Howard: Dragon King Questions...

[bdp]

Howard,

I am trying to use emusaver in Dragon King and it's not working.  I downloaded .81 and it didn't have any screen saver in it.  I tried just putting emusaver into the main DK folder, called it default.scr, and turned it on in the frontend options, it's not kicking in.

It works fine as a windows screen saver.  What am I doing wrong?

Also, have you stopped work on Dragon King?  If not, I'd like to make a request for the next version: Can you have A to Z and Z to A wraparound in the game lists?  It would be nice for the longer game lists.

Thanks for all you do for the community.

Brad

[Howard_Casto]

What version of dk are you using?  The latest version has both exe and path options in the frontend.ini.....

Btw you can't leave the path blank, if it's your dragon king directory then you have to put that in.  

If it's working as a windows scr then simply set the path to c:\windows\ (or your windows path) and the scr to emusaver.scr

Should work fine..... also make sure that you have the kick in time to something reasonable, like 60 seconds


Yes I'm still working on it, but nobody seems to care... I posted a thread asking for suggestions just last week and not a single person replied.  The reason I don't make a lot of announcments like i used to is because I get zero feedback anymore.  

And until the poor schmucks with 2.4 gig processors running ugly gdi based fes wise up and realize that they can run dk with it's superior directX enhanced 2d interface instead, it'll probably stay that way.

[bdp]

Howard,

Thanks for your reply.  I will look at the settings a bit later today when I get a chance.  I'm likely just doing something wrong.

I'm glad to hear you are still working on DK.  I think a lot more people are still interested and using it, more than you think, they just don't have anything to say.  I can certainly come up with a list of suggestions (like the Z to A wraparound thing) if you are working on the project still.  Some of the other stuff you're working on are features I may not even use, I already have a skin I'm pretty pleased with and I doubt I'll mess with any of the new elements, but that's just me.  

I think the one thing that keeps a lot of people away may be the list generator.  DK is awesome but it's a lot of work to set up.  For example, with some other frontends, I point to my ROMs folder, and it just indexes them for me.  If I add new ROMs to the folder, there they are.  With DK, I need to re-run a listgen and make a DAT file, etc etc, any time I add new ROMs (I just added new SNES ROMs for example and there's a lot of work I need to do to update the list now, where most frontends just have the entire directory automatically included).

Again, this doesn't keep me from using DK cuz it's still the best once it's set up, but a lot of users need something easier.  There are just a LOT of options out there now as far as FE's go, lots more than there used to be, and naturally users are gonna be spread amongst them all.  

By the way can you post the portions of frontend.ini that have the screensaver settings?  I don't recall seeing that at all in my frontend.ini.

Thanks again Howard, hope you'll keep working on the FE, I will always have ideas.

BDP

[papaschtroumpf]

Since you're using DirectX, are the graphics in DK displayed faster than MameWah's GDI based graphics, or is disk access the main gating factor?
The reason I'm asking is that I tried making a 1024x768 skin for mamewah with a lot of graphic-based info about the game: screenshot, but also original cab and marquee and flyer and an image based "how-to-play" card.
It works great in mamewah but slows down the scrolling of the game because of the time it takes to display all the art pieces while scrolling. Mamewah has an option to not display graphics while scrolling but only display them when you stop scrolling, but I don't like that, and the kids mostly identify games by their screenshot so it makes it harder to scroll.

[Howard_Casto]

Since you're using DirectX, are the graphics in DK displayed faster than MameWah's GDI based graphics, or is disk access the main gating factor?
The reason I'm asking is that I tried making a 1024x768 skin for mamewah with a lot of graphic-based info about the game: screenshot, but also original cab and marquee and flyer and an image based "how-to-play" card.
It works great in mamewah but slows down the scrolling of the game because of the time it takes to display all the art pieces while scrolling. Mamewah has an option to not display graphics while scrolling but only display them when you stop scrolling, but I don't like that, and the kids mostly identify games by their screenshot so it makes it harder to scroll.

Yes and no.... If you have a video card with true hardware acceleration (any radeon or geforce)  and enough ram to handle all the stuff you wish to display then yes.  I can tell you that it can't be any slower.... directX is inheriently faster than the gdi....  My old front ends were gdi based and I switched to dx mostly because of the added speed.  

To give you an example the default dk skin displays the screenshot, cabinet shot, and flyer shot at 1024x768 with the selection list being marquees instead of text.  It runs smoothly on my old 900mhz and my new machine and most people tell me that it runs well on their systems too.  The catch is while it's running it takes approx 35 megs of memory.  When you play a game this memory is re-allocated to the emulator but it's still something to consider.  

[papaschtroumpf]

Athlon XP 2400+ with 256M of RAM on WinXP so that hsouldn't really be a problem, but I currently only have an ATI Rage Pro video card which does 2D acceleration so I don't know if it's supported.
I'm probably going to upgrade the video card pretty soon since I'm planning on adding PC games to my cab and my main rig is getting a video card update for Xmas, but then again my Linux machine would like that video card too...

[bdp]

Howard, another DK question for ya, I hope I am putting these at the right place.

I saw that there's something called "steadykey" support for 4 way games.  I have this option on but it doesn't seem to help.  Do I need to compile a special mame or something to get this option?  I have an 8 way joystick and 4-way games still are tough to play (like pacman) because all the extra ways interfere when I try to play.  What is steadykey supposed to do?  What I'd love is for mame to somehow make the joystick act as a 4-way for 4 way games...

BDP

[Howard_Casto]

All the steadykey option does is turn on steadykey within mame....  it isn't super good so that might be your issue.  

[bdp]

Yeah, it certainly doesn't make playing 4 way games any easier with an 8-way stick.  What's steadykey supposed to do to make 4 way play any easier, anyway?  

Are there any other solutions for getting 4 way games to play better in mame when using an 8 way stick?

[dreamfreak]

sorry, what is DRAGON KING

thx

[PacManFan]

It's just like Burger King, except they sell Dragon meat instead  


Actually, It's a fairly cool Front End, except I've heard it's a little difficult to configure, I haven't tried it personnally.

-PMF

[Howard_Casto]

except I've heard it's a little difficult to configure

This from the person who wrote an entire scripting language in their fe despite virtually every fe developer on the board told them the users would find it too hard to configure, only to come out several months later and admit that the scripting language was a bad way to go?  

You know the old saying... listen to HowardC he's always right, even when he's wrong.  

Getting back to the point.... At this current time it is by far the easiest windows "non-windowsy" front-end to configure.  (Except for arcadeFx, but it appears to be a dead project) Mamewah used to have that title, but as more features were added to it, the amount of user questions has grown.  On second though I've heard Jfront is pretty simple to setup as well, but considering you have ot install all that wierd java stuff I'm not really sure.  

Other points are arguable, but I don't see how a front-end that's preconfigured for mame, requires no installation, doesn't have any dependancies other than directX, and actually walks you through the initial mame setup (roms paths and the path to mame) via a wizard could be considered hard to configure.  


www.oscarcontrols.com/lazarus/

[PacManFan]

except I've heard it's a little difficult to configure

This from the person who wrote an entire scripting language in their fe despite virtually every fe developer on the board told them the users would find it too hard to configure, only to come out several months later and admit that the scripting language was a bad way to go?  

www.oscarcontrols.com/lazarus/

Hey, at least I wasn't afraid to try something new, It's an idea that's way ahead of it's time. The scripting language was a great idea, making the users actually program the script was a bad idea. That's where WYSIWYG editor comes in.
      I still have a group of hardcore users who swear that EmuTron's the best thing since sliced bread, and use it for all sorts of FE applications both game and non-game related. They use it for things that I had never thought about and use the script to perform all sort of complex batch processing behavior.

Well, I'm not to worrired about it. I've learned from my mistakes, and that's the best that one can hope for. Don't take that "Burger King" comment too personally, I was just trolling you for a fight, we haven't butted heads in months.

All I can say is that Kymaera's coming soon.

-PMF