PC Games broken in 2.2?

[justonewren]

Well, I finally relinquished my 0.99.12 install with My Programs Beta3 after reformatting my PC and updated to 1.2.9 with GameZone. I have most of the emulators running well enough to be playable, but I still have some issues to work out.

I use nullDC for Dreamcast emulation instead of Chankast since it is still supported and has higher compatibility. I set it up like I had it in My Programs using the PC Games tab & enabled PC Games. In PVRX2, when clicking on the PC Games button, the button responds but nothing happens (it just stays at the menu). I also tried clearing PC Games and using the MP3 playing example in the Wiki & still had no success. Is anyone else having this issue?

From setting up & using this plugin, I have also put together a wishlist of what I would like GameZone to be capable of. Here it is:

1. Functioning PC Games tab
2. A “Other Emulators” tab, that uses the setup of ‘PC Games’, but places that emulator in the left-side menu instead of the PC Games folder. (I realize it might not be possible, but I am not familiar with how GB-PVR builds its menus)
3. nullDC support for Dreamcast emulation (Not necessary if #2 is fulfilled)
4. Radio-button options on each emulator in the config to allow Gamezone to pass the configuration through to what the program already has set up (Not necessary if #2 is fulfilled)


5. HDTV resolution support: 1360x768, 1920x1080 (Not necessary if #4 is fulfilled)
6. Ability to rename & reorder the menu buttons (if that’s possible) [Kega -> Genesis, etc]

[idkpmiller]

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback wehich I will deal with as a separate response.

The issue you are having with PCGames is quite strange, here is the setup which I have just tested with 2.2 and is working here fine, incidentally you have shown your mame config and not your PC games config.

one thing comes to mind if your config turns out to be correct, is the name that you are seeing in the menu buttons for PCGames, is it PC Games or PCGames (no space?)

[idkpmiller]

1. Functioning PC Games tab
2. A “Other Emulators” tab, that uses the setup of ‘PC Games’, but places that emulator in the left-side menu instead of the PC Games folder. (I realize it might not be possible, but I am not familiar with how GB-PVR builds its menus)
3. nullDC support for Dreamcast emulation (Not necessary if #2 is fulfilled)
4. Radio-button options on each emulator in the config to allow Gamezone to pass the configuration through to what the program already has set up (Not necessary if #2 is fulfilled)
5. HDTV resolution support: 1360x768, 1920x1080 (Not necessary if #4 is fulfilled)
6. Ability to rename & reorder the menu buttons (if that’s possible) [Kega -> Genesis, etc]

Thanks for your feedback and wishlist.

Responses below:

1. To my knowledge PC gAmes is functioning
2. I would really like to do this and it might be possible but not without MAJOR rewrite of GameZone which is something I am unlikely to do, It would be quicker to start a separate plugin that set this as its objective from the beginning than to rewrite GameZone to have this feature... believe me I have considered this as it would provide a really generic plugin that could be used to do many tasks and not just emulators.
3. I haven't come across NullDC before I cant promise anything but I will take a look at it, I have neer heard of anyone else using the Dreamcast emulation it seems to lack a good following...
4. I am not sure what you are getting at with this one, can you elaborate perhaps with a user case?
5. GameZone will support the settings of PVRx2 when showing a menu and will support the scren resolution of the emulator when running a game. What more would you like it to do.
6. reordering of the menu buttons (main set not submenus is possible today. Rename is one of the main rewrite issue as the name is used to determine the configuration and what sections of code need to be considered, its not the same process for each emulator.

I cant help thinking that many of your comments have been made because PCGames is not working for you, I certainly understand how frustrating it is to have something not work when you seem to have done everything correctly. However your list of wishes may well change once we sorted out why PCGames is not working. I would appreciate any updates to your wishlist at that time.

Thanks

[5l4k3r]

I had the same problem with PCGames not working. After a little digging I found out that something went haywire in gbpvr's config.xml. "<PCGamesENABLED>True</PCGamesENABLED>" was in as "<PCGamesENA>True</PCGamesENA>". I just switched it back to "<PCGamesENABLED>True</PCGamesENABLED>", and all was well after that. Hope that helps.

[justonewren]

My Issue

Well, that fixed it! Thanks!

My Wishlist
The Mame config I posted was trying show my configuration pass-through idea. Since not all the options of each emulator are supported in GameZone yet, I was wondering if it was possible to have the option to let the emulator use its own config, as if it was opened by itself in Windows.

I agree, a lot of my requests will be accomplished if we can solve my problem with PC Games. Most of my thinking was to make GameZone more universal & customizable to the end-user's setup. Hence, having options such as 1360x768 and 1920x1080 resolutions being available in the dropdown menus on the config pages.

Either way, GameZone is a great plugin & it certainly fills a void in GB-PVR's plugin lineup.

nullDC
I agree, Dreamcast emulation is not a very large community. There are definitely some great games for the system, and nullDC has high compatibility, and will run roms without using daemon tools. The program can be found HERE. The most recent version at the time of this writing is beta 1.6.

When I had it set up in My Programs, it had these inputs:
Name: Dreamcast
Path: D:\Emu\Dreamcast\nullDC\nullDC_100b1_6.exe
Rom Path: D:\Emu\Dreamcast\Roms
Arguments: -config ImageReader:defaultImage="%ROM%"
Extensions: nrg|cdi|mdf

Edit: For the emulator, the nullDC.cfg needs to be edited to read:
LoadDefaultImage=1
Emulator.Autostart=1

Also, 'Use Default Image' & 'Swap Disk' need to be checked in the Options>GDRom menu. I'm pretty sure these are in the config too somewhere


Cheers!
-Wren

[idkpmiller]

My Wishlist
The Mame config I posted was trying show my configuration pass-through idea. Since not all the options of each emulator are supported in GameZone yet, I was wondering if it was possible to have the option to let the emulator use its own config, as if it was opened by itself in Windows.

I agree, a lot of my requests will be accomplished if we can solve my problem with PC Games. Most of my thinking was to make GameZone more universal & customizable to the end-user's setup. Hence, having options such as 1360x768 and 1920x1080 resolutions being available in the dropdown menus on the config pages.

If you change your arguament to say "%FILE%" instead of "%ROM%" itshould work as you described.

I am starting to get an idea of what you mean about the pass through but still its a little vague for me.

The principle so far has been allowing the configuration for the most common of the options to be gui based through the gamexone cofig applet, where there are a lot of options that users may wish to change then I have added a manual arguament textbox like Mame and Dosbox for example.

Most of the emulators are configured via the commandline and this makes it easyier to ensure that the settings are correct, and easy for most users to setup. when we have emulators which are windows based and do not keep their config in an easy editable form then it is far easier to let gamezone just launch the emulator and the emulator will look after its own config . there a few like that for example VGBA, Visual Pinball and N64.

If an application can be run from the commandline and its arguament is less than 255 characters then it should be possible for Gamezone to run it through PCGames.

I am sure I am missing something here, something I am just not getting :confused:
If you can try drawing what you mean, pictures normally help :-D I may get what you are talking about

The whole thing about the resolution is going over my head.....


Thanks

[justonewren]

Turns out the issues I was having with fullscreening & stretching my games on my HDTV was within the emulators and not in GameZone. I thought that GameZone was overriding what I had set up, but it's working fine now.

One other thing i've found while setting this up is that GameZone overwrites Zinc's zinc.cfg, renderer.cfg, and controller.cfg files every time the you access the GameZone config, but there aren't any options on the Zinc tab to specify your own config files, so I've been manually copying over the .cfg's that I want to use each time I close out the config. Will the ability to specify these files be available in a future release?

Well, I think my wishlist just got reduced to this:
1. Ability to rename the menu buttons
2. Other Emulators tab to place added emulators in left-hand menu
3. Ability to choose Zinc config files
4. Oh, and one more thought: maybe preventing the bios files to be selectable in the MAME list (have a blacklist to remove apsx.zip, ar_bios.zip, etc.) since they aren't playable games, but are still seen because they are zip files

Cheers!

[idkpmiller]

Turns out the issues I was having with fullscreening & stretching my games on my HDTV was within the emulators and not in GameZone. I thought that GameZone was overriding what I had set up, but it's working fine now.

One other thing i've found while setting this up is that GameZone overwrites Zinc's zinc.cfg, renderer.cfg, and controller.cfg files every time the you access the GameZone config, but there aren't any options on the Zinc tab to specify your own config files, so I've been manually copying over the .cfg's that I want to use each time I close out the config. Will the ability to specify these files be available in a future release?

Well, I think my wishlist just got reduced to this:
1. Ability to rename the menu buttons
2. Other Emulators tab to place added emulators in left-hand menu
3. Ability to choose Zinc config files
4. Oh, and one more thought: maybe preventing the bios files to be selectable in the MAME list (have a blacklist to remove apsx.zip, ar_bios.zip, etc.) since they aren't playable games, but are still seen because they are zip files

Cheers!

First off, your efforts and feedback have been VERY useful to me, Thank you I really wish others would provide feedback.

With Zonc the overwriting of the .cfg files as I recall was because I needed to set some values in there. ultimately I would like to set up the controller once in GameZone and then this would setup all the emulators, I am not sure this is actually the right way to do it based on your feedback, any thoughts? for the meantime I can look at removing the overwriting of the .cfg files for the next release.

WISHLIST
1. Renaming of the buttons is not possible without a total rewrite.
2. Instead on "other Emulators" tab it may be possible to look at doing what you requested for PCGames tab instead would that suffice, actually I think you are correct it should be done on a new tab :-( oh well I will certainly look at that one.
3. this problem would disapper if I stopped writing the .cfg files when I get to the details I will make a decission at that time which way is better, user selectable overide or just stop writing them.
4. That sounds like a bug, I should only be adding items that exist in the database, hmmm unless the bios files do have entries in the database then that would explain it...


I will look at these ideas for the next release.

Thanks!

[justonewren]

your efforts and feedback have been VERY useful to me, Thank you I really wish others would provide feedback.

It's no problem at all. As you can see, I have a lot of emulators & I'm kind of a perfectionist when it comes to setting up my plugins . I'd be happy to help beta-test future releases if you'd like & can probably compile a spreadsheet for setting up emulators that are currently unsupported (nullDC works fine through PC Games by the way).

Thanks again!

[idkpmiller]

Well, I think my wishlist just got reduced to this:
1. Ability to rename the menu buttons
2. Other Emulators tab to place added emulators in left-hand menu
3. Ability to choose Zinc config files
4. Oh, and one more thought: maybe preventing the bios files to be selectable in the MAME list (have a blacklist to remove apsx.zip, ar_bios.zip, etc.) since they aren't playable games, but are still seen because they are zip files

Ok, latest response,

1. Not going to happen - sorry
2. Done - awaiting beta testing
3. Next on my TODO list
4. Can-t seem to emulate this issue, can anyone else see the BIOS fils in their Mame filelist?

Thanks