My Emulators

[stormbringer]

That sounds good

[scales]

Ok i just tried the plugin out. i love the simplicity, and it could be better than my programs since it takes a lot less time to load the list of games. however few important things:

1. like previously mentioned, need to fix it closing media portal.
2. i still hate how one cannot nicely exit the game via some button on my remote controller. each emulator has a different key for exiting. girder isnt as nice as it should be. i did stumble upon a free program that allows a user to map keyboard commands to a gamepad. any way we can easily do this with a MCE remote? or remote in general?

[zombiepig]

Originally Posted by scales

2. i still hate how one cannot nicely exit the game via some button on my remote controller. each emulator has a different key for exiting. girder isnt as nice as it should be. i did stumble upon a free program that allows a user to map keyboard commands to a gamepad. any way we can easily do this with a MCE remote? or remote in general?

if you're using a gamepad/joystick then mp's built in directinput plugin has an option to set a button combination to close a process - you can use this to exit emulators (although - if mp's closed at the time - it's not really gonna work )

[scales]

ok.
i think the dilemma i am having is that each emulator needs a different key pressed to quit it. alt+x or alt+F4, or Esc. i wish i could get one button do to it all and have it be a button on my MCE remote.

anyway, i really look forward to this emulator plugin being finalized.

[shewless]

I would look at "joy2key" and try and load different profiles based on the game you are launching..

I don't know about mp's built in directinput plugin, because if that's going on then your up and down keys on the joystick might be controlling MP in the background while you're playing! (this happened to me with "my programs" and my xbox controller

[EMKO]

it needs to have a safe way to exit the emulator because some emulators dont save if you close it in a bad way.

i still just lunch gameex from myprograms to play my emulators
you can check out a video of how it works on there main page

http://tomspeirs.com/gameex/

it did many more things then Myprograms thats why i use it but i would be great if there was plugin inside of MP instead of launching a different program.

[VT-Vincent]

Currently, I use SnapStream Beyond Media's "My Games" plugin, which is the best media center emulator solution I've found so far, but it suffers from several issues. First, Beyond Media is generally considered to be a dead project and as such, will likely never be updated, seriously limiting is viability as a Media Center. Second, the plugin is also dead, and the site it used to gather box art has changed it's code, breaking the parsing feature.

So, since it is obvious I will need to find another solution, I have tried the most common solution, which is GameEx. Although GameEx looks to be a very good project, I find it to be very bloated, it's interface is rough at best, and I find myself missing the simplicity of "My Games".

Naturally, after I heard of this plugin, I was very excited. This is the closest replacement for my current solution that I've found. Since this plugin is in the infancy of it's development, I do have a few suggestions...

1. I can understand why you wouldn't want users to need to change their settings for MediaPortal's focus, but I think closing the program is far more invasive than changing a single setting. I would like to see the plugin not close MediaPortal, or at least offer the user the option for it not to close MediaPortal, while leaving it as-is by default.
2. It would be great if box art and brief descriptions for games could be downloaded. However, if you do implement such a feature, it would also be great to be able to manually edit the descriptions and box art.
3. This is kind of a run-on to my previous point, but should "My Emulators" start to house game information, there should definately be some way to export that information for backup purposes.

Lastly, I noticed the issue of closing emulators come up. The easiest solution I have found to this is to configure Girder to execute an "Alt+F4" key combination on a remote control press. This has worked for all emulators except two... ZSNES and ePSXe. On ZSNES, I took the lazy route and just mapped an unused button within the emulator to close the program. ePSXe was a bit more difficult, It's window management is screwy since the window in the foreground is not actually the emulator, but simply the video output from the video plugin. So, to fix this, I used the command line tool "pskill" along with an handy batch file which I called "killepsxe.exe" to execute the command "pskill -t epsxe.exe" and had girder execute it when my close button on the remote was pushed.

[Chreekar]

Wow, I never thought I would get so much feedback! I thank you for that and continue working on the plugin. I will try to get a quick fix for the Always on top/MP closing-issue (probably with an option as VT-Vincent proposed). After that I'll start thinking about the database and box art features.

[shewless]

VT-Vincent
You should check out the "My Programs" plugin for MP... I think it does a lot of what you want already.

[waeberd]

Hi Chreekar,

good to see, someone is working on the emulator-part of MP again!

I've posted some thoughts on myPrograms in this thread some months ago:
http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/sh...6321#post66321

Maybe it's helpful! Good luck for your plugin (and feel free to steal code from the myProgram sources in case it's useful! :-) ).

Cheerz, Daniel