Can someone recommend a good universal frontend ..

[Skeleton]

I am looking for a nice windows-based universal frontend to launch emulators. Since this is on my desk PC running WinXP and not in a cabinet, I am not concerned if it looks "windowy" but I would prefer full screen operation. I do want it to be fully configurable to launch any emu, batch file, or any program for that matter; with command line parameters that I determine. I don't like the frontends that are hard coded to support certian emu's. Other features like screenshots and such would be nice also.

Instead of downloading and trying out all the ones that are out there perhaps someone here has done this already and could recommend some good ones. Thanks.

[Lilwolf]

Since you have a keyboard, the choices will increase considerably.

The ones that are talked about around here mainly where written so you can control everything from just a joystick and a few buttons.

Do you really need a frontend?  
You might consider setting up an ActiveDesktop and a html with all the emulators you like.  

[Skeleton]

The reason I want a frontend is to launch the emulator via a batch file so I can activate an AutoIt script to resize the emulator window.

Let me explain why: when running low resolution console games on a 19" computer monitor it looks horrible. It is way too sharp and blocky looking. Also, the console games are sometimes a weird resolution that doesn't fill the screen entirely. MAME handles this nicely with hwstrech, but other emulators don't handle this well. I've found, however, that with Gens, NNESTERJ, PCAEwin, and Intwin that you can run the game in a window and resize the window to the whole screen. This not only stretches the game nicely to fill the entire screen, but it performs some sort of filtering or smoothing on the image so the low res games look nice. The only problems are that I don't want to bother resizing the windows every time I run a game and you cannot resize it larger than the screen so you still see the title and menu bar. I can't stand seeing any trace of a window while playing a game. I know that AutoIt can resize and position a window even larger than the screen (I do this on DVD's to zoom in on letterbox titles to reduce the black bars) so all I have to do is call a batch file that launches the emulator with the Rom and calls AutoIt to resize and position the window to make it look fullscreen (window borders and titlebar are off the viewable portion of the screen).

The frontend will also hopefully give a nicer looking Rom list than the ugly windows open file dialog box and show screenshots.

[SirPoonga]

This is the "main" front end for my cab.
http://www.critters.org/noontidenight.com/partyon/

I use it to run my custom mame fe and any other pc game on my cab.

[ArcadeFX]

What AutoIt code are you using to do the resize?

[Howard_Casto]

I don't think your idea will work unless you use the emu itself to select the game.... here's why

if you launch via a bat file then the fe can't pass the game name to the emulator.

Oh and of course check out my fe... Raging Dragon

It is "hard-coded" as you put it, but there's a reason for that.

Do you see any other fe's that support the games mine does?  No, that's because these emu's require special care that must be integrated into the code.  (Not for long though... check out my morg thread)

Also you can add any command-line based emu, by simply pointing it to one of the rom paths and adding any non-mame games to the gamelist.  It will also run any exe, bat, ect in the custom list.