@ES - MorphX Beta 1 Released!

[@ruantec]

Usually i would start with a joke like "Introducing the IPAD!! err... Introducing the new @ES!" but i guess its time to get serious and finally show the long awaited application i've been teasing for such a long time. the reason why it took so long its because of the lack of time, dedication and also because i was never happy with the tests i did. anyways lets start!

Short story about @ES:

Spoiler:

The project was originally written by my wife about 4 years ago. it started as a VB6 application(the language she use) and the goal at that point was to replace Winamp and Windows media player because she definitely dislike those applications. with the time she progressed quite well until she got stuck since i started to learn VB6(used to code in C++ but the company i worked for wanted me to choose between VB6 or .Net which i obviously denied due to my hate against the .net technology at that time). since i took over the project @ES got some nice features including the one already known as the "Emu-Grabbing method" which was the result of a mistake while coding a crazy code just for fun. after all those years the project turned to be my main project since am unable to work on a bigger project due to the lack of time... however the project at this point in time isn't as small as it once was but quite big i would say :P

WTH is @ES???

Spoiler:

@ES stands for "@ruantec Entertainment Software" and its goal is to unify all possible Emulators into 1 single application while offering nice GUI design as well as menu design etc. and at the same time trying to keep things 'organized'. it also offers some extra features since the very first version such as Audio and Video playback through Directshow which means that if the file type is in the filter and the right codec is installed you can basically play every single multimedia file with it. to be honest it is even hard for me to explain what kind of app @ES actually is because it works like a frontend but in its functionality such as the grabbing feature its totally different.

What's the point on release a beta?
The only goal of this beta release is to collect ideas and also bugs that may help me to improve this app with the time.

What's required to run the app???

Spoiler:

- Windows XP or higher.
- DirectX for rendering.
- .Net framework 4.0
- A resolution of 1280+(because of the new design)
- Multi-threaded capable CPU
- The Emulators you need(only the one listed in the Settings file)
- Some Roms/Games.
- A Gamepad or just use your keyboard :P

Features:
Watch this youtube video to see some of the features included in this beta.


Before you can run any Emulator you should first edit the settings file and edit the paths or emu-ids required:

Spoiler:

Understanding the Settings structure:

Spoiler:

The settings structure is very simple and right now i has two 3 main sections which are: <<Main>>, <<EmuSections>> and <<Emulators>>. all 3 ends with '>>Out' which indicates the end of the section to execute. the values are stored inside each one and they are separated in different ways depending on the section they are like this:

<<EmuSections>>
for example:
PSX::A very popular console due to its large library of games and cheap price.::NONE::PSX.png::26::Playstation
=
Console:: Description::Extras(not used yet)::Picture::EmuID(see <<Emulators>>)::Consolename

The EmuID indicates the emulator to execute and grab at the time you choose a game and its very helpful when more than 1 emulator is required in a section like in the case of PS1 where few people main play some games using ePSXe but then others using pSX and so on.

<<Emulators>>
for example:
1::ePSXe PSX Emulator::E:\Emulators\PSX\epsxe170\ePSXe.exe::ePS Xe
=
EmuID:: Description::Path::Emulator name

As previously said.. here you add an Emulator giving a unique ID of your choice which you are going to use in the EmuSection. after you configured both of them you're ready to go.

How to:

Spoiler:

How do i add Roms/Games???
Each time you enter a section you will see a message in @ES screen telling you that no items were found and that you should drop the folders containing your Roms/Games/Audio/Video files. note that @ES do not support single-file drop but you have to drop the folder containing them and @ES will list the files required for the section you're currently in. if you don't know what am talking about then watch this pic as it may help you to understand what i mean a bit better:

Spoiler:

WTF??? there's no option to change the Wallpaper! how do i do that?
Am a weird programmer and i have a weird way of doing things... one of them is the famous drag and drop and by dropping a picture to the main screen you're are able to change the wallpaper anytime.

You was zooming and moving the Wallpaper and Albumart in one of your videos... how the hell do i do that???
Very simple... just press click and hold the pic then move around and to zoom just use your mouse-scroller

Ok, gotcha but can i do the same with a video while is playing???
Hell yes!!! actually its just another crazy idea of mine that maybe some of you may like.

WTF!!! i moved the Wallpaper/Albumart/Video out of the screen and i don't know how to get it back...
Don't toy around next time :P ... on a more serious note: the code isn't complete yet and atm there is no way to get it back to the main position(it should be possible in the next beta tho.)

My list is huge, where is the scroller???
By moving the mouse the right part of the list(the console selection list has no scroller) a scroller will appear allowing you to scroll anytime but its going to dissapear if you move the mouse away from it.

Context menus:
Two areas contains context menus and those are the main one(Wallpaper) and the audio controls one. if you don't know what am talking about then check out this picture:

Spoiler:

Bug, report and ideas:
Feel free to post any bugs or ideas here as its going to help me to improve my app.

Compatibility issues and things i should know:
There are 3 Emulators that are giving me pain right now and those are ePSXe, PJ64 and DeSmuME.

ePSXe:
To make it work propertly set the windowed resolution of your GPU plugin to match @ES natural resolution of 512x384 like this:

Spoiler:

PJ64:
To make it work propertly set the windowed resolution of your GPU plugin to mach @ES natural resolution of 512x384 like this:

Spoiler:

DeSmuME:
Due to some rendering problems the newest version(0.9.6) do not work as i expected and only the old one(0.9.4) works propertly.


How many tests/version of @ES have you written so far???
this ones:

Spoiler:

The Iphone skinned @ES:

The Iphone skinned one is probably one of the most advanced versions of @ES and at the same time due to design flaws the most resource intensive one.

The Gray-Fox @ES:

The second most advanced one. it includes emu-grabbing as well as other nices effects and its less resource intensive than the iphone one by far.

The PSP @ES:

The same as the Gray-Fox one but it has a nice PSP skin ^_^

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Special thanks to you for downloading and using my app and to all my mates and testers that helped me all this years such as Schumi, Darksamus, Hard Core Rikki, Snkmad(Mad), KrossX, Shendo, Lord_Snow, Topken, Zack, Phil, Squall, Mudlord, Hatorijr, Xtreme2damax, Strike105X, Bigig, Chossy, Desred, Dax, Nosound97(Mike), P.Rep, PCXL-Fan, Prafull and many others i probably forgot. last but not least to every Author of those awesome emulators supported by @ES.

Download

Enjoy!!!

Regards
@ruantec

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Update:

I just uploaded a quick fix that fixes the following bugs:

1. Crash when adding large audio libraries.
2. Double-item when adding a single folder.
3. Play button visible even if a new video is being rendered.
4. Some consoles do not display the roms added even if they are valid.
5. Drop a pic to the main layer didn't worked so you couldn't add a custom wallpaper.
6. "Set albumart as wallpaper" displayed an error message.

More is comming soon with the next beta but sadly i didn't had much time today to work on it.

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Update 2:

A new release is out and the download was attached to this post. for more information about the changes check out my post here.

Attached Images

	audio.jpg (75.3 KB, 159 views)
	console.jpg (74.1 KB, 24 views)
	main.jpg (71.4 KB, 156 views)
	video.jpg (73.2 KB, 17 views)

Attached Files

	@ES - MorphX 1.2a exe_only.rar (886.7 KB, 21 views)
	@ES - MorphX 1.2a.rar (2.89 MB, 115 views)

__________________

Current development tools:

Visual C++.net, Visual C#.net
Visual VB.net, Visual Webdeveloper.net
Bloodshed Dev C++, Borland C++
Visual Basic 6

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Last edited by @ruantec; August 20th, 2010 at 00:35..

[@ruantec]

Since the main post is huge i guess it makes more sense to make a new post to write the update.

In case some of you downloaded the package before reading this post then please re-download the file again because i made a mistake that prevented the app from starting. since i work a lot with .net apps(C#) am used to apply some security measures but in this case isn't really necessary also i used a trial version which causes problems while starting the app.

Special thanks to Lord_Snow for the report.

__________________

Current development tools:

Visual C++.net, Visual C#.net
Visual VB.net, Visual Webdeveloper.net
Bloodshed Dev C++, Borland C++
Visual Basic 6

[Bogard]

Glad to see @ES in action again, thank you for the download!

__________________

[Silenus]

Nice downloading right now.

I suggest that as you show the emulators from AES, if a user doesn't have the emulator by clicking on it, to direct it to a page to download it, the user have to get his own bios anyways but it would better if you could integrate download links to the emulators that AES supports.

Another thing, I added an Album to test and it shows twice on the AES window.

Animations look good.

__________________

--ASUS G50VT-X1 - P8400 2.5GHZ - Geforce 9800GS 512MB - HDD 320GB - 4GB DDR2 800MHZ - WINDOWS 7 64 BIT - ZALMAN NC2000--

...Mis sueños son mentiras que algun día dejarán de serlo...

[@ruantec]

Thank you for the report and suggestions guys.. i just found the reason why the items are added twice and am going to fix it soon as for the ideas they sound perfect and i think i will add a link and probably even ask for permission to bundle @ES with emulators if necessary. also am thinking to add the VLC core for audio and video and the recently released emulator bsneslib which may give both cores a new and fresh look ^^

__________________

Current development tools:

Visual C++.net, Visual C#.net
Visual VB.net, Visual Webdeveloper.net
Bloodshed Dev C++, Borland C++
Visual Basic 6

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Last edited by @ruantec; August 10th, 2010 at 19:50..

[Bogard]

Alright guys, got some screenshots. Everything pretty much works.

Plus there's a couple nostalgic surprises!

Spoiler:

I wish we could get the latest one.

Spoiler:

Everyone should play this one at least once.

Spoiler:

One of my favorites, I really miss those days.

__________________

[Foxfyre]

First bug I've found so far. Dropping my MP3 folder into the audio section results in a crash. I have pretty large collection of ripped cd's...over 10 gigs worth. It gets up to album 149 and crashes.

Second bug I've found. Dropping my roms folder into the appropriate screens for each emu results in absolutely nothing happening.

Edit 3: Gameboy Advance, Color, and Nintendo DS worked when dragging the appropriate rom folder in, but I haven't gotten the others to work yet.

__________________
Main Rig: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale (4.0ghz at 445FSB)/ GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P P45 Mobo/ 4 GB G Skill PC2 8500 Ram / SAMSUNG 22X SATA DVD Burner / 500 Gig Seagate HD / 250 Gig Maxtor HD / 1TB Western Digital HD / ATI Radeon HD5750 / Realtek HD Audio

Media Center PC: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Manchester/ 2 GB Corsair PC3200 Ram / Sony Optiarc DVD-RW / 200 Gig Samsung HD / ATI Radeon HD 4650

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Last edited by Foxfyre; August 10th, 2010 at 21:24..

[@ruantec]

Originally Posted by Foxfyre

First bug I've found so far. Dropping my MP3 folder into the audio section results in a crash. I have pretty large collection of ripped cd's...over 10 gigs worth. It gets up to album 149 and crashes.

Second bug I've found. Dropping my roms folder into the appropriate screens for each emu results in absolutely nothing happening.

Very interesting... specially the first bug. about the second one it may be due to the format you use since atm @ES prefer uncompressed roms and files and no zip etc.

i will look into the first one and see what may be the reason. you´re actually the first one with that problem tho.

__________________

Current development tools:

Visual C++.net, Visual C#.net
Visual VB.net, Visual Webdeveloper.net
Bloodshed Dev C++, Borland C++
Visual Basic 6

[Foxfyre]

Seems like compressed roms are the problem. Any plans to fully implement zip support?

Also, are there any audio file formats that @ES has a problem with? Most of my stuff is .mp3, but there could be some oddball files in there.

__________________
Main Rig: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale (4.0ghz at 445FSB)/ GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P P45 Mobo/ 4 GB G Skill PC2 8500 Ram / SAMSUNG 22X SATA DVD Burner / 500 Gig Seagate HD / 250 Gig Maxtor HD / 1TB Western Digital HD / ATI Radeon HD5750 / Realtek HD Audio

Media Center PC: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Manchester/ 2 GB Corsair PC3200 Ram / Sony Optiarc DVD-RW / 200 Gig Samsung HD / ATI Radeon HD 4650

[@ruantec]

Originally Posted by Foxfyre

Seems like compressed roms are the problem. Any plans to fully implement zip support?

Also, are there any audio file formats that @ES has a problem with? Most of my stuff is .mp3, but there could be some oddball files in there.

mp3 and wma are supported right now but in the case of mp3 i´ve experienced a lot of weird scenarios where apps destroy or add bad data to there ID3 which may cause some problems and even an exception i didn't handled propertly. try to separate some files into folders and drop those 1 by 1. atm that is going to cause the items to be added twice but you can select the item and hit delete to delete the ones you don´t need.

__________________

Current development tools:

Visual C++.net, Visual C#.net
Visual VB.net, Visual Webdeveloper.net
Bloodshed Dev C++, Borland C++
Visual Basic 6

[Xtreme2damax]

Originally Posted by Foxfyre

Seems like compressed roms are the problem. Any plans to fully implement zip support?

I also noticed that when I was testing and reported it to @ruantec.

@ruantec, I can report some of the native compression formats/extensions a couple emulators use.

Dolphin uses .gcz for compression
Pcsx2 with Linuz ISO CDVD uses .Z, .BZ. Right now I have my games compressed with the .BZ2 extension. There's also another extension that is created during compression .BZ2.table.

__________________

[Foxfyre]

Originally Posted by Xtreme2damax

I also noticed that when I was testing and reported it to @ruantec.

@ruantec, I can report some of the native compression formats/extensions a couple emulators use.

Dolphin uses .gcz for compression
Pcsx2 with Linuz ISO CDVD uses .Z, .BZ. Right now I have my games compressed with the .BZ2 extension. There's also another extension that is created during compression .BZ2.table.

I'm just using standard zip containers, to save on harddrive space. This has nothing to do with any built in compression a rom or iso may have.

__________________
Main Rig: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale (4.0ghz at 445FSB)/ GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P P45 Mobo/ 4 GB G Skill PC2 8500 Ram / SAMSUNG 22X SATA DVD Burner / 500 Gig Seagate HD / 250 Gig Maxtor HD / 1TB Western Digital HD / ATI Radeon HD5750 / Realtek HD Audio

Media Center PC: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Manchester/ 2 GB Corsair PC3200 Ram / Sony Optiarc DVD-RW / 200 Gig Samsung HD / ATI Radeon HD 4650

[@ruantec]

let me explain you why it doesn´t work. @ES has an internal filter which use formats defined by me and those you mentioned aren't in the filter so its not going to show them. am working right now to put the main filter array in the settings file so that you can choose what type of files are going to get used by the filter while scanning the folders you drop to it and in that way those formats are going to work as long as they are supported by the target Emulator.

__________________

Current development tools:

Visual C++.net, Visual C#.net
Visual VB.net, Visual Webdeveloper.net
Bloodshed Dev C++, Borland C++
Visual Basic 6

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Last edited by @ruantec; August 10th, 2010 at 21:54..

[Xtreme2damax]

Originally Posted by Foxfyre

I'm just using standard zip containers, to save on harddrive space. This has nothing to do with any built in compression a rom or iso may have.

I already knew that..

I was referring to the fact compressed images and roms in general don't work, including images compressed with an emulators or plugins inbuilt compression utility.

Both Pcsx2 with Linuz's CDVD plugin and Dolphin have inbuilt utilities to compress images. As as I mentioned above I wasn't specifically referring to just the inbuilt utilities, but any kind of compressed image/rom including roms/images compressed in .zip, .rar or whatever.

__________________

[Player594]

Originally Posted by Foxfyre

First bug I've found so far. Dropping my MP3 folder into the audio section results in a crash. I have pretty large collection of ripped cd's...over 10 gigs worth. It gets up to album 149 and crashes.

Second bug I've found. Dropping my roms folder into the appropriate screens for each emu results in absolutely nothing happening.

Edit 3: Gameboy Advance, Color, and Nintendo DS worked when dragging the appropriate rom folder in, but I haven't gotten the others to work yet.

I have the same problem with adding a large folder of music. It hangs then crashes.

__________________
system specs:
P4 3.2 ghz w/HT - Geforce 7300 GS - 2.5 GB RAM -200 GB hard drive

[@ruantec]

I just uploaded a new package and .exe only in the main post that fixes the following bugs:

1. Crash when adding large audio libraries.
2. Double-item when adding a single folder.
3. Play button visible even if a new video is being rendered.
4. Some consoles do not display the roms added even if they are valid.

More is comming soon with the next beta but sadly i didn't had much time today to work on it.

Enjoy!

__________________

Current development tools:

Visual C++.net, Visual C#.net
Visual VB.net, Visual Webdeveloper.net
Bloodshed Dev C++, Borland C++
Visual Basic 6

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Last edited by @ruantec; August 11th, 2010 at 20:19..

[Bogard]

Alright, just tested the new fixes, everything seems to work great. No obvious bugs or crashes for me.

Spoiler:

^I'm a Kamen Rider fan.

Looks like it can only improve from here on.

__________________

[@ruantec]

I just uploaded a new fix which fixes 2 more bugs which are:

- Drop a pic to the main layer didn't worked so you couldn't add a custom wallpaper.
- "Set albumart as wallpaper" displayed an error message.

__________________

Current development tools:

Visual C++.net, Visual C#.net
Visual VB.net, Visual Webdeveloper.net
Bloodshed Dev C++, Borland C++
Visual Basic 6

[Bogard]

I can confirm the wallpaper bug is fixed.

Spoiler:

__________________

[LoRd_SnOw]

Curious to know from anyone here, has any one gotten this message when setting an album image as your default wallpaper? I haven't heard any mentioning of it in this thread, im beginning to think it just might be me.

Spoiler:

__________________
My Development Blog (now with an updated url!)

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Last edited by LoRd_SnOw; August 12th, 2010 at 02:33..