Main > Driving & Racing Cabinets
What would you guys want in a Racing Cab FE?
Howard_Casto:
Now first off, a word of warning. I've obviously got enough projects to keep me busy for the next year or more so nothing could come out of this discussion BUT....
I was starting to gather things up for my upcoming cab, started looking at fe options and all of them, even the ones I've made personally, don't seem to fit the bill.
I'm thinking of something very very simple. Not a whole lot of backend other than supporting/parsing mame's listxml and catver because let's face it, the gamelists would be really short and due to control issues you'd just about have to add individual games manually anyway.
In terms of layout, I suppose you could make it skin able, but I don't really see the point considering a lists specialized nature. I'm thinking a row of snapshots at the bottom to navigate via the Wheel and the entire background a vid of the selected game. Maybe a marquee at the top or something, but no graphics or anything like that to mention.
In terms of controls, I think the Outrun 2k6 approach would be best. Instead of generic Fe-based names for the controls, I could design the interface around controls typically found on a racing cab. Start button would start the game (duh). Any X axis, mosue or joystick, (wheel) would scroll through the list, as would any hat switch and maybe have a view button that toggles more info to the screen.
Because of the oddball nature of racing games I would also like to add support for "halt" screens. Upon launching a game the FE would optionally display a halt image for that game. You would create one with instructions on how to set up the game. The game wouldn't actually launch, until the conditions you specify are met.
For example in a hi-low shifter game, you could make a halt screen instructing you to "Shift into Hi to Continue" now mame with it's oddball toggling and inconsistent mapping might have trouble determining hi from low on a 2 switch shifter, but the FE wouldn't. So long as you don't touch it during the game bootup, the shifter would remain in sync.
Like wise if you had a dual wheel setup and needed to change to your optical wheel you could make a halt screen instructing you to change wheels and turn the wheel left to continue.
Just some ideas floating around in my head. I spent an hour or so writing some code to smoothly scroll a row of images similar to how hyperspin does it. It seemed pretty quick considering I was just messing with picture boxes and wasn't even using HW-accel.
Well Fed Games:
I think that sounds pretty great. Good list navigation with a wheel and accounting for shifter weirdness would be top of my list, and you've already accounted for those.
BadMouth:
I always wanted an FE that had screenshots and marquees moving horizontally across the center of the screen.
Navigation would be controlled by the wheel and a game would be launched by the gas pedal.
The highlighted snap in the center of the screen would switch to a video preview if you stopped on it for more than a second.
The background would look like a driving cab, with it's screen and marquee belonging to the highlighted game.
Driving cab marquees are hit or miss, so making some custom uniform ones would probably be in order.
As far as arcade games go and the variety of emulators required to run them, I wouldn't mind at all having to have an ahk script or batch file for every single one. The front end could just look for shortcuts as far as I'm concerned.
Console games on the other hand, might require a more blanket approach, although there are shortcuts to creating batch files based on a list of roms. If everyone agreed on a folder structure, we could just make them once and share.
Howard_Casto:
I think I would need a mockup for what you are talking about to fully understand.
In terms of using the gas pedal to launch games (or anything really) I would like to try to avoid it just to save me a headache. If I support pedals then I've got to support mixed axis and single axis and half axis and inverted versions of all three. Or I could just use the start button. ;)
Backend stuff is surprisingly easy. I generally just parse clrmamepro dat files for games, they typically have the real name and year, even for a console rom. For lists this short though, we could just about get away with adding games manually. I know I did that for pac-fe (a pacman-centric vertical fe I haven't released publically) because I made custom marquees for each game instead of using a text-based list. As I got a marquee done, I just added it to the list.
Since there are so few racing games we could probably work on custom art as a community and as it gets finished add that particular game to a master list manually. Then it would just be a matter of the end user filtering those games off. You know, like the hyperspin community, minus the charge for the privilege of tech support. ;)
twistedsymphony:
personally I would love something similar to the track selection screen in Daytona...
not so much graphically but the fact that it utilizes the force feedback to let you "feel" that you've moved to the next selection...
as for pedal selection considering not all driving cabs have start buttons (no Start Button on my San Fran rush cab... in-game you use the gas to start) I think it is rather important. I also know I'm not interested in adding additional buttons to my cab either.
the buttons the cab DOSE have are view change, "music", "abort" and "reverse"... none of which make sense for "start game"
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another thing that I've been thinking about with driving cabs... for linked setups a lot of time you need alternate configurations when performing a linked setup then when playing solo (most arcade games will sit in the boot screen waiting for the linked machines to respond).
so it might be nice to have some option to say "play linked", or "play solo" after selecting your game to boot using the proper configuration. Even better if after selecting linked the FE could send a message to the front end on the other machines to quit their current game (if necessary) and boot into linked mode. that way you don't have to walk the other player through selecting the right options in order to play in linked mode. Or maybe instead of quitting out of the other cabs if the other cabs are in-game then then it automatically selects Solo... or maybe prompts you as to whether you want to kick the other cabs ... or maybe all of these options configurable to how you want them to act, lol.
obviously this would have to be disabled completely for people with solo cabs... but for linked setups it's a HUGE problem really only effects racing games and none of the front ends out there even come close to addressing this.
In the end the biggest thing I want out of any front-end is for someone who has never used it before to easily use it without instruction from me.... IMO a FE needs to be good enough that it could work in a publicly placed machine without any user confusion.
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