Posted by Lilwolf on February 08, 2002 at 09:49:17:
In Reply to: I can't hold it back any more. Read this! posted by ArcadeFX on February 07, 2002 at 22:36:39:
Cool... I love that all of our front ends are coming along so well. I might have to move to one of your two soon!!
Well, I started my skin application the day ofter the new skins in ArcadeFX (and when I found that I couldn't run yours). I've been running your skins on my cabinet for 2 weeks now at 640x480. Then I started seeing some of RD's skins that I like and had to add some features to mine.
Then I started listing more and more features that I wanted in mine.
The list of new features. (+/- a few by the time I'm done I'm sure)
1) in-game skin application. Don't have to leave. Change default images, colors, fonts, locations, resolutions, rotation (for vertical screen setups!), whats in the swappable frame, visible/hidden on each, number of preview windows. Some fun things to add. You don't have to have a 'middle' preview, they don't have to be in order. I made a great skin that had a cabinet in the middle and previews on the left and right going into it (getting bigger as it got there).... then I broke serialization adding new features (sigh).
2) ingame favorite settings. You can set keys to increase/decrease each game. Then you can create indexs for games you haven't set the favorites yet. There can also (hopefully soon) have more then one favorite list saved ingame (so I can add what games my daughter likes to one index)
3) Better multi-control panel. You can have the ingame key settings by the current control panel. But you can have differant mame configiguration (based on game information) for each control panel. I would also like to add auto change based on keyboard keys (since most encoders you can hardware a different key pressed on each control panel so you plug it in and your configuration changes... but not tested yet...). Again, once I have my 5 configurations in mame, that handles about 95% of all games without any more configuration. Note that you can easily add encoder setup for each game still.
4) Tons of hidden updates. The image loader is a lot more stable now. I wrote an object to handle all image loading since Java's image loaders forced each image to load even if you don't wanted it by the time it started. This sucked for when my daughter would hit the random button a hundred times (and you would have to load each image up for pages not shown anymore before it came to the current)... (and I added it so that the images are loaded in the background so that you can quickly move around without having to wait for the images to load the first time).
things that haven't been updated and probably wont before the next version.
I still just have the generic game loader (that can run any application...). I was hoping to add some game loaders for specific emulators. This should be pretty easy for most emulators since I can use a mini parser with the rom directory list to run each game.
I was hoping to add another application that runs behind the frontend that shows a loading image. The java application cant be showing when I run mame since mame does some funky graphic stuff that causes exceptions (since the java application can't display). I might do an active desktop for this.
A hack at a 3d image. Not truely 3d, but I started to write a image filter that would scale one side by a percentage, then I can rotate that image (I'm doing this as a lense, so it should be fast as long as it doesn't move). This would allow me to have the marquee and the screenshot (or previews I guess) on a picture of a cabinet that isn't looking straight on. Looks VERY cool when doing this.
Bezel. I would LOVE to add bezel images into my frontend around the screenshot. Then load mame non-fullscreen and have a transparent image (or 4 images) of the bezel above it. Trouble is.... I can't find enought bezels of high enought image quality to allow this to be a useful option (since I think it would only work for about 5 games....sigh)
btw, I'm getting close. I have a final feature set. The next version will also probably come with an installer and a jdk so that it was easier to load. I might spend some time getting mame to compile again on my machine (haven't done it in years) so I can add support for SNK rotary joysticks without buying any hardware. So this might slow things down. The main trouble with all features / bugs is that I have a fulltime+ job and a wife with 2 kids. So I only get a few hours a day at best a few times a week.