"Name that song" game

[JamIt]

Lave Laar,
Just downloaded and tried it for the first time...
Much love!  This is a great app!  Definitely will get some play at next party!
--JamIt

[fiscap]

Is anyone else having a problem with errors and songs not playing? I saw a mention of this earlier in the thread, but I don't think the question was answered. The error that I am receiving is "The specified file cannot be played on the specified MCI device. The file may be corrupt, not in the correct format, or no file handler available for the format."

I get the error roughly 9 out of 10 times, but I don't see a pattern.

[Hutt]

Hi,
Just downloaded....GREAT program.
I thing I didn't care for was how it chose some of the randomness.
For example....it the song title was the option.
Let's say Beethoven was picked and the other answers were songs by Led Zeppelin, Korn, System of a Down and Van Halen.....or it a Led Zep song was played and the choices were songs by Bad Religion, Clutch, Mozart, and Madonna!
What I am getting at is that these are to easy to answer.

It would be nice if it was a Zep song then at least 3 of the songs to choose from were Led Zep songs...and the others were from the same Genre.
Something to make the game a little harder.
Just a thought....

Besides that I think it is great so far...I have to play around with it tonight after work 

Thanks for the program!!

[Hutt]

Everytime I finish a game it goes back to the default directory of C:\mp3

?
It doesn't seem to be saving the changes....

[Lave Laar]

Is anyone else having a problem with errors and songs not playing? I saw a mention of this earlier in the thread, but I don't think the question was answered. The error that I am receiving is "The specified file cannot be played on the specified MCI device. The file may be corrupt, not in the correct format, or no file handler available for the format."

I get the error roughly 9 out of 10 times, but I don't see a pattern.

I've actually experienced this on my own machine with a couple of songs.

[Space Fractal]

I've actually experienced this on my own machine with a couple of songs.  The same songs work fine if I try them on a different machine.  I suspect it's an hardware incompability problem with TMediaPlayer, but I haven't been able to solve the problem. What OS and soundcard are you using ?  SB Live ?
I'm however looking into finding an free alternative to TMediaPlayer for the decoding the MP3-files.

I used bass.dll (www.un4seen.com) for my own Arcade Music Box (wich is also have "name that song" as minigame too), and that dll have works great ). You may try this.

[fiscap]

Is anyone else having a problem with errors and songs not playing? I saw a mention of this earlier in the thread, but I don't think the question was answered. The error that I am receiving is "The specified file cannot be played on the specified MCI device. The file may be corrupt, not in the correct format, or no file handler available for the format."

I get the error roughly 9 out of 10 times, but I don't see a pattern.

I've actually experienced this on my own machine with a couple of songs.

[Lave Laar]

I've released a new version. New in this version :

* Switched to bass.dll for the decoding of the files (thanks for the tip Space Fractal)

This solves the problem with the songs I previously had problems with.

[sac01]

Great work, will make nice addition to cabinet.  wondering about the screen formating, my cab screen max is 640x480.  and this seems to be the default setting in the .ini for the game, but i'm looseing alot of the display, especially in the options menu, and player 4's stat display.

Am I just missing something stupid?


thanks, and nice work!

sac

[Lave Laar]

You will have to turn off the statusline to be able to use the program at 640 x 480. As you will only be able to see the whole options screen at 800 x 600 you can edit the nts.ini file instead.

Changing the following options will make the program work at 640 x 480 :

Start Full Screen=1
Hide Statusline=1
Resize Components=1
Resize Method=0

Everything can be configured by altering the ini-file and the dat-files in the data folder.

[Lave Laar]

New version available.

Added :
* Option to randomly select playlist during gameplay
* Simple program (GPGen.exe) to create playlists based on genres

http://home.c2i.net/llin/programs.html

[whatisk]

Possibly a little off topic, but does anyone know of somewhere to get some good sound effects to use within the program?

For when players buzz in, etc.

[The Man]

Possibly a little off topic, but does anyone know of somewhere to get some good sound effects to use within the program?

For when players buzz in, etc.

I downloaded the PacMan sample and used the sounds for my game.

TM

[Lave Laar]

You can get some great soundeffects from this game :

http://get.games.yahoo.com/proddesc?gamekey=familyfeud

And a bunch of others here :

http://www.angelfire.com/tv2/gssfx/

[whatisk]

You can get some great soundeffects from this game :

http://get.games.yahoo.com/proddesc?gamekey=familyfeud

And a bunch of others here :

http://www.angelfire.com/tv2/gssfx/

Thanks. I'll check them out.

[Lave Laar]

New version available :

Added :
* Individual sound for each players buzz-in
* Sounds for high-score and countdown
* Individual colors for each player
* Support for multiple sounds for right/wrong/high-score
* Optional informationscreen at startup
* Redesigned the options-screen to fit in a 640x480 setup

[cerebus]

Great game Lava Laar. My cabinet got it's first real run with my family last weekend and your game was a hit 

[quarterstringer]

Lave Laar,

Thanks for the great game, it's a lot of fun. I'm using the joystick type selection, but it never remembers that I remapped Player 4's UP. I'll go into the options and Player 4's UP changes to the same number as Player 1's UP. So everytime I play I need to remap Player 4. But in the cfg file, it remembers the correct remapped number. Can you see if you have the same problem?

[cerebus]

Lava Laar,

If you're thinking about the next round of enhancements, an option to continue playing the song when the song information displays after each round would be nice. Because in my experience some players can buzz in very quickly, so it would be nice for everyone to be able to hear a bit more of the song...

[Lave Laar]

I'm using the joystick type selection, but it never remembers that I remapped Player 4's UP.

This is a bug.

[Lave Laar]

Update available.

[Space Fractal]

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=39000.0

ArcadeMusicBox V2.09 is released with "Name That Song v2" updated. It now much eaiser to mainstream that game.

[Lave Laar]

New version out

* Added an additional resizing method
* Should now work with resolutions below 640 x 480.  Tested OK at 320 x 240.
* Renamed skins to themes
* Included some sounds with the default theme
* Added a bonus round to the gameplay
* Minimized the "blinking effect" when alternatives where removed and an image was used as the background
* New version of GPGen.exe which is much faster

http://home.minlos.no/~lars.lindgard/programs.html
 

[Lave Laar]

* Added a new label so that you can see what you are guessing for
* Fixed a few bugs
* Removed GPGen.exe from the installfile
* Created a new website with a few themes available for download

http://home.minlos.no/~lars.lindgard
 

[Animeka]

Found some bugs in the game... the bonus questions, once in a while, the question gets asked and before we have time to answer, the next regular question pops up...

Also,

when offering choices for albums, etc, you should validate if the field has actual values in it, sometimes I get empty choices (obvioulsy because the source mp3 doesnt have all the fields filled in...

Good job, me and my son are having fun

Marc

[Lave Laar]

Found some bugs in the game... the bonus questions, once in a while, the question gets asked and before we have time to answer, the next regular question pops up...

I'm having a little trouble reproducing this one.  Does there seem to be a pattern to this or is it random ?
Will work on it some more and see if I can figure it out.

when offering choices for albums, etc, you should validate if the field has actual values in it, sometimes I get empty choices (obvioulsy because the source mp3 doesnt have all the fields filled in...

This one I've fixed.  I've got all my MP3s tagged so this one slipped by me...

Good job, me and my son are having fun

Thanks.  Great to hear.

[Lave Laar]

New version available

* Fixed a bug with blank alternatives in the bonus round
* Rewrote the code that shows the background text to avoid the text beeing cut off
* Moved the text-alignment of the buttons to the themes section
* Changed the various resize-methods to better support windows 125 DPI setting

http://home.minlos.no/~lars.lindgard

[Lave Laar]

Yet another update :

* Added option to start the songs with increasing and/or decreasing frequency
* Added code to display which playlist/folder is selected when using one of the "cycle-keys" and the statusline is hidden
* Added play-buttons for the soundeffects
* Fixed a bug in the folder selection
* Grouped some of the options

http://home.minlos.no/~lars.lindgard

[Lave Laar]

And another one... 
New in this version :

* Changed the code for the sound-effects.  All soundeffects are now handled by bass.dll  (This should fix the problems for those that have reported that the soundeffects don't play)
* Fixed a bug where the bottom text on the playfield would be cut of when using large fonts
* Changed the key-configuration to display the actual key used instead of the key-code
* Changed the "pop-up" windows to scale with the font so they would not be so stupidly large
* Fixed a bug where the "prefix before the answer" would function in reverse for the bonus round
* Fixed a couple of other minor bugs

[sac01]

Nice work, this was a favorite on my arcade machine bak when you first released it, but it was unstable back then so I kinda gave up on it.  Thanks! this will see alot of use again!

-sac

[sac01]

ok I just installed the game, and went to create the mp3 list with the GPGen.exe  It gets to song 275 and has an access violation error in the gpgen.exe module.  I tried changing what mp3 was #275 in case it was something wrong with the mp3, but it didnt matter.

Am I doing someting wrong?

* oh never mind, my bad, just noticed the game itself handles the mp3 list

[Lave Laar]

As you discovered you only need to use the GPGen-program if you want to create playlists based on genres.  The playlists can then be used by the game to select songs from the same genre and thus make it a little harder.

Did it create a file called "MP3_errors.txt" in your installation-folder ?  This should contain name of the MP3-files it crashed at.  If you could send me one of the the offending files I will try to fix the generator.  Probably got something to do with the tagging of the file.

[sac01]

yes it did create that file. It was a long list in it. pretty much looks like every mp3 up to 275.  so maybe the problem was it didnt like any of my mp3's and it kept adding each one into the error log, and the error log crashes at 275 entries?

[Lave Laar]

New update :

* Updated bass.dll to version 2.3
* Improved errorhandling
* Added support for the following audioformats :  FLAC, OGG, WMA, OFR, MPC, AAC
* Will play other formats that is supported by the add-ons (plugins) at
  http://www.un4seen.com/bass.html#addons, but these does not have support for reading tags with tags.dll
* Added a fileinfo mask to read songinfo from directory/filestructure. For files without tag-info :
  XM, IT, S3M, MOD, MTM, UMX, MO3, MID, TTA, APE (might work with tags.dll), ALAC, AC3, SPX, WV
* New version of GPGen.exe with support for the new audioformats supported by tags.dll

This should fix the problem with GPGen as the old library I used for the reading of tags created the "access violation" error when it wasn't able to read the tag.

Available at http://home.minlos.no/~lars.lindgard

[MustardTent]

How do you deal with DRM'ed AAC files?

[Lave Laar]

I don't really.  Since the plugin that adds AAC-support doesn't handle DRM-protected files.

[Lave Laar]

Not much done since the last version, but I've had a couple of requests so here is another one :

* Added support for Playstation 2 buzz controllers
* Added support for setting different colors on the buttons to match the colors on the buzz controllers
* Added option to easily switch between different key configurations
* Fixed a bug under the captions option and added two extra captions
* Changed the default theme
* Fixed a bug that caused the program to display "Time's Up" to every following answer if you let the bonus time run out

Available at http://home.minlos.no/~lars.lindgard