If you want your FE to be the best (which secretly you do want) and you want people to say Dang, "This IS" the best dang piece uh of dang software I ever saw man!!!, then write the best and make it easy to use. There are probably more complaints about difficulty of use than about anything else in this hobby. You are busy humming along building this cab, then bam! You hit a wall when it comes time to make it work with the FE.
Aight I am done </rant>
I think this is a major misconception of users out there. The cabinet part is supposed to be the easy part and the software should take you a lot more time to setup. Let's put it this way. When you buy a new pc which is harder, taking it out of the box and plugging in all the cables or spending the next 8 hours installing all the programs you need and getting the settings just the way you like it? It's the same thing for mame cabs, just multiply the time by about a thousand. Computers are complicated, computer software is compliacted, emulators are infinately more complicated than regular software and a program that is supposed to manage/launch an emulator... holy crap, that thing is complicated.
No Doubt, but getting the software configured does not require going into the actual program and modifying little snippets of code here and there with very little documentation as to if you are modifying the right snippet of code.
None of use expect for everyone to bow at our feet at how great our stuff is, but what would be nice is if users would be appreciative of how easy we've made it for them instead of constantly complaining when they have trouble getting one thing or another configured the way they would like. People get on my case a lot because I am negative, I'm realistic. I would rather point out hurdles that devs are going to run into rather then tell them how great it is going to be. I do this because the users that say "yeah that'd be cool you should do it" are the exact same ones to complain un-endingly when you are finished with it and it isn't exactly as they wanted it.
No, I have actually enjoyed reading your stuff because you are not afraid to tell it like it is. (Although I will admit a lot of if does go over my head). And again, I said what I said with respect. I do appreciate the amount of effort you and many others have taken to write the stuff you have written. People assume that programmers are uncreative little nerds sitting in a dark room glasses at nose level just doing nothing but typing.
I know that to be not true. You guys are very creative.
I have seen very inventive things and options. And perhaps my post came too early. I know that there is constand development and perhaps we are at a new dawn of front ends. Things are getting better and better all the time. I read your history of DK a while back and it cleared up a lot of questions about why things take so long to get done.
You learn real quick that you should please yourself first and the user second or else you go crazy trying to make everyone happy.
I figured this much. It is why I wanted to start learning the stuff myself.
Ok first off where is it? You can ask the user, but it would require them to actually know where they put mame and probably the use of a mouse. Well that probably isn't going to work on the cab itself. You could do it over the network, but what about the cabs without nics? Parallel port connection? Floppy?
Let's assume we figured that much out. Now for mame itself. Mame has around 60 options and they seem to change every week. There is absolutely no way to set them up optimally for every pc in an automatic fashion. You can write a fe that allows you to access these options internally but that in of itself could be a fulltime job. Let's skip over that part and assume the user can figure out how to setup mame on their own. Now for roms. Some people have multiple rom directories, some just have one. Some are one different drives, some are on network shares, some are on cd rom. You can have the program search for roms across the whole computer but even with a super fast algorythm that could take hours on larger harddrives. You can let users manually browse but if they have a lot of paths to add it could take forever. Manually typing paths leaves it open to user error. Now we have the artwork paths, the same issue applies. Also the user has to actually find and download the artwork themselves. Finally it's time to generate a gamelist. You can do that automatically, but there are three distinct case scenarios you have to check for as depending upon the mame version, there are three different calls to choose from to generate the list. Once you get that mess sorted out, you have to deal with catvers and how the fe is going to display the list. Just a big list of all the games? How about clones? Lists by cats? Different users are going to want it different ways, sometimes in very custom ways. Those are a lof of questions to ask and a lot of places where things can go wrong. Oh and before you get some grand idea like "what about a drop in module that has the emu, roms and artwork" I'm not even going to begin to explain how illegal that is and how that violates mame's useage agreement.
Yeah, this is true. And no, I would never ask for a ROMs module. I understand the legal issues there.
In Atomic, there is a page for file paths. You can click and browse to the folder that the roms are in and it says that it should go. Even though I have done this, when I start atomic, it starts, but no games show up. I just am sitting in the FE with the background with empty boxes where the games should be.
With DK, I liked the step by step set up (although I did have to type the paths) but when I went to start the thing and go through the master list set up, I get a little pop up Run Time Error 52 (Bad file name or number) I click OK then the DK lightning and thinder thing happens (it's taunting me) and then another RT Error, this time it is 53 (file not found.) then it just exited back out to windows. (BTW a little side effect is that when this happens, the windows start bar no longer will show up). I have gone back and checked each path and tried making the exicutable path both with the .exe and without the .exe. I have tried many things and still get the same response. So again I sit with a FE I would like to try, but because I do not understand the full ins and outs I wish for a dang FE that would "just work."
Ok, in my search of FE's I started with MAMEWah. After a lot of frustration and some help from MinWah I finally got the thing to generate a list and actually play. (Turns out that XML2LIST or whatever it was called was not included in this version. I downloaded the official CL version and snagged it and placed it in the PM Folder and all was well) I liked MAMEWah was using my editing computer upstairs to get everything configured so when the cab was done I could transfer it downstairs and put it in the cab. (BTW the set up is the same...i.e. C = system drive, D = Emulation Drive). What I did not expect is for PowerMAME to flop and go defunct. I bought a heck of a lot of stuff based around PowerMAME and it's features. Perhaps this was a bad idea. But when he was getting going on this, you even warned him about going too heavy down the MAME path and it would die like the rest of them have. He was very confident and kept going. I bought into it. Now that it seems to be a dead horse, I have a cabinet built that likes PM32, but neither PM32 nor PM (command line) play well with MAMEWah. I put up many posts stating my config and has anyone else made it go and no one responded. So I went on a search for a different FE. You started talking about the LEDWiz functionality with J5. So I started folowing your stuff. I also heard about Atomic, so I started following that stuff too. No offense, and as I have stated in other posts, I do not want to mess with MALA as you need a special chip for the Wiz and then you loose a lot of cool features which were part of the reason why I bought the thing. I also am using 2 GPWiz 49s with 49 way Joys. The auto DRS was integrated into PowerMAME. This made life very nice. Game comes up and the DRS mode is selected. If it is wrong, you go into the MAME set up and change the mode. Easy. Now, if I want to go to a different FE I have to use this method I read on TigerHeli's page, which is said to work, but everytime I start to read through it I start to glaze over and eventually give up. (Granted a lot of this is being tried to be done late at night when I am already fried from the day.) But it would be nice to see a FE do this. I almost wish Randy would write a FE for users of his stuff.
I don't think anyone in their right mind would expect a developer to take care of all of this automatically, but the way some of you guys talk, we might think so.
And remember, I listed the easy one, mame, which has built in tools to help us devs. There are far more complicated ones like daphne and zinc, in which we can either write a slew of custom utilites, depend upon clrmamepro dats for data or other crazy means. Then of course there's the custom launching.
I'm not ranting back, or anything I just wanted to share the devs likely point of view.
Yeah, I guess it is a struggle for both sides then eh'. You are right there is a lot to area to cover. Perhaps this is where screamings idea about all the Devs coming together towards a common FE might not be a bad idea. I am a video editor so the following is based there... but when adobe was progressing Photoshop, it started on the basis of one guys idea, then many people started adding to it. There are many programmers that work on a common program. If just one guy did all the work, man we would still be at version 3. Seeing the arguments below about who's programming language is the best I see would be an issue that would need to be resolved. My guess, there would be a lot of yelling and many people would get mad and quit. But if for some magical reason, everyone decieded to come together... Man you guys could write a ROCKIN FE. There are people that are more proficient at some things than others. Delegate jobs and make it work. Find the most knowledgable person, and if everyone dropped their personal pride for a moment it is ok to admit someone is better than someone else. Choose the best guy to be like a foreman to direct the thing, with the understanding that it is still driven from the ideas from all. But this way in a pinch and all heck breaks loose, you have one person that says "No... this is how this needs to progress". I know even as I write this, many of you are going to have the hairs on the back of you neck stand up at the thought of being somewhat directed. But, if the end result is a FE that Rivals of not kicks the $h!T out of a comercial FE, then DO IT.
Anyway, my hat is off to all of you. But, I really do want to play SOMETHING that "Just works".
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Topic: State of the FE devs? (Read 13297 times)
