Day 314

Today I thought I'd try a different frontend. The reason for this is that I wanted to incorporate Internet radio and I was having a great deal of difficulty. I spent all this morning installing a program called GameEX (http://www.gameex.com/) from scratch onto its own partition along with all the emulators for all the games. I discovered today that after 6 hours, I accomplished more with it than I had with Hyperspin in the last 8 months. On top of that, ALL of my emulators are working with little trouble.

There are some pros and cons.

Pros: First, the program was intuitive and simplistic. It self installs and it self updates. It gives you a list of all the emulators you want and installs them and organizes the folders for you. All you have to do is drop in the game ROM files into their proper place and that's it.

Next, it has its own built-in jukebox program and reads your library from Windows Media Center. This is a pro and a con, but I'll cover that later. It also has its own built-in Internet radio which you can drop in the URL of any radio station you like.

It also has newsfeeds, weather, Hulu and Youtube access, etc. You can enable and disable these to your whim.

Everything is customizable, including the themes, backgrounds, startup videos, sounds and so on.

Now the cons:

First the jukebox reads the library from the Windows Media Center. Now that is only a pain because I couldn't add my jukebox DVD to the library because "Microsoft knows best" and doesn't think anyone would want that. Basically, I just moved the individual mp3's from the DVD and dropped them into the My Music folder, which sucked up an additional 4 GB of hard drive space. Feh on Microsoft. Once that was done, the Jukebox filled right up.

Next, GameEx, while it is free, does have a nag screen with a wait time when you first fire the program up. The nag screen is to encourage people to donate for the program's development, which is a good thing. While I was trying to keep the expenses to a minimum, I believe the program is a good investment and well worth the measly $17 donation for the quality. The bottom line is the nag screen isn't really a con.

While GameEx may not be as flashy and colorful as Hyperspin, it also doesn't create the incredible jigsaw puzzle atmosphere of putting a cabinet together for having fun. Unless you're into that sort of thing.