Posted by generic eric on 29, 2001 at 3:05 AM:
In Reply to: Re: Dan - EmuWizard Requests... posted by Sergei on 29, 2001 at 1:22 AM:
I did something like that to organize mp3s
Well it was kinda like what your talking about.
: Has anyone considered just making their own frontend using HTML and a fullscreen web browser? You can even set up Windows so that explorer.exe won't load at startup.
: There'd be the extra overhead of having the web browser running, but it shouldn't be that much overhead especially if explorer isn't loaded. And, RAM and processing horsepower is so cheap these days, anyway.
: I was thinking of doing this myself and using Opera as the web browser to run the interface, since it's one of the lightest, smallest, most efficient web browsers for Windows. Mozilla is nice, but too big and a memory hog--maybe when it gets out of beta. Internet Explorer is of course a bad choice because it's such a hog.
: I was thinking of this since my future cab project won't be just for MAME, but for many, many PC games and other emulated games as well. It's easy to code HTML, it's very extensible, and if I do something like that I could unify all my games into one interface sorted by whatever categories I want. I could also give the interface any look fairly easily--I was thinking of having buttons with sizable game images or logos on them for each game.
: The beauty of this approach would be the extreme customizability, and the fact that you don't even need any programming knowledge to code the interface. If you don't even know HTML, there are plenty of good editors. And there are great tools that can convert raw data into pages, so that the games wouldn't need to be entered manually each time MAME and others are updated.
: I was just wondering if anyone else had the same idea. I kind of like the ease of updating and customization that an HTML-based solution might bring. One could even incorporate information pages for each game, including rich content like myultimedia or game manuals and such, and update whenever one finds a new picture or video clip or historical fact to include.
: Just a thought. It would be a bit heavier than many front-ends out there now, even if a light browser like Opera is used to display the HTML content--but PCs are only getting more and more powerful, so most new PCs have the memory and cycles to spare. It'll take a chunk of my time to organize everything and churn out the pages when I finally do, but I think it'll be worth it to have an interface totally customized to my own aesthetics and incorporating all the content about the games which I've been accumulating.
: Any thoughts?