GameEx strange loading behaviour

[kemikal]

As a long time registered user, GameEx has become a vital part of my HTPC. As well as viewing my media via mediaportal I also access my retro gaming via the GameEx frontend.

Recently I upgraded the OS on my home server / nas to unRAID (linux based) which basically manages my hard drives and sets up the shared folders. I have created a Gaming shared folder and put all my emulators and roms in there and access them via GameEx on my HTPC.

I am experiencing strange loading problems after the initial startup, basically when on the main menu screen I go to Favorites (I have about 450 games in there, mixture of mame, snes, megadrive etc..) a Loading popup appears and stays there, I waited 20 minutes but it did not go any further so I had to do a CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up task manager and noticed GameEx was not responding so killed the task.

This has become very annoying now as it seems like whenever GameEx is trying to retrieve random data from the server it hangs. The house is fully wired via Gigabit, the server and my HTPC running Windows 7 32bit are showing to be connected at 1.0 Gbps. I can play / stream 1080p HD movies just fine.

I did some further investigating by going through the GameEx configuration by enabling / disabling various options, eventually I came to the Mame snaps option, I removed the path in GameEx where the snaps are located (pointing to the server) and went back into GameEx and this time Favorites loaded pretty much straight away.

I'm not sure what GameEx does when it tries to load favorites but it completely crashes, when I remove the path it seems to work fine.

SO.... what does GameEx try to do when the favorites are accessed, does it try to load all the extra assets (snaps, artwork etc...) linked to roms at the same time, or are assets loaded only when a rom is in focus / selected?

I would be grateful if someone or Tom can look in to this, I'm thinking GameEx is hammering the network and hangs, maybe the code needs to be tweaked on how and when assets are loaded? Maybe I've found a bug?!

[Tom Speirs]

Ill look at it. Please post the log with the issue happening.

Something else to do its to delete all the dbcache,dbcacheini and map files in the data folder. See if that helps.

Also for your emulators turn off scan sub folders if its not needed. When loading favorites GameEx checks for the existence of the rom and that might be causing the issue.

It does not try to load assets when loading favorites so I am not sure why removing the snaps folder helped.

[kemikal]

Hello Tom,

Thanks for your prompt reply. I have removed the cache files and map files in the DATA folder, started GameEx and noticed the same behaviour / hang when Favorites is selected, had to kill GameEx from task manager, after forcing the close of GameEx Windows displays the message below. I have also attached the log file from GameEx for this run (log_hang.txt).

-----------

Description:

A problem caused this program to stop interacting with Windows.

Problem signature:

Problem Event Name: AppHangB1

Application Name: GameEx.exe

Application Version: 1.0.0.0

Application Timestamp: 4d90481a

Hang Signature: f01d

Hang Type: 2304

OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.4

Locale ID: 2057

Additional Hang Signature 1: f01d24b21c0433531384391580720e1b

Additional Hang Signature 2: 06de

Additional Hang Signature 3: 06de04913ee8aa9d8233dc06804d67a8

Additional Hang Signature 4: f01d

Additional Hang Signature 5: f01d24b21c0433531384391580720e1b

Additional Hang Signature 6: 06de

Additional Hang Signature 7: 06de04913ee8aa9d8233dc06804d67a8

-----------

I started GameEx again with the MAME snaps path removed, and as expected Favorites loaded fine. I ahve also attached a log for this run (log_ok_with_mame_snaps_off.txt).

Previously my setup was running from the local pc and it was all fine, now I've moved the files to a server and I'm getting this behaviour. Being on a Gigabit network I don't have any probs streaming / copying 8Gb+ 1080p movies between the server and the HTPC so I don't think it's my network, I do think it's the way GameEx handles / processes files over the network.

Thanks again for your time on this Tom, I'm more than happy to test some builds with any tweaks you make as I'm running a linux based home server.

log_hang.txt

log_ok_with_mame_snaps_off.txt

[Tom Speirs]

Try using a UNC path for the server paths. eg. \\server\share\folder

.net is sometimes a bit picky about connecting to mapped drives.

If that does not work as a troubleshooting test try copying that one snap path locally see if its maybe some other issue.

[kemikal]

Hello Tom,

Thanks for your assistance on this one.

Unfortunately changing the to UNC paths did not help, running the snaps locally worked fine as expected but it's not how I wanted my setup to work as I wanted all my files on a server. The funny thing is when the server had a windows OS it worked fine, after upgrading the OS to unRAID (linux) GameEx hangs when it does its routine of going through the assigned paths on a network share. All my other programs (mediaportal streaming 1080p files) that use the share folders work fine as they did with the windows OS, it seems just GameEx struggles with this setup.

I don't fancy the thought of moving 10tb of data back to a windows OS my hair will turn grey!

[Tom Speirs]

Just something that occured to me. Could it be a rights issue perhaps?