Gildahl

Thanks! And one neat feature in arcadeEIP is support for parallel versions of MAME such that if you (for example) setup your mame folders like this: \Emulators\MAME_179 \Emulators\MAME_237 ...any game (such as vector games) whose roms are in the \roms folder of MAME_179 but not in MAME_237 will automatically be run in 179. Basically, roms are always run from the highest version they are found in. BTW, in what way is 179 better for vector games? Is it the HLSL settings? I should also mention that there are some more recent videos posted here. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUq6aj4TJUPN9izghAuBdxA

That would be this guy...https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08FJ21RNW/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1 I had actually bought this one first (which might be more suitable as a built-in), but found the above one better as a topper monitor. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07QGBL568/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o08_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Added a new dynamic marquee feature, including basic support for display of the game's high score (using hi2txt). You can see a demonstration video and download link here.

Oh, one more thing. Even though the video snap does not appear on the screen for the first item in the list, I still *hear* it. So almost as if something's up with the z level.

If I change the theme to Default-Default it still exhibits the same issues (joystick and first item in favorites not showing video).

Looks like turning off video upscaling fixes the problem with the background going black on screen having video snaps. So thanks for that suggestion! While testing, though, I noticed a secondary issue with the video snaps. It seems that when I first go into my favorites list, the video snap for the very first game in the list ("1942" in my list) is not shown. If I go down to the next game, the video for that one does show, and if I then return back to the first one again the video snap for the first one now appears. This can be duplicated every time. Regarding the U360s, they work like gamepads/ordinary joysticks. I have all power saving options turned off in the USB settings. I will try turning off the cursor hider plug-in and see what happens with that.

I just posted my config files to my other thread on the joystick issue.

I've added my config files here. It's very strange. When I start GameEx, there is no joystick control unless I am lucky (menus work with keyboard and mouse though). This is true in the main menu, and my submenus (list of favorites, for example); however, curiously, in the menu at the game level (Play Game, Marquees, etc.) the joystick works fine. When I back out of this menu, however, the joysticks stop working again. This all happens whether I launch a game or not. In everything else I've tried, such as in games, in the UltraMap config utility, or the Windows game controller utility, the joysticks work fine. This problem also occurs in older versions where I never had a problem before, so it is pretty baffling. I'm going to add one other thing too that seems unrelated, but also started happening randomly at about this time, which is that occasionally when I exit GameEx, my mouse pointer does not show up, and I have to use the windows mouse properties to restore it. Another strange oddity. CustomMenu.ini GameEx.ini log.txt Theme.ini

I'll post the ini and log when I get back to my machine...I should note, however, that I did try with the default theme as well and it exhibited the same behavior.

Windows 10 Pro, version 20H2 with the last update installed on 7/11.

After upgrading to the latest version, I'm finding that selecting any game that has a video snap causes the background in my theme to go black. If the game doesn't have a video snap, but say, just an screen snap, then the background remains. Going back to the old version (16.54) it doesn't do this, but doing an update to the latest introduces this behavior. I can post my ini files later if needed, but first just wondering if this is a known issue.

I've developed a strange issue lately with my joysticks (Ultra 360s) not working in GameEx menus. They will work sometimes, say after a reboot, but most of the time they don't work at all. Mouse/trackball/spinner control in the menus continues to work, and within games the joysticks work fine; however, as soon as I return to GameEx they don't do anything--unless I'm lucky and they happen to start working again. First off, I don't think this is a GameEx problem per se, since I've gone back to older versions where I know everything was working fine, and these now exhibit the same problem. Consequently, I'm thinking that it may be a Windows issue since it did seem to happen after a recent update. The thing is though, that GameEx is the only software I experience this problem in and nothing else. Has anyone else encountered this sort of problem?

This post is to announce a little program I wrote that I call arcadeEIP. It's an emulated game switching program that I wrote primarily to extend GameEx with some features that I often thought I'd like--mainly, a live attract mode--but it adds some extended launch capabilities and a minimalistic game menu for quick game switching and favorites management too. Since it's a little hard to explain exactly what it's good for, I posted a video here to introduce it: See the included docs, and especially the MAME Quick Start text file to get started. https://1drv.ms/u/s!ArCGq1gvf0jkhcps9OhCyubzHy8Usg?e=RcND4F Additional videos can be found here... https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUq6aj4TJUPN9izghAuBdxA Download link: https://github.com/gildahl/arcadeEIP Dave

Small update. GameEx only updates the favorites field in gamelist.txt when it's fully re-generated, so to avoid the inconvenience of needing to do this every time the favorites list is updated, I've added the capability to read the favorites field directly from Data.db3. You'll just need to make sure the file Class_SQLiteDB.ahk and sqlite3.dll are in the same folder as the script when you run or compile (links are in the code comments). Link to gamelist_toolbox_v1.1

I believe I found the culprit. There was a line in the [internal] section of GameEx.ini that had changed from mameversion=0.145 to 0.222 even though Defender is running under MAME 0.222. Changing it back to 0.145 fixes the problem. I do use a launch script; however, that allows me to launch games under any version of MAME I like, so perhaps that has something to do with it (though I've been doing that for years); but anyway, it does seem fixed now. Will just need to keep an eye to see that this setting doesn't change in the future I guess.

Hi Tom, I'm on 16.73 and hadn't played Defender in a while. So after starting it up and starting to play the screen went blank and returned me to GameEx. After exiting GameEx I found MAME/Defender was still running. So I exited everything (including computer restart) and tried again and could repeat this reliably. It seems to only happen after I start mashing buttons on my CP and not if I just let the game sit there. Anyway, I tried going back to rev. 16.62 and was able to reproduce it there too (must not have played Defender under that rev). Then I went back to 16.54 at which point I found I could not reproduce the problem. So I suspect something happened between those versions, and for now I'm just sticking to 16.54. I tried this in another game (DoDonPachi) and initally could not reproduce it, but then I started mashing buttons as if I were playing defender (primarily left-ctl and left-alt) and I was immediately thrown back to GameEx (with the game still running in the background). Playing the game normally doesn't do this. Once again, going back to 16.54 eliminates the problem. Note that in looking at the forum there is an issue posted here, that looks exactly like the problem I'm having, so I'm keeping a watchful eye on any solutions to that one. Dave

I’ve recently polished-up a little AHK script I’ve been using for a while to help maintain corrections and edits to gamelist.txt. If you don’t know what this file is, then you probably don’t need this script, but if you do find yourself editing it from time to time, then you might be interested. The script is called gamelist_toolbox. For full disclosure, I actually tend to do a lot of gamelist.txt editing—mainly to customize game names and descriptions better to my liking, to correct some data errors, and to clean-up a few problems that sometime crop up as the result of doing this, such as nuisance Unicode characters that mess with formatting in GameEx, and extraneous text that gets introduced when building a game list using newer versions of history.dat. The main trouble though is that over time (years in my case), I’ve made so many edits to my gamelist.txt file that it has become a chore to re-apply these every time I update the mame game list. Hence this script, which makes it as easy as single click to reapply a package of edits and clean-ups to a freshly produced gamelist.txt file--plus do a few other optional things like remove clone text from just my favorites, synchronize my video screensavers folder to my favorites list, sort games by release date, etc. Since this post is really directed toward folks who (a) already edit their gamelist.txt file and (b) have AHK installed and a bit of knowledge about how to use it, I’ll skip the details here and just refer you to the script itself, which contains lots of comments about what it does and how to use it. And, of course, how to tweak it to your own specific needs. Maybe it will be useful to a few of you. [Edit, 7/27: fixed a bug in option 6] Link to gamelist_toolbox

I would definitely need to test more before reporting a real problem--especially since I don't fully understand how high scores even work (for example do high scores come exclusively from *.hi files, or in some cases from nvram, or some mix of the two?). My superficial observation is that some games (like Berzerk, which I just tried this morning) updates and displays high scores in GameEx perfectly, suggesting that I got the configuration in mame right (plug-in turned on, etc.), but others like Omega Race produce a *.hi file in mame and display a high score screen in GameEx, but with no high scores listed (even after I've entered one). So its kind of hit or miss. Again, I wouldn't put it past me having messed-up something and I'm not raising this as a GameEx issue (and certainly not critical), just making some observations.

16.60 seems to have done the trick and no longer blocks omegrace or wow from launching when the high score feature is turned on. Thanks! Insofar as the high scores actually working for these particular games, that's another story, but I don't think that's a GameEx issue--so I won't even go there, hehe. Regarding classic.exe, that's an command line AHK script called classicLauncher that I've been hacking on for a long time, but made sure to exclude when I was doing my later testing so as to eliminate it as a culprit. It provides "lots of stuff" like a common command line for all emulators, load sequencing/debugging, rom proxies and vectoring (say, to best mame version), command-line overriding, bookend screens, plug-ins, etc. Actually works quite nicely with GameEx at this point. If you're interested, I've posted it here: classicLauncher

Here you go. MAMEHiScores.ini

Ok, finally figured this out. It is a problem with high scores. I can easily duplicate it on a brand new fresh install of GameEx 16.58. If I install GameEx, then turn off the high score feature before creating the initial MAME game list, it works fine. However, once I turn on the high score feature the problem happens. Unfortunately, just turning off high scores again does not return me back to a working state; rather, I must turn off high scores and delete MAMEHiScores.ini. If I do that or if I delete the omegrace and wow sections in the file, it will now work--but ONLY if I keep keep the high score feature turned off in the setup wizard. If I turn the high score feature back on, the two games will work once, and then stop working again as the high score data once again gets regenerated in MAMEHiScores.ini. Note that this happens even if I delete omegrace.hi and wow.hi from the mame\hi folder and force them to get regenerated (which apparently happens immediately on game load, as I did not have to get a high score for it to get created--this is in MAME .222). So I suspect that there is some issue with GameEx not being able to get past something in the high score registration information for these two roms specifically (and perhaps others I don't know about since I've only really spot-checked). So right now as long as I keep the high score feature turned off and MAMEHiScores.ini is deleted (or the offending sections removed), the problem I have reported in this thread is at least circumvented. Here is a copy of the offending section for omegrace. [omegrace] fields=RANK|SCORE 1C|NAME 1C fullstring=# DAILY 1CÿÿRANK|SCORE 1C|NAME 1Cÿÿ1|31350|DLMÿÿ2|30500|MICÿÿ3|23350|LRSÿÿ4|22400|JACÿÿ5|19550|RDHÿÿ# ALLTIME 1CÿÿRANK|ALLTIME SCORE 1C|ALLTIME NAME 1Cÿÿ1|38250|AE ÿÿ# DAILY 2CÿÿRANK|SCORE 2C|NAME 2Cÿÿ1|31350|DLMÿÿ2|30500|MICÿÿ3|23350|LRSÿÿ4|22400|JACÿÿ5|19550|RDHÿÿ# ALLTIME 2CÿÿRANK|ALLTIME SCORE 2C|ALLTIME NAME 2Cÿÿ1|38250|AE hi_1=1|31350|DLM hi_2=2|30500|MIC hi_3=3|23350|LRS

Well I'm starting to lean toward thinking this is a bug of some kind. As an experiment I tried replacing all the files in the GameEx root folder with those from an earlier version (15.69) that I found in an older archive. After doing so, omegrace and wow work normal. I left all other folders in place (Data, Config, Themes, etc.), so that should, in theory, eliminate database issues as being the culprit. Restoring the 16.54 binaries causes the problem to return.

Hi Tom. Not sure what's suddenly become up with my install, but today I noticed that manuals were no longer being displayed. I checked the log (attached) and it reports... PDF Viewer exe not found at: C:\Program Files (x86)\gs\gs\bin\gswin32c.exe Sure enough, if I go to that folder, I find the folder structure, but its empty...there's nothing in the \gs\gs\bin folder. I don't know where it could have gone. The only thing I can think of is that I recently uninstalled an old copy of GameEx Evolution...could that have deleted it? Anyway to try getting it back I downloaded the latest GameEx installer and ran it, but it didn't do anything to restore it. I was finally able to fix it by installing the latest Ghostscript installer and renaming the folder, but it is still a mystery why this should have happened in the first place. Since I can now see my PDFs again, I'm satisfied with that, but thought I'd report it since maybe its something worth looking into. log.txt

Perfect. Thanks!

Tom, any further ideas? I'm really at a loss too. Today I did a rebuild of the game database, and still the same behavior persists. Any chance of knowing what happens in the code between the time the launching dialog gets displayed and when the launch line gets written to the log?