Hi there, I'm dr.prodigy, FEEL main developer.
Maybe I should present myself somewhere else before posting here, but hopefully you'll forgive my rudeness (and my english too)
My friends from Arcade Italia brought me here to talk about my small piece of work, so hereiam..
I'll try to answer to some questions I've read around (trying to avoid the most pointless ones
):
FEEL has started development in 2011 as 2 friends' project (me and a friend of mine, antogeno, being involved in building/restoring an arcade MAME cabinet, one for each), in replacement to MameWah, which was very good to us at the beginning, though missing some options we needed.
So we started developing *our own* FE as a hobby in our spare time, using .net 2.0 and DirectX managed (FEEL 1.2.x, still available for download, is based on it), which - we thought - was the best choice for running on XP and DX7 on very old hw, without implementing the whole thing in C++ , which would have taken a lot more time (btw, I used to be quite a VB6 fan and still quite I am for *really tiny* things, but come on.. we must evolve sometimes!
).
Then after some good work, antogeno left the project and since then (2013) I'm keeping it up on my own (apart from the graphics work, which is helped out by Arcade Italia users, adolfo69 as first).
In these years I then decided to move to .net 3.5 and XNA 3.1 (I intentionally chose outdated versions because of their compatibility and lightness qualities).. a little more requesting in terms of hw, but still very light and very well supported even on very old hw (e.g.: a crappy P4 ATI-Radeon-9xxx-equipped - which I still use in my cabinet - is always my requirement target, and on it FEEL runs like hell .. any test
).
This technology change allowed me to rewrite the whole graphics engine (yep FEEL is not Windows forms app, instead it's developed on a "proprietary"
2D game engine, whence implementing all graphics at quite low level), adding transparencies and transitions and a very better videosnap management thru DirectShow. This has been available from v.1.5 on, and then the FE has been upgraded with a lot of nice layouts made by the good guys at A.I.
Then I went on adding support for LED dashboards on SmartASD (from v.1.7) with a quite unique approach (i.e.: no LED configuration required: all is plug-and-play with MAME roms' controls), and finally I've been working on vertical screens management (v.1.8 ).
Okay such a long story.. well to cut it short FEEL (at least, IMHO) is:
- capable of running on any PC you'll find useful for something
- perfect for 15khz arcade cabinets, bartop and so on (coupled with Win7 or - even better - WinXP)
- damn fast (it features the fastest frontend GUI I know), lightweight and effective in managing huge amount of roms and as many emu you would want (the same adolfo69, for instance, is running near 100 different emu on it)
- able to run any commandline-driven emulator, even the "worst", at its best conditions
- configurable at any level of need
- fulfilled of quite interesting features, some designed by me, some coming from A.I. community concepts and hints
Yep, it's not a professional product (so it lacks some useful facilities, such as layout design and others), it's not hyper-wow-C++
, it's not graphics-at-top as hyperspin, it doesn't run on Arduino or RaspPI, but when properly set, it works quite flawlessly, faster (in terms of responsiveness and GUI) and "smarter" than any other FE I've ever tried. Or at least - as always - to me!
Another big lack is probably.. a complete english documentation (and even an updated doc, I must admit). The thing is: I don't have much time, and doc writing is not the most enjoyable thing in the world isn't it?), so I'm trying to fix this with the new website some of you have visited (very "primitive", since it's born just in the last weeks).
In the end, if you want, give FEEL a try, check it out yourselves and let me know your impressions.. or if you don't no prob, to me FEEL development is just a nice hobby so I surely won't argue
PS: I've read about those CHD and devices small issues.. you're probably right.. I'll investigate.. thx!