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| State of the FE devs? |
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| screaming:
This community just seems to have an overabundance of FE developers, more than enough software development hobbists, and even more people that seem willing to help but unable to afford the time it takes to do it alone (like me). I would love to have some influence in an FE by giving up some ideas, helping out with the development and/or project management. I can't afford the time to do it all on my own though. It's a lot of work, even for just a config program like MAMEWAH Config! Speaking of which, writing a config program is all well and good, and I had fun with it mostly because I learned just about everything possible about MAMEWAH - my FE of choice then. MAMEWAH ended up going a different direction than I had hoped, which caused my interest in maintaining the config program slim to none (okay, more like none). I gave up the source to the interested parties. My point is, I do not want to end up in this situation again - If I'm going to invest just as much time as the primary FE dev in just the config program, then I want a stake in where the FE goes and the features available to me in my cabinet. I don't think you FE devs understand this, but I can't understand why anyone else would feel any different. If you made it this far... thanks for listening to my rant ;) party on! 8) :cheers: |
| Howard_Casto:
--- Quote from: loadman on September 08, 2006, 09:24:14 pm --- --- Quote ---edit: okay, I've noticed there is a difference, something about helping different programs work seamlessly or something like that. I still would like to know if I should start learning with .NET or VB6? also, is there any reason that some of the programmers who are working with VB6 have not started working with .net as of yet? --- End quote --- My understanding is .net is the future but is more resource hungry. Not really needed for a FE I guess as you want to cater to older machines that are commonly used in CABS. --- End quote --- .net (at least vb.net) is utter crap. They tried to "improve" it by making it more standardized with the rest of the visual stuido family but what they ended up doing is adding in all the redundaancy that I was talking about. It's a very nice language mind you, but you no longer have the rapid development advantage of vb and you have the more cumbersome declarations of c. Basically what they did is killed vb. You are better off running c# or c if you are moving to .net. Again, there is a reason I use vb6 and not vb.net ;) |
| headkaze:
I have to agree alot with what youki has said here. I started coding a long time ago in C64 BASIC. I programmed C on the Amiga and then DOS. I learned COBOL at Tafe which was a waste of time for anyone not jumping on the Y2k porting scare. I learned OOP with Java at Uni, did alot of VB6 stuff, then did a bit of VB.NET and then realised C# was nicer to code in (especially having a C background). I also know perl/php & actionscript because I am a web designer. With the C foundation you can learn pretty much any language easily. As a hobby I write code for the Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS using C++. C++ creates the leanest compiled code (aside from asm). But like assembly it's not very good for rapid development. The result is faster code if your good at it but I wouldn't recommend going this way if your new to programming now - there is no point in making your life difficult by doing everything the long way. I also believe it's easier to create hard to detect bugs that will crash a large program. You have to write alot of custom code to do simple things, for example, string handling (Eg. Extract a filename from a string) which is a pain. C++ is definately the way to go for wrappers (Eg. chankast_launch) and small memory resident applications so that is what I use for those sort of things. It's also good for low level stuff Eg. CoinDrop was written in C++ as it uses a DirectInput wrapper dll to inject keystrokes into Mame as well as a global keyboard hook dll to detect coin drops outside Mame. I have coded alot of stuff in VB6 and now I won't go near it. After using C#/VB.NET you realise how much better it is. Simple stuff like threading is not stable in VB6. And you often have to do crazy things in VB6 to achieve something that is simple to do in C++. On the upside it's easier to code in VB6 than C++ because there is so much code and controls available on the Net and in the Visual Studio 6. VB6 was the way to go to learn coding a long time ago, but now it's VB.NET/C#. VB6 is no longer supported by Microsoft so it is infact a dead or dying language. A program crashing in C++ & VB6 can bring the whole system down, but in .NET your pretty much protected from that unless you use P/Invoke to access the old API or use unmanaged code. If I was to code a FE today I would use C# and MDX 3D. It has garbage collection, automatic memory managment, great error handling and a ton of useful namespaces for anything you could imagine. And once you get to know the namespaces it's very easy to do rapid development. For example, you can download a file from a server with 2 lines of code! --- Code: ---WebClient Client = new WebClient (); Client.DownloadFile("http://www.myspace.com/myfile.zip", " myfile.zip"); --- End code --- That is the sort of thing that makes development in C# so nice. It saves you time and you get more done in a shorter amount of time. Also having C# experience will mean your ready to code for Vista. It's no secret that Microsoft is giving managed code and .NET development a big thrust of support for this OS. Although for whatever reason if the Windows OS happens to get killed by something like Linux (unlikely), then all your experience in .NET will probably become useless. |
| coasternuts:
Ugh. I hate programming language arguments. They never end. :blah: Having said that I wrote an FE in Java using OpenGL. I didn't write it for public consumption. I have a P4 2.66MHz 640MB and it runs nicely. I got tired of the idiosyncrasies and caveats of other FE's and wrote my own off and on over a couple of weeks. I wanted Vader in the background and his sabre to select the games and the sabre sound to kick in when you move the sabre(sound get's annoying after a while. Meh). Marquee and screen shot come up on pic of actual cabinet. Pretty simple but compex to code in "generic" form. Certain keys will switch between other EMU's. It was a fun project and rewarding in the end. I highly recommend adding that personal touch to a cab. |
| youki:
--- Quote ---If I was to code a FE today I would use C# and MDX 3D. It has garbage collection, automatic memory managment, --- End quote --- That point could be a problem. I don't know enough .NEt to judge his memory management. But we had a very big problem with this kind of thing in JAVA that has too a garbage colletion and automatic memory managment. We discover a memory leak in our project. This memory leak was critical and we had no way to fix it!!! (believe we tried all we could). It appeared to be a bug in Java (it has been fixed lot later by Sun) . In C++ we could always find a way to fix that kind of problem because we have control. But i agree with Headkaze , if i was to code a FE today where the target will be only modern powerfull computer on Windows only i will use C# or Delphi .NET and MDX 3d. |
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