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ActiveX component of Mame
PedroSilva:
Hi,
Just finished my Java Course at Sun Microsystems.
Whene I saw the potencial of the language, on thing came to mind immediatly: That could make a great frontend for Mame.
Started asking some questions to the monitor and he said that it could be done:
- Having the game running on a window instead of a steady image, but we would need the component used by Mame.
Does anyone knows wich or what activeX component does Mame uses to graphicaly comunicate with Windows ?
Thanks and if anybody tried this before, love to ear about you experiences on the subject.
Howard_Casto:
hehe I can tell you are new to programming. Mame is cross-platform, which means it doesn't contain any active x controls.
Besides you are looking at the issue completely wrong....
All you have to do to make mame appear in a box in your fe is to use the "setwindowpos" and "setwindowstyleex" api calls to remove mame's border, size the window to your box and plop it on top of the zorder.
But what is the point exactly? You could see the attract mode, but videos are available for that. Interacting with the window would be silly as it'd have to be killed and then mame re-launched to play the game (because the resolution would have to be changed, ect upon entering fullscreen). Also it would slow down your fe to a crawl because many newer games can take a LOT of memory to run, not to mention some have boot times of over 5 minutes!
Long story short, eyecandy isn't always practical. Make sure something will work no matter how "cool" it'd be. ;)
PedroSilva:
Well ... actually ... I've been programming for more than 12 years ... ;D
It's indeed true that I've never programmed for Windows or DOS ... only in C (the pure one :D ) on Unix systems (mainly Solaris) with a Videotex interface (French stuff) ... and thats the reason why I really know very little about Windows graphical appearence ... the main part of my programming is the business core (banking) but I've looked a bit on Mame's code and it uses DirectDraw and Direct3d wich I believe are activeX components ... anyway the idea (if it works) is not to use mame (as is) for launchng games ... I agree with you it shouldn't be very performant ... the main idea was to make it work with java and the create a kinda mini version of Mame just for showing the demo ... just the video part ... no sound .. no inputs ...
The reason I asked was because the java expert guy to whom I asked said it would be necessary to have the library that implements Mame graphicaly on Windows ...
There are already some stuff made on java that can open a window for showing, for instance, the windows media player ... it's emulating windows inside a java application ...
What do you think ?
:)
Howard_Casto:
if you want me to be honest....
I think it's a dumb idea, for the reasons I've already mentioned.
You can get video from... well videos... there are over 300 attract mode videos and the number is growing. Why waste computer resources running mame? Besides, if you've ever looked at the mame source code you'd realize that it's quite impossible to only run the video. You have to emulate the entire system to display the video properly, so your idea flat out won't work. The only way to get video from mame is to run mame; enough said.
Windows programing and programming for other platforms are worlds apart. ActiveX is a web (and optionally vb) only type of plugin. What I find funny is that you don't know this... it's basically window's version of java script. ;) DirectX is part of the windows core. You call it via the api, not plugins.
To be honest, java is a bad choice for a programmer that has never programmed for windows. Out of all the languages, it's the most unfriendly in terms of communicating with the windows core and other functions which are absolutely necessary for even the simplest of front ends.
I'm not saying it can't be done, because it can and it has.... it's just that you have to really know java and really know the "windows version" of java to make a decent fe.
PedroSilva:
... well ... java is not an option to me ... ;D the top managemet decided to implement our application on a web based interface and java is not an option ... it's an obligation ... ;D ... just tought I might have some fun with it ... since I'll have to learn it anyway ... whether I like it or not ... :D
Thanks anyway for sharing your experience ...