

thanks for offering help...to be honest i have almost no clue how to write this....

could you give me an example?

edit> without winterblasts plugin hzperathlete starts up! hooray.. i also found the verify roms option! thanks for the hints verz helpful

To remap the X-Arcade, you will need to write an AHK script. It's pretty easy, so just ask if you need help.

[bkenobi]

I highly recommend checking out AutoHotKey. It's free and AWESOME! Remapping is such a common task for AHK that they have put together a very nice little tutorial on how to do it here.

Basically, you create a text file and put your remapping info in it as such:

a::x
b::y
c::z

Which remaps a, b, and c keys to send x, y, and z, respectively.

[chriss]

I highly recommend checking out AutoHotKey. It's free and AWESOME! Remapping is such a common task for AHK that they have put together a very nice little tutorial on how to do it here.

Basically, you create a text file and put your remapping info in it as such:

a::x
b::y
c::z

Which remaps a, b, and c keys to send x, y, and z, respectively.

thanks for the quick tutorial. i already use autohotkey to exit games. it works really great. I think brian wrote it for me back in febuary so I don't recall exactly what was written in there.. could you tell me how i use the remap infos only on zinc so that no other emulator is affected?

would that be

#IfWinActive zinc

as first row?

[bkenobi]

That's pretty close, but I don't know if it's perfect. I don't remember if it would need a # or not, but yes it would be "IfWinActive, Zinc" (I think the ',' is optional in most AHK statements, but it's technically preferred). Also, you might need a #Persistent and #SingleInstance in there as well.

[chriss]

Thanks for your help bkenobi

i figured it out!

here is the ahk script for the x-arcade controller to run with zinc

#InstallKeybdHook
#SingleInstance force
#Persistent
#MaxHotkeysPerInterval 200
#IfWinActive, ZiNc 1.1 ©1997-2005 Drunken Muppets (www.emuhype.com)			
3::5
4::6
LCtrl::A
LAlt::S
Space::D
LShift::Z
z::X
x::C
Numpad8::Up
Numpad2::Down
Numpad4::Left
Numpad6::Right
a::U
s::I
q::o
w::J
e::K
[::L
d::B
r::H
f::N
g::M

somehow it didn't work when i only wrote zinc. so i looked upt the full windows title and that made it work. outside of zinc the x-arcade behaves normally! finally i can close this chapter on zinc! kept me busy for quite a while

and in the end it were just a few lines of code

[chriss]

Ohh nooo... I thought I got it to work and some initial test confirmed it working

but... still no hyperathlete for me

The problem is with my current script the window minimizes when two player (and sometimes one) play. It works for a few minutes (or seconds) after that sometimes even the whole autoit script seems to be gone and no keys work anymore... what have i done wrong? headkaze, brian, bkenobi, frequency... anyone any idea??

it works when only a few keys are pressed... Is there an issue with my script i posted above?

i somehow suspect the alt key or ctrl key to produce this issue... when two player play the main keys (the bold ones are the two keys that are pressed a lot for running) for hyperathlete are:

P1:

LCtrl remapped to A

LAlt remapped to S

Space remapped to D

and

P2:

a remapped to U

s remapped to I

q remapped to o

[fRequEnCy]

Hmmmm I'm more of an AutoIt user. Not sure if this makes a difference but looks like you remap to uppercase letters. Try changing all those to lowercase. Also it looks like you wait for that window to be active before your keys will work. Is that wintitle always active or does it change? Cuz if it changes then I wouldn't expect the keys to work. Also I always wait for the process to close before exiting a script. Again I don't use AHK so hard to say unless I learn the code. If that doesn't work then I can whip one up in AutoIt for ya real quick.

[Tempest]

For a guy that doesn't use AHK, I'd say you were right on!

Lower case will match either, Upper case only matches Uppercase.

[bkenobi]

Just as an FYI, AHK looks a lot like AI and in some cases the code for AI is exactly the same. I don't understand why there are two camps that are more or less working on the same project, but that's the way it is. I've used AHK and not AI (just the one I started with, not that one is better than the other).

[chriss]

thanks for your answers!

the best thing would be to have the ahk script start with zinc and then end when i close zinc but i don't see the "launch before" option for zinc...

anyway, i'll try to change to lower case... maybe that works

i also expect the issue could be related to the winactive command..... or maybe because of the frequency of button pushing for hyperathlete...

[bkenobi]

One option is to make a loader for zinc. The script would call zinc and wait for it to quit. You would actually call this script from GameEx by pointing to it instead of zinc.exe. Since GameEx will expect an executable, you would need to compile the loader to an exe. The script should also contain the remapped keys and anything else you need in there. Since I don't think GameEx uses zinc in any way to check for valid roms, you shouldn't need to do anything special with it.

[chriss]

ok, i fixxed it!

i didn|t see at first that ahk gave me a warning about tthe maximum key interval.

#MaxHotkeysPerInterval 200

i addded this line and now it works

so zinc was minimizing because of the ahk windows popup witht the warning that more than 70 keys are pressed

i updated the ahk code i postted earlier, now it runs smoothly