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)
Sinclir 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.

If you do find any genuine miss-information within the databases; please pm me, I won't take offence and any help to get them closer to the overal goal would be deemed a benefit by me.

Many thanks to flash for his diligent work on the databases, and also for his testing and ensuring the quality of this release.

Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays.