How do I make different gamelists? Is it possible to navigate between different emulators/gamelists from inside the frontend, or do I have to have a frontend for each emulator?
I know there is no documentation out there, so I'll try to explain the best I can.
First, a couple of things:
1) Kymaera supports multiple emulators, On the main config screen, You can click "Add New" to create a new emulator settings profile. Then you can click on it and click "edit" to configure it.
2) Kymaera supports re-mappable keys. Some of the keys you can re-map are NEXT_EMULATOR and PREV_EMULATOR. These keys move you in a circular list through the emulators you have configured.
3) You can add / remove gamelists to/from an emulator in the emulator configuration screen. You can change the NEXT_GAMELIST / PREV_GAMELIST keys the same way you changes the NEXT_EMULATOR keys. The NEXT/PREV_GAMELIST keys move you in a circular list through the gamelists you have added to each emulator.
Creating a new gamelist isn't too hard. Inside the emu config screen, click the "create/edit" gamelist button. This will take you to the game list editor screen.
From here, you can perform lots of operations on game lists. The top grid is the source game list, and the bottom grid is the destination game list. To create a "Master" game list of all games for mame, click the "create master list" button, then click "mame". Set your mame exe file, and you can browse for the catver.ini file and gameplay.ini (included with kymaera). Choose a filename with a .xml entension somewhere in your /gamelists directory under kymaera. (catver.ini and gameplay.ini are optional)
Click "create" and the master list of all mame games for your version of mame will be built and saved.
Now, click the "Load source games list" button and load up the file you just created.
From here, you have a bunch of options,
1)You can select all the games and copy them to a destination list
2) you can sort the games
3) you can create and run inclusionary or exclusionary filters and run them to move games from the source to the destination.
4) you can select and copy single or multiple games from source to destination.
Play around with the filters, they are quite powerful for creating gamelists.
After you create a list of games for a "catagory" you want, You can optionally give it a name and image that is tied to a text control and image control in the skin.
Save you game list out as a .xml file in the gamelist directory, and go back to the emu config screen and add it as a gamelist to use.
You can have as many gamelists for an emulator as you want, and you can cycle between them using the next/prev_gamelist keys you've configured.
I hope this enough to get you guys started.
-PacManFan