Posted by Druin on 29, 2000 at 5:36 PM:
In Reply to: how about an instruct.dat file for mame and/or frontends? please comment posted by bill connolly on 28, 2000 at 7:12 AM:
So in line with my semi-idea of having MAME send out control details for each game upon request, in the form of also look up custom maps from its config file so it's accurate for each particular instance of MAME, and having people put their own custom control panel screen shots with all possible action button combos shown and others grayed, then having some utility decypher the MAME control data to decide what control layout to display, then manually print some mapping text to say what non-grayed buttons on the generic shown panel actually do what (fire, jump)....
My next thought on how to have instructions/game info shown, whereby everyone may prefer different game details to be shown, maybe there could simply be a generic text file showing option, either in MAME or in this intermediate utility...there could be an editable text file with sections for each game, and if any text exists, the utility will display it upon request, if the [Contra] field is blank then nothing is shown, and everyone can edit their own "misc info" to add to the control panel mapping screenshots. So the intent wouldn't necessarily be to get a specific type of data file incorporate into the system like a game history or game cheat info or general game theme storyline just for the player's interest of knowing the point of a game plot...it's just a generic optional file that will happen to show any text for that game name when it is time...in our case it happens to include that type of info...
So we get, somehow, the data on people's custom MAME control mappings from the config files, either from a new MAME commandline feature or a separate utility, show the proper custom panel layout with the needed controls, show some text saying what buttons specifically do what function, then IF it exists in a miscinfo.dat file for that game, press a key to show More info on that game (whatever it contains) and that is the game plot of what you must do etc.
I could use that feature myself, lots of games I don't know what I'm supposed to really do half the time...