i was recently at a local pizza place and they had a multi-game arcade cabinet set up. i was in a hurry, and didn't have time to play any games, but i liked the interface. it was pretty simple, with 6 screen shots of the games and you just used the joystick to select the one you wanted to play. (they may have been animated/videos, i can't remember)
after a little googling, here is a pic of what i'm talking about.
my question is: are there any mame front ends out there that can replicate this? i've tried a few different front ends, but havent found anything like this. i am currently running mala, which i am relatively happy with...however i think i'd like to have something set up more like that cabinet, which i'm assuming is a 60-in-1 board.
any ideas?
I like this kind of layout too, and I have done it in Mala. There are a couple caveats however:
1. You don't mind doing a fair bit of work especially if your gamelist is large (although some Autohotkey skills can reduce the amount of work considerably)
2. You will not be able to easily add or remove games from the list, so make sure it's what you want before you begin.
My explanation is going to be very convoluted, but the results will be exactly what you want, so bear with me.
I took a minute to make a sketch up in Paint of the kind of layout you'd want to make - see attached.
The gamelist is simply Mala's regular gamelist, you'll just want to squish it down so that only the currently selected game is shown in the list.
For the definables, you'll need to make a template of the row of three snaps. An easy way to do this is to load up 39in1 in Mame and take a screenshot of the menu image and then cut out a row in Paint or whatever program you use for this sort of thing.
You'll need snaps that fit into this template for all the games in the list. Both in color and black and white.
For simplicity sake, let's say the first 6 roms in your list are named rom1, rom2, rom3, rom4, rom5, and rom6.
In the template, put in the black and white snaps of rom1-rom3, save that with a different filename, then open the template again and put in the black and white snaps of rom4-rom6.
From the rom1-rom3 file, you're going to make 3 more files, each with one of the snaps in color. So simply paste the color snap of rom1 over the black and white one, save it with the name rom1, and then repeat this for rom2-rom6.
Save rom1, rom2, and rom3 in your definable 1 folder, save rom4, rom5, and rom6, in your definable 2 folder.
Now, you need to think about how the screen should look with each game selected. When rom1 is selected, the top 3 should have rom1 in color (you've taken care of this by saving rom1 in the definable 1 folder), and the bottom 3 should be all black and white. So you need have a file named rom1 in the definable 2 folder that is the bottom row in all black and white. For rom2, you'll need to have a file in the definable 2 folder that is again the bottom row in black and white - it's a copy of the file you're using for rom1, just named rom2. You'll do the same for rom3, and then the same for rom4-rom6, only of course the definable 1 folder will contain files named rom4-rom6 that are all a copy of the top row of 3 in black and white.
Again, I know this is really convoluted, but it works beautifully. If you want clarification on any of this, let me know.
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Topic: 60-in-1 front end? anything out there like it? (Read 5201 times)
