Newer MAME and Frontends for PC/Windows?

[1500points]

Are there any front ends that will work with newer MAME?
I am running Golden Tee Fore! 06 on MAME 184 from a win10 PC.  It uses a CHD file.

I can't seem to find any front ends that are compatible with the newer mame.
Been googling and downloading but many of the common FE's from the past don't work with mame64.exe.

I can't get mala to recognize the gamelist.xml from mame64.
I bought maximus arcade for 5 bucks and it runs (after i switched the gamelist.xml entries from machine to game per another thread).
When I attempt to select golden tee from the MA menu it just gets bricked on a completely black screen.

Is there any front end that'll work for the newer emulated games??
I've already tried Pi 3/retropie with it but that is a no-go.

[keilmillerjr]

AttractMode

[Slippyblade]

Gonna second Attract Mode. 

[wp34]

Thirded. 

AttractMode is so easy to use.

[shaolindrunkard]

Launchbox

[JudgeRob]

I'm back with hyperspin again.

[1500points]

ok, i downloaded attract-mode.
looks pretty good, I've lightly messed with it in the pi realm and know it is great.  didn't realize it worked with windows, too. thanks

Need to google and figure out what a windows OS path looks like in the "emulator executable" path.
update- found this at the top of a google search. sweet-  http://forum.attractmode.org/index.php?topic=328.0


Awesome, that was quick and easy to set up.  Very cool.  Makes my day to know attract mode works in windows, too.  Now to go out and find the files for one of my favorite pi layouts.....

[paigeoliver]

Frontends choking on generating the gamelists was my main frontend complaint in 2003, and it still is 15 years later.

I have no idea why frontend developers insist on using that "feature" of mame that breaks or changes constantly instead of literally doing it any of the other ways that would work every time.

[keilmillerjr]

Frontends choking on generating the gamelists was my main frontend complaint in 2003, and it still is 15 years later.

I have no idea why frontend developers insist on using that "feature" of mame that breaks or changes constantly instead of literally doing it any of the other ways that would work every time.

It’s quick with attract mode on my Mac and win10.

[DeLuSioNal29]

There's your problem right there.  Maximus Arcade hasn't been updated in years.  And it probably never will be.  I'm surprised X-Arcade purchased the rights to a dead end front end.

+1 on all the other front ends people mentioned above.

Good luck!

DeL

[GeoMan]

Launchbox works fine. Use Emuloader if you don't need fancy stuff.

[paigeoliver]

You know this is another problem that mamedev could fix if they wanted to. With dosmame decades in the past there is no reason that mame couldn't support properly named roms instead of requiring those 8.3 filenames.

[MaseMan]

I switched from Maximus to Launchbox a few weeks ago and really glad I did. Awesome front end that doesn't expect random message board members to provide their IT support (like Maximus Arcade does), and it gets constantly updated.

[JudgeRob]

I had high hopes for Bigbox, and I don't want to bash but... I couldn't get over the lag on scrolling through games.  Apparently it works better on higher end systems, but not mine, which is decent but not great.  So I went back to Hyperspin.  This might also sound weird but I found customizing Bigbox harder than Hyperspin.

[Titchgamer]

I had high hopes for Bigbox, and I don't want to bash but... I couldn't get over the lag on scrolling through games.  Apparently it works better on higher end systems, but not mine, which is decent but not great.  So I went back to Hyperspin.  This might also sound weird but I found customizing Bigbox harder than Hyperspin.

HS can be pretty resource heavy to.
Does big box not have any options to adjust performance settings like HS does?
HS can also be a ---smurfette--- to configure so ime suprised and intrigued by your experiences.

Never used big box personally though.
Ime happy with my HS set up.

[shaolindrunkard]

I had high hopes for Bigbox, and I don't want to bash but... I couldn't get over the lag on scrolling through games.  Apparently it works better on higher end systems, but not mine, which is decent but not great.  So I went back to Hyperspin.  This might also sound weird but I found customizing Bigbox harder than Hyperspin.

HS can be pretty resource heavy to.
Does big box not have any options to adjust performance settings like HS does?
HS can also be a ---smurfette--- to configure so ime suprised and intrigued by your experiences.

Never used big box personally though.
Ime happy with my HS set up.

I don't think Bigbox has any performance settings, and to be fair it is definitely not designed for PCs older than say 5 years. Basically what i mean is
your not going to be able to use it on a PC running XP, like some of us still like to use... A decent video card goes a long way too...
It really depends on the theme you are using how it performs, which makes sense. Some have multiple screen shots and video and effects.
If you use the basic themes it comes with it usually runs well.

As far as customizing exactly how you want it I'd wager that Bigbox doesn't have the same flexibility that HS has, however I find it much easier to get a system up and running in an hours instead of days and the themes available allow you to get a great looking system with very little effort.

Its really what you are used to. I tried HS years ago and could't get anywhere with it. I found Bigbox last year some time and was able to get it set up in minutes. I use it on all my systems now.

[1500points]

btw- I summarized the setup steps here.  There were a number of details to be addressed such as the 64bit version of Attract Mode being flakey upon exiting game back to menu.
---------
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,157047.0.html

[nitrogen_widget]

btw- I summarized the setup steps here.  There were a number of details to be addressed such as the 64bit version of Attract Mode being flakey upon exiting game back to menu.
---------
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,157047.0.html

Interestingly enough I found Attract mode compiled by me on 64 bit Linux not only worked perfectly but also allowed me to do dual monitors.

[1500points]

Interestingly enough I found Attract mode compiled by me on 64 bit Linux not only worked perfectly but also allowed me to do dual monitors.

I should have clarified my experience was windows.  I learned of it by googling about attract mode and 64bit errors.  microsoft windows....hmmph.

[keilmillerjr]

Interestingly enough I found Attract mode compiled by me on 64 bit Linux not only worked perfectly but also allowed me to do dual monitors.

I should have clarified my experience was windows.  I learned of it by googling about attract mode and 64bit errors.  microsoft windows....hmmph.

I have zero issues with this 64-bit mac os10 and win10. But all I use is mame. Is there certain emulators you use when this happens?

[1500points]

I have zero issues with this 64-bit mac os10 and win10. But all I use is mame. Is there certain emulators you use when this happens?

Nope. MAME.  Occasionally, when exiting a game back to menu it will go to attract mode stopped responding which is a windows message.  It isn't specific to me, I found it when googling and it was a known issue. That's the only way I knew what to do for the workaround.....
http://forum.attractmode.org/index.php?topic=233.0

Switching to 32bit on win10 solved it completely.

[JudgeRob]

HS can be pretty resource heavy to.
Does big box not have any options to adjust performance settings like HS does?
HS can also be a ---smurfette--- to configure so ime suprised and intrigued by your experiences.

The performance issues were a pretty hot topic in their forums.  Obviously, I started combing through them when I had some serious lag.  There are lots of settings to turn off and on, so there is some customization you can do.  But the names of the settings did not seem very intuitive to me and it was confusing what each one did.  It was mostly trial and error.  Anyway, if you turn every bell and whistle off, it definitely helps, but then you are left with a really bland experience which kind of defeats the purpose.  I didn't really like the tutorial organization either.  They consist of dozens of different YouTube videos and it is difficult to find the one you need.  I guess the same could be said about HS, but I personally found the BB ones more difficult to find and use.  There is sort of a confusing relationship between LaunchBox and BigBox and how and if changes in one affect the other.

The moderators over there are pretty cool but, honestly, they were kind of in denial about the performance.  They would either insist that it worked fine on their own systems or suggest eliminating game systems and significantly limiting the lists of games.  Again, with me, I use a front end to help quickly sift though a large library of games so paring the lists down also defeats the purpose.  I tried BigBox because it looked to be more actively developed and I thought the performance would be better than HS, but it was not.  HS has some built in adjustments that help.  The most important is that HS will let you scroll quickly and then "catch up" with the graphics.  BigBox does not.  It will freeze or stutter the scrolling until the graphics can catch up.  Seems like a simple adjustment, but when I tried it 3-4 months ago, it was not fixed yet.

I had almost gotten BigBox to visually replicate HS, but I had an issue of a graphic box popping up and causing problems.  I posted in tech support and never got a response.  So that and the performance issues sent me back to HS.  I'm not trying to bash on BB.  I'll probably give it a try again someday when I update my system or if they get the performance issues settled.

[keilmillerjr]

I have zero issues with this 64-bit mac os10 and win10. But all I use is mame. Is there certain emulators you use when this happens?

Nope. MAME.  Occasionally, when exiting a game back to menu it will go to attract mode stopped responding which is a windows message.  It isn't specific to me, I found it when googling and it was a known issue. That's the only way I knew what to do for the workaround.....
http://forum.attractmode.org/index.php?topic=233.0

Switching to 32bit on win10 solved it completely.

It is NOT a common issue. You found one other instance, and they were using an old version of attract and did not try something as simple as trying other layouts.

What version of attract are you using? Layout? Specific OS version? Video drivers? More details are needed.

[1500points]

I have zero issues with this 64-bit mac os10 and win10. But all I use is mame. Is there certain emulators you use when this happens?

Nope. MAME.  Occasionally, when exiting a game back to menu it will go to attract mode stopped responding which is a windows message.  It isn't specific to me, I found it when googling and it was a known issue. That's the only way I knew what to do for the workaround.....
http://forum.attractmode.org/index.php?topic=233.0

Switching to 32bit on win10 solved it completely.

It is NOT a common issue. You found one other instance, and they were using an old version of attract and did not try something as simple as trying other layouts.

What version of attract are you using? Layout? Specific OS version? Video drivers? More details are needed.

I got the latest from here- http://attractmode.org/download.html
win10
32bit is working great so I'm not actually messing with that project any more, off to a Pacmania pi project.