Doscab/Wincab - Wheresit?

[Mameham]

 How goes it Chris? Haven't heard from the Doscab world in a while...

[Chris]

How goes it Chris? Haven't heard from the Doscab world in a while...

Sorry... Real Life and all that...

Right now, much of my free time is taken up by rehearsals for "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (Augusta Theatre Company, Augusta, GA, opens Feb 14... be there!) and rebuilding my MAME cabinet.  What was meant to be a simple upgrade has turned into a complete rebuild...

I also have to squash a couple of wierd bugs in the Jukebox that I haven't been able to find yet.

The next version should have multiple resolution support (not yet full skinning, just the default skin in multiple resolutions), 256 color support (it'll suck until skins are built specifically for it, but it'll work), play stimulator mode, and turning off of the random sort function.  The version after that will support CD album style labels with album covers, ID3 support (possibly eliminating the need for a songlist.ini in DOS mode), mouse support (mostly for touchscreens), skins, gamepad button support (for gamepad hacks), and GUI-style joystick navigation (allowing operation on cabinets with just a 4-way joy and a single button).  The version after that will hopefully have vertical support (probably no mouse in vertical mode), reloadabe songlists (swap your regular music set for, say, a Christmas set), multiple song location support (so you can build a juke with a few CD-ROM drives and just change CD's every now and then), and possibly even karaeoke/MIDI/OGG support.

--Chris

[Lave Laar]

Great to see that you're still developing your program.  I think that it's the best jukebox program by far.  I like the fact that it's a singles jukebox which is the way a real jukebox should be.  

A couple of suggestions.  If possible I would like the up and down buttons to be "repeat" buttons.  If you have several hundred or thousand songs it would help if you could just hold the button to browse the songs.  I also would like an option to add another letter, E, to the selection.  This way it could fill the whole screen if you don't want the surronding graphics.  What do you think ?

[Chris]

Having the ability to add additional songs per page (an E and F button) will not be in the next version, but should be in the version after that.  I should be able to build a key repeat into the next version; I hadn't thought of it...

[Mosez]

Chris are you still going to have vertical monitor support in the next version or is that also tied into the bugs you were mentioning?

[Chris]

The next version is going to be a hack to get multiple resolutions working... for any other features to be feasible, I'm pretty much going to have to rewrite the thing from scratch.  This version is just bad code; I wrote the initial version for my own cabinet in just a few hours, so a lot of assumptions were hardcoded in.

I'll see if there's something quick and dirty I can do for vertical resolution support, but odds are it'll be sluggish as heck and require more horsepower than it should....

--Chris

[pink]

Casn't wait for the id3 support.  That is the only reason im using arcade jukebox 7 instead of your program.. its great to just point the program at your mp3 directory and have all of your stuff indexed automatically.

Good work, keep it up!

- pink

[Chris]

Casn't wait for the id3 support.  That is the only reason im using arcade jukebox 7 instead of your program.. its great to just point the program at your mp3 directory and have all of your stuff indexed automatically.

WinCab will do that now, using the long filenames of the artist foldera and MP3 files; it's only DOSCab that requires a separate indexing step.  Of course, if your music isn't srted into separate folders by artist, that won't help...

I'll defnately need ID3 support when I add an album mode, as that's the only way I know of to get the track order.

[Lave Laar]

I wrote a small utility to create index-files from the ID3 tags as I needed it for my setup for my jukebox.  It's a dos-program, but it should work fine in windows as well.  If you want it you can download it here :

http://home.online.no/~lindgrd/mp3listd.zip

[papaschtroumpf]

Great to see that you're still developing your program.  I think that it's the best jukebox program by far.  I like the fact that it's a singles jukebox which is the way a real jukebox should be.  

When you have too much music, this kind of setup is a pain, because you scrool forever until you find the song you want, yet I don't like the "media player" feel for a cabinet jukebox.
One feature that I would love to see added to WinCab would be the ability to flip through albums (text and cover picture if it's available, kindof like front ends show game snaps), then you can either select the whole album or "open" the album and select a song inside it.

[Chris]

Casn't wait for the id3 support.  That is the only reason im using arcade jukebox 7 instead of your program.. its great to just point the program at your mp3 directory and have all of your stuff indexed automatically.

Well, I've definately decided on ID3 support for the next version.  Every single support E-mail I've had comes down to indexing.  The indexing step was fine for my cabinet, because it was built around the way I organize my tiny MP3 collection, and because I rarely update the collection.  This is obviously not true for most people!  Indexing takes time, but instead of re-indexing at startup the way WinCab does now, it'll just make a pass through to verify the existence of already indexed songs (in case some have been removed or are on removable media) and only index those files that are new or have changed, and it will index based on ID3 tags, so creating the index for DOS on a Windows machine will no longer be necessary.

The problem is that so many ID3 tags are inconsistent and incomplete, so I may need to include some sort of tag editing solution as well.  Of course, you would want to disable the tag editor before putting the jukebox on the cabinet...

I was working on the update last weekend, so I'm finally moving forward!  Hopefully I'll have something to show before you all die of old age.

--Chris