(Old) My Emulators (2 Viewers)

[Chreekar]

hi,,,,,

with mediaportal rc1 and mame32, when i try to game any games, i have this error:
unable to create the Direct3D device (88760868)

Can you help me, please?

I have the same problem with another emulator on my laptop, but not on my other computer with more video RAM. I suspect that Mediaportal takes too much power from your graphics card and that you can't have both MP and this emulator running at the same time. That means you can't use this plugin with this emulator...

NEW VERSION
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I have changed the old way of finding out where the DB file and Thumbs folder are located, so now it uses the built-in Config.Getfile()-method instead of Reflection.Assembly information. This should mean that there will be no more problems with finding the database or thumbnails in Vista or with RC1. I would be very grateful if someone who had this problem before could test the new version from the SVN and tell me if it works now

 

[Justchill]

Perhaps you could update the start-post? The latest version seems to be 1.9 and the startpost says it's 1.7..

I'll try it out soon when I try MP.
I'm now using EMUCENTER for Windows Vista MCE

 

[kcmoney13]

Hey justchill, can you point me to the direction where you can find version 1.9 I have looked everywhere and i can only find 1.7. Which does not work in RC1 for me. Unless I am missing something I would love the link to it.

Thanks in advnace

 

[mortstar]

I have changed the old way of finding out where the DB file and Thumbs folder are located, so now it uses the built-in Config.Getfile()-method instead of Reflection.Assembly information. This should mean that there will be no more problems with finding the database or thumbnails in Vista or with RC1. I would be very grateful if someone who had this problem before could test the new version from the SVN and tell me if it works now

Hi Chreekar,

Testing out the new version of MyEmulators on my setup (XP SP3 - recent SVN) and just wanted to report that it now populates data from same location as other plugins\modules etc.

Big

 

[Justchill]

link: https://mp-plugins.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/mp-plugins/trunk/plugins/MyEmulators/

Hope the creator updates his startpost sometime..

 

[Chreekar]

Thank you for the testing! I appreciate it a lot. Now that it works, I have only one thing left to do before I will release the plugin as a major upgrade and thus putting it in the plugins section of this site and updating the first post of the thread.

 

[gamingexpert]

SpinSafe Revolve skin

I was wondering if someone could mod My Emulators to work properly with the SpinSafe Revolve skin (latest version, 0.2.3 I think). I installed it and it works partially, but although it is just barely usable, it looks horrid, lines of code thrown everywhere around the page.

Just noticed this post after I modified the xml for SpinSafe Revolve so I figured I'd reply to it in case he still needs the skin. I just messed around with the BlueTwo skin until it looked good enough with the SpinSafe skin so it's not really in the SpinSafe style but I don't really care much as long as it works.

And Chreekar, it would be nice to include it with your plugin, unless there is a better version. There was one included with the skin but it didn't work at all. (I'm running MediaPortal 0.2.3.0 and SpinSafe Revolve 0.2.3.0 v0.8.6, idk if theres a newer version of the skin)

 

[gamingexpert]

I love this plugin but I have a few suggestions and suspected bugs for you.
Pretty much listed in order of importance (imo).

SUGGESTIONS:

1) Include a FAQ that deals with the most common problems people have.
I read this whole thread and saw a lot of repeat questions that could have been dealt with in a FAQ and/or by keeping the first post updated. Also, I would not have been able to get Project 64 or ePSXe to work if I hadn't found this thread. I attached a FAQ I made that you can use or modify.

2) Add subdirectory searching and a way to search multiple locations for games.
This has been suggested many times before me but I also really want this implemented. A few examples of when this would be useful are: when somebody keeps each game in their own folder like for PSX games because they sometimes have multiple discs and you can set a folder thumbnails for each game, If you have a lot of games and keep them in subdirectories categorized by letter, If you have games in multiple locations like for DOSBox.

3) Add an option to sort emulators and games by name.
Right now the emulators only show up in the order you add them, there's no way to rearrange them through the configuration or inside MediaPortal. Also, I find it strange that while you can sort games by Most Played, Recently Played, and Top Graded, once you've done that you can't set them back to alphabetical sort (unless you exit out of the list and go back in).

4) Ability to manually remove (and add?) games from the database through the configuration window.
I realize this might be possible if I manually edit the myEmulators.db3 file but I haven't tried and it would be nice to not have to do that. The reason I want this feature is because when I have the plugin search for DOSBox games I use *.EXE but only a few of the exe's in that folder are the actual ones that launch the game, so I want to remove the ones from the list that aren't actually games.

5) Make a way to have a category for PC games instead of having to list them all on the emulator page.
I know you can directly launch PC games if you check the box "Execute without arguments", but that would list the games beside all the emulators. I want a way to have a fake emulator (through .bat file?) that you can point to a folder that has shortcuts to all your PC games, so you can have a PC emulator listed beside the other emulators that once you go in to, it shows a list of all your PC games that you can launch.

6) Make an option for where to search for game thumbnails.
For instance, if someone has PSX games in individual folders with a folder.jpg in each, they should be able to set the plugin to search the directory the game is in for a thumbnail for it. There could be an option for location (like absolute path to a folder with them all or just search current folder) and for what the image is named (folder.jpg, %ROMNAME%.png, %ROMNAME%.*, *.*, *.jpg).

7) Show large game thumbnails on left side (where comments are) when game is hovered over.
This would be nice for every view but most useful in list view. This would be good to have because in list view it is much easier to see the (entire) names of games and you can fit more games on the screen with bigger thumbnails. And you wouldn't have to switch to thumbnail/icon view to see the game thumbnail. It would also probably make the plugin look nicer. You could move the comments to below the list of games and put the large thumbnail where the comments are now on the left side under sort buttons. If you want to fill the empty space when there is no game thumbnail available or no game selected it could default to the system thumbnail. (This could also be where you put game videos if you implement that.)

8) Option to disable the space button to select things (make only the Enter button select things).
I have my controller configured to control MediaPortal and my external video player (vlc) so I configured one main button to Enter and Space so when I'm in mediaportal it will select things and when I'm in vlc it will pause the video. In the My Emulators plugin when I press that button on an emulator, since Enter and Space both select things, it goes into the list of games then immediately hits the back button and puts me back at the list of emulators, making it impossible to see the list of games. And if I do get in the list of games and try to pick one, it launches it twice.

9) Actually write on the config page what currently only shows up when hovering over things.
I didn't know what those two checkboxes were for or how to search for multiple filetypes because I never saw the popup tooltips when hovering over those. So it might be good to just put those tooltips in parenthesis on that page instead.

10) Optionally use preset configs for certain emulators to make it easier and avoid common problems.
Like what cracksloth said in this post, it would be good to have preset profiles/configurations for popular emulators because then you wouldn't have all these people asking why Project 64 or ePSXe doesn't work because it would automatically set those little things like extra switches or not to use quotes.

BUGS:

11) Make MediaPortal un-fullscreen when launching a game and re-fullscreen after it closes.
Concerning the problem with the plugin after closing an emulator, I've noticed there's much less of a problem if MediaPortal is windowed as opposed to fullscreen. Like if I launch a fullscreen game in zSNES through My Emulators when MediaPortal is windowed then I close zSNES through its menu or with alt+f4 then it goes back to MediaPortal and everything is fine. If I launch the same game when MediaPortal is fullscreen then close the game, it looks like mediaportal is stuck in the system tray and can't come back and the whole (primary) screen is black. If I then open Process Explorer (an advanced ctrl+alt+del type program) on my secondary monitor and right click on the mediaportal process and go to Window > Bring to Front then it shows up again.

12) Match both lowercase and uppercase strings in 'Filter for showing files'.
For DOSBox games I made the filter *.exe and it wouldn't find my files that ended in .EXE so I had to change it to uppercase. Seems a little strange that it would do this. If it's on purpose then maybe at least make an automatically enabled option to search for both uppercase and lowercase for those of us that don't realize it won't.

13) Fix database shuffling problem.
I think I might have experienced the same problem that Markedc had in this post. It seems when I went into the ROM Database in the My Emulators configuration with multiple emulators installed and sort the roms by name then edit a couple names and save, its like it sorted the roms by name but didn't sort the paths so it saved the wrong names for most ROMs. I had to just delete my myEmulators.db3 file and start over.

14) Fix emulator adding problem.
When I was adding emulators I added a few and before saving I went back up and changed the name of one then kept adding a few more, then I clicked ok and opened MediaPortal and the one that I had went back and changed the name on didn't show up. When I went back into the configuration it wasn't on the list. Kinda weird.

15) Fix emulator removal problem.
When I was removing a few emulators at one time sometimes it didn't remove them all. I'm not sure if it only worked correctly if I removed from the bottom of the list instead of in the middle or if it was because some had the same name or just that I did a bunch at a time but it was a little strange. I had to remove some 2 or 3 times.

Sorry if this is the longest post ever.

 

[gerikes]

Hey Chreekar.

Any idea why the very first time the screen shows up (or after returning from an emulator), the first icon is not selected (at least it's not graphically enabled, although if you hit enter you get to that first emulators rom listing), but if you go to the menu and back it is selected?

Somewhere it's not being set to focus but I can't figure it out.

 

[Chreekar]

I don't know. I have previously tried to manage the focus so that the control with the emulator list always has focus when entering a screen, but I couldn't figure it out.