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prettiest front end?
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)p(:

--- Quote from: Minwah on March 30, 2006, 10:49:31 am ---.  I built an arcade machine to play classic (or at least old school) games on...so I want the FE to look old school also (low-res 2d).

--- End quote ---

Yeah it may be weird coming from the guy who made 3darcade. But I feel that too. Thats why I never changed the skin I made specifically for the cab. It fits it like a glove. So all the 3d stuff has never made it to my cabinet either ;)
(The 3d stuff was actually added for a whole different project about the history of video games.)

peter
Howard_Casto:

--- Quote from: )p( on March 29, 2006, 04:10:29 pm ---
--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on March 26, 2006, 02:04:54 am ---
I will completely agree with you about it being the users fault though.  You can't be expected to make a buttload of skins and write the dang thing as well.  I suggest your users get busy and quit doing the whole "mamewah skinning" thing (namely take the default skin, change it ever so slightly and try to sell it off as a brand new skin.)  I've had a similar problem with dk over the past few years, that's why you only see my skins on the download page.  :)

--- End quote ---

Problem is with more complex skinning it really becomes very difficult to make a nice gui for the average user. A good example is the c64 skin for 3darcade that uses cylarcade mode to animate a row of diskettes etc. Just look at this video how it works...
It will be really difficult to design good gui's for this kind of skins. This will be a big challenge for the next generation fe's...not me anymore ;)

peter

--- End quote ---

What he said headkaze. 

Dk and 3da have a lot of features that you don't set in the skinner.  If anything I designed dk so that you DON"T use the skinner to set most things because it's simpler to the user. Want to make a layer animated?  Drop the frames in the folder with the correct name.  Want to put on a stencil?  Again just name it correctly. 

Dk final will also have these 3d skins that peter is talking about, the problem is that as he said, it's nearly impossible to write a gui for.  So my solution is to just make material "keys" in max and the fe automatically plugs in the appropriate textures.  Still the user isn't going to just drag pre-created 3d objects onto the skin, quite frankly I don't have that kind of time on my hands.  I'll just create a model format and the user can stick to it.  Seeing as how virtually NOBDOY will ever use the 3d skins but me, much less, go to the trouble of modeling thier own, I don't see how this is a problem.

So to finish up, I don't know how skinning features and the actual skinner became the same thing to you but they aren't.  With respect, as I said gameex still has a ways to go.  that doesn't make it any less of a good fe, it's just all of the flexibility and features aren't supported yet.  Has nothing to do with your skinner.  :)


Following the rest of the thread I'll have to jump the trend and DISAGREE with everyone about the ease of use thing. 

If front-ends were commercial and you had to pay for them then I would say they should always be user-friendly, but since they aren't you have two choices, a simple fe that is either ugly and/or is very inflexible but very easy to setup or one that is very pretty and/or has a ton of features but is difficult to setup. 

This isn't the exception this is the rule.  The final factor comes down to time.  The author can only work on so much... personally I'd rather him concentrate on making the thing presentable, felxible enough for evryone's needs and generic enough with game/emu configurations so that it'll still be useable for ages rather than make soemthing really flashy or really easy to setup that won't work 3 months down the road when mame changes it's source or some new emu comes out and the author has long since abandoned it. 

3da, dk and mamewah will always be around because they stick to these principals, with the first two leaning towards graphics a tad more and thus losing a bit of ease in the setup dept.  Some of these newer ones I worry about though. 

Ultrasyle was brilliant.. pretty and very easy to setup but now it's a paper-wieght.  Arcadefx also comes to mind.  I've been around long enough to see dozens of these "one trick ponys" come and go.  The problem is the author always thinks he'll be around to update his fe forever and unfortuantely that is never the case.  I tell the rest of you this not to be-little other fe's that are the next hot thing, but to urge the authors to go back and fix them the "right way" before they decide to leave us.  It will be impossible to make them both easy to setup and "future proof" but you've gotta ask yourself something.... would you rather have a fe that's easy to setup or a fe that'll actually work in 3 years. 
mccoy178:
Howard, that may be the best writing I've seen from you in a long time.  Great post! :cheers:
youki:
I partially agree with howard.

I agree that the FE should not be to emulator specific.  It is why , Atomic does not depend at all on Mame Features or options  for instance . In Atomic itself, you can not set specific option for MAME or other emulators.  You have to configure emulators a side. Atomic just run the config you set for your emulator what ever it is. Atomic will work for ages.

I disagree on other parts and i will prove that with Atomic soon. (just few version to wait... ;))
tspeirs:
The good thing is folks have a fair choice of front ends. I'm just hoping we can help make it easier to decide on the one that suites them best. You mentioned Howard about FE's not being updated, I agree on that point entirely. Thats why I am hoping the Wiki can be improved and be made to make the whole process factual based and not biased rather than so opinionated like these threads about best front end etc seem to be. I think we'd all be better contributing our time to the Wiki rather than offering our own experience (which is often huge, I dont disagree) in threads such as this, but when we are all playing nice, I don't mind  :)
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