GameEx 9.79 released

[Robert]

Front End

 

21st December, 2008 - GameEx 9.77

 

With perfect timing for the holidays, I am very pleased to release this version of GameEx. It contains two major enhancements and various small fixes and changes that I won't mention here.

 

First of all image lists have been implemented in GameEx. You can now view game lists and other pages as an image list giving a thumbnail display. To access the image list you need to be running a version 3 or 4 theme, and to access the view either change in the configuration applications or hit the Change View menu item. In this release the view is remembered for restart. I think you will like this new feature, and I think it fits in really well with GameEx. It should work well on both cabs and media centers, and it also looks great when the display is rotated. It will display a thumb of videos, and will cache this but it takes time to get the frame, so I recommend you ensure you also have image based snaps setup for your systems and MAME.

 

The other improvement is enhanced database support. When on the game information page, you are given menu options to find "more" games with the same developer, year, or category. This effectively links all systems together, and there is also now an All Games list available. Any database caching issues have been resolved, and this really does make GameEx the ultimate repository for when you have many systems.

 

Here are some notes from Flash on this new feature.

 

Along with the new improved game database support much work has been done on the current databases to aid the overal functionality.

 

These databases have been improved/modified, some more than others.

 

Atari Jaguar (nearly complete)

Vectrex

Supergrafix

Pc Engine

Nintendo 64 (complete)

Super Nintendo

Nintendo Gameboy

Sega Saturn

Virtual Boy

Commodore 64 (very early stages, 20,000 games)

Sinclair ZX81 and Spectrum.

 

For these to work correctly they rely on your romsets to follow one of these naming conventions, Tosec, No-Into, GoodName.

 

To go hand-in-hand with the new "More:" feature, both Publisher and Developer fields have been modified across ALL databases. To make the matching easier certain concessions have been made. Examples are: All Sony subdivisions are listed as "Sony Computer Entertainment", Rockstar is just Rockstar Games (no Rockstar North, Rockstar Tokyo, etc). You will see the reason for this when using GameEx and this does make it a lot easier to bring up a FULL list of games by a favorite Developer (I.e. Rare, Treasure) rather than having several entries for the same developer. I hope this is acceptable to all as we felt that the slight loss of software divisions far outweighed the benefits.

 

You will find that some games may not appear in the More: lists as expected. This is not a fault with GameEx; but rather a problem of incomplete databases. As the databases get more and more complete, the issue will become less and less. When they are all done (and trust me - I am doing my best) all games will match across the board including Publishers, Manufacturers, Years, Genres.

>> Get it HERE.