Game Program

[Nightmare03]

Hey, i was thinking about making a program for PC that could be used on MAME arcades. Like you choose it to startup with windows, or even make it the shell for the computer, and you can add, remove or select and play a game.

Would anybody be intrested in using it ?

-Nightmare

[TalkingOctopus]

There are many programs that allready exist which allow you to do the things you mention.  Make sure you check them out so you do not reinvent the wheel.  Here are a few of them:

Gamelauncher - http://www.dribin.org/dave/game_launcher/
Mamewah - http://mamewah.mameworld.net/
Dragon King - http://www.oscarcontrols.com/lazarus/

[Nightmare03]

Oh i see, just a idea anyway!  

[APFelon]

Go ahead and write a new one! There is always room at the top.

APf

[Brad Lee]

I did this with Flash.
My cabinet boots up to a flash select screen which has the various emulators on it, atari, nes, mame, winamp. Pick one and it goes to the front end for just that system. They're all using AdvanceMenu once I get to that point but it's optimized for each system. Exit out of the emulator front end and youre back at the flash screen

The down side is that everything is hardcoded into the flash, so if I ever make changes such as adding an emu then I would need to add it and recompile the flash. Not too big a deal but it makes it very specific to my cabinet

[tmasman]

You know, flash can read-write to files right?
Why not set up an ini file to drive the contents of the flash menu?

[StephenH]

Also, check out PartyON, if you want a joystick based one.

go to www.critters.org/noontidenight.com/partyon

[Nightmare03]

Well, i was thinking of using Visual Basic to program in... Im still learning C++

I was thinking making a nice GUI, where you add games to a list where then you just select it and play.

When you add then game, it would ask what it should be played on ( like what emulator etc.. )

-Nightmare

[Nightmare03]

I was wondering, is there any mame emulators that you just set the emulator dir and it auto detects your roms and adds them to a list?

[mahuti]

Brad Lee, I've been working on something (in a non-arcade related field) using Flash & XML. If you could give me that flash file, I could make it so you could import a .cfg file on the fly into your flash FE that would allow you (or anyone) to make changes to the directories without making changes to the flash itself.

I can control just about everything from directories, to text, to image loading & location, etc, via flash. Names of the roms, their locations, what emulator to use them on, etc.

I could show you a demo of something like this I did for an automotive image company that allows them to load over a hundred thousand images in on the fly, change skins, & text. The product hasn't launched, so I can't post the link, but if you are interested, msg me.

[Nightmare03]

Nevermind, i figure out mamewah! It RULEZ