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Friday, December 18, 2009

post://4672237220726642051/

Windows 7 Games Explorer Manual Customization How To
Windows 7 has removed the ability from Games Explorer to Customize out of the box.

It's not impossible to do, however - it just takes some finangling and registry knowledge.

All of your Games Explorer shortcuts are stored here:
%localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows\GameExplorer

If you have games installed you should see several folders with very long names that start with {######...
Each of these is the unique game ID used by Windows to synch the icons and commands that appear in the Games Explorer to the actual EXE that runs the game.

These numbers correspond to the values in the registry here:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\GameUX\Games

By clicking on one of the IDs in the registry you can figure out which game is which:
IE {1396D271-A5F9-4F29-8D7D-767858558567} is Batman for me.
When I click the ID folder the config options are on the right including the full path so you should be able to find which ID corresponds to which game.

To modify the options for a game like change the path, or even add additional play or right click options, just modify or add a folder within PlayTasks for that game. I believe you are limited to 0 to 5 tasks, but try it. Batman's 0 task is Play and the 1 task is Support. So within PlayTask\0 (default) for Batman is a shortcut named "Play". Right click and choose properties as you would on any other shortcut and modify the files as you need to (run as admin, compatability mode, etc). To create a new play task you could make a folder named "3" and within that place a shortcut named as you'd like it to appear on the context menu.

Finally, you can also modify the box art shown in GamesExplorer or even add box art for games that don't have it by default by modifying the images in the
%localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows\GameExplorer folder.