Dynamic snaps?

[Stormrider]

I've been away from this forum for many months. Have new versions of MaLa implemented the idea of alternating/cycling snapshots? I remember there was a guy over here who was developing a plugin called engine18, and he said this could be possible. Any idea if that project is still on development?

[Celsius]

would be nice

[drventure]

Yeah, it's still "in development". Probably perpetually. 

I'm pretty sure loadman hasn't implemented a feature like that at this point.

Tell you what. I don't recall the specific thread that was on, or what you were particularly interested in.

If you shoot me over a list of the specific features you're looking for, I'll see if I can get Engine18 up to a point to at least support those.

As I recall, you  were mainly looking for a way to rotate through the Cab pics, CP pics, Marquee pics, and maybe flyers and other misc art. I believe I was trying to get the videos included in the rotation, but was having issues with Mala rotation (things wouldn't position right when you rotated the Mala interface), but it's been a while. Sidetracked onto other things<sigh>

Does that sound right? Could you live without the videos being included in the rotation? (at least for now).

[Stormrider]

hey, it's great news to know your plugin is still alive. Yes, I don't care about videos. I don't use videos. My idea was: for instance, two folders, one with in-game-snaps and other folder with title-snaps (of course there can be more folders, like cabinets, flyers, etc). You set it up to display in-game-snap for, let's say, 5 seconds, and then swap to title-snaps, and then again in-game-snaps... and so on. The files in the different folders should be named the same for this to work, for instance, ffight.png, so the program just have to look for the name of the image in the different folders.

[drventure]

Here's what I've got so far

Support for the CABINETS, CPANEL, FLYERS, MARQUEES, SNAP and TITLES folders (these are all pretty standard folders in the MAME folder structure to store related artwork. in each folder, you'll have an image file (most are PNGs though all the normal image files are supported, including ".JPG", ".GIF", ".TIF", ".PNG", ".BMP").)

Further, if a folder contains additional files related to a rom, those will be picked up as well.

for instance, say the SNAPS folder contains firefox.png, and ALSO contains firefox-a.png, firefox-somethingelse.png and firefox-otherimage.gif. They'll all be loaded into the slideshow cycle.

This will work for all the folders (Snaps, marquees, etc). You can also set which folders you want to include in the rotation (only snaps, snaps and marquees, etc).


The only snags right now are
1) getting the coords of the window right when the mala screen orientation is flipped or switched.
2) rotating the images themselves properly.

Just me being a tad dim when it comes to graphics manipulations in .net really (and not having tons of time to spend on it).

But I'll post back when I've got something to beta if you're interested.

[Stormrider]

I'll be looking forward to it. Thanx.