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Introducing arcadeEIP
bobbyb13:
I just stumbled onto your work here and it is fantastic.
Front ends and game management have always flustered me so I need to get my machine set up to utilize your efforts.
Would you recommend one front end over another?
I recall not liking some portion of setup for GameEx a few years ago but it is probable that I was doing something wrong.
LB/BB seemed appealing but I never bought rights to try it out.
Thanks for offering this to us all!
Bobby
gildahl:
I had standardized on GameEx for many years, but at a certain point found it getting harder to maintain my game lists the way I wanted. I think LaunchBox is better in that department, but as far as whether GameEx or BigBox is a better front-end, I consider it a wash. GameEx (IMO) offers better/deeper customization options, while BigBox is generally prettier and easier to use.
With all that said though, these days I use LaunchBox (which is free) as my content manager and arcadeEIP (which is able to read the LaunchBox database) as my sole "front-end". I don't use BigBox or GameEx on the arcade machine at all anymore. 90% of the time when I walk into the game room, I'm happy to play whatever arcadeEIP has up at the moment, and if I really want to play something specific, I can just press a button on the StreamDeck or pull up the menu to switch to a different game. It sounds stupid, but simply eliminating the requirement to choose a game before you play has made me actually play the machine more; and this goes for guests too.
Fursphere:
Is there a way to get ArcadeEIP to just pick any MAME game at random, instead of having to play the games first to populate the 'arcadeeip favorites' list that it uses to pick games for attract mode?
this was the biggest reason I didn't get into arcadeEIP. felt really tedious trying to populate the list.
gildahl:
Absolutely. The Auto-Switch list can be manually populated. Just bring up the game selection menu and navigate all the way to the left so that the Auto-Switch list is selected. To put the list into edit mode press the Left-Shift key. You may now go to any other list (such as your MAME list) and use the spacebar to add any selected game from any list to the Auto-Switch list. If you want to add all of your MAME games to the Auto-Switch list, just press the "a" key while in the MAME list and watch the blue progress bar (this may take a while if your list is big). Press Left-Shift again when complete. If you never want the list to be automatically populated, just set auto=0 in the [Auto_Switch] section of arcadeEIP.ini.
Note that you can also manually remove games from the Auto-Switch list by selecting it while in edit mode and using the spacebar on any games you want to remove (in this case, pressing "a" will clear the whole list). Or you could just delete files as desired from the ..\Lists\autoswitch folder if find it easier/quicker to work in the file system.
gildahl:
New release just posted. This is a pretty major one. See release notes at first link below.
Current Release: arcadeEIP latest release (v0.4.1.0 beta)
Documentation: GitHub Wiki for arcadeEIP
Discussion: Here on ArcadeControls.com, LaunchBox forums or GitHub