Khameleon tech demo available (successor to Kymaera front end)

[Cakemeister]

Hello,

Khameleon is a front end application which I developed starting from the Kymaera source code.

Some features include:
- six different alpha blending modes supported
- supports png, jpg, tga, bmp, and gif image formats
- background mp3 music play supported
- open source and free
- supports arbitrary rotation of text and images (not just horizontal/vertical)
- uses SDL for window management and sound and OpenGL for graphics
- will eventually be ported to Linux and Macintosh
- six skins included

I've assembled a self-contained demo (no configuration or other files necessary), which contains 62 selected games. I set up Mplayer as an emulator so when a game is launched it plays a movie.

Since the demo is self-contained, it is huge, weighing in at 100 megabytes. All you have to do is extract the demo and run khdemo.exe. If you extract the demo to c:\khdemo, you can right click the desktop and select "New->Shortcut" and create a shortcut to the demo. Or you can run the demo from a command prompt, or from the Run prompt.

Link to the zip file for the full demo

If you have any feature requests or bug reports, you can post to this thread, PM me, or email me at cakemeister AT comcast DOT net.

Enjoy!

[gonzo90017]

400mhz Celeron 256mb memory

Shouldn't it  be Select skins instead of frontends?
Anyways here's me results:

AtomicFE crashes


khameleon crashes


Mamewah crashes


The rest run fine but extremely slow.

[Cakemeister]

If you would like to send in a bug report, please turn on logging by editing the config\khameleon.kfg file. Set the entry "Log" to 1.

Thanks!

[gonzo90017]

E-mail sent.

[Cakemeister]

Some fonts were missing out of the package:

     3184 : FT_New_Face failed (there is probably a problem with your font file)
     3184 : The filename was <Impact>, also tried <c:\windows\fonts\Impact.ttf>

Thanks for the report!

[gonzo90017]

No problem. You can email me the font so I can test the other skins that didn't work.

[Cakemeister]

Okay, I've added the missing font to the package and I put the download link back up.

I made a separate zip file with the updated executables and the missing zip files so no one has to redownload the entire package. I upxed the executables to minimize the zip file size.

Edit: Link removed Oct-16-07

[2600]

Just when I was thinking Buddabing was working on something like this and who is Cakemeister, I see the little note under your avatar.

[gonzo90017]

Some skins perform better than others. Here's the list from best to worst.

Ultrastyle
Mala
Dragon King
AtomicFe
Kymaera

Kymaera doesn't respond to button presses.
Mamewah doesn't load. Bug report Sent.

Test system
1.5 ghz AMD Sempron 2200
768mb ram

Will test on a 400 mhz 256mb next.

[Cakemeister]

Well, the Kymaera skin has eight attract videos going on at once, so it will be a challenging skin to run on a lower-powered machine, especially at higher resolutions.

You might try running the skin at 640x480 for better performance, but I am getting 48 fps on the Kyamera skin even at 1600x1200x32. You can see your frames per second by looking at the log. I think I'll make a "toggle FPS" display for the release version, it's useful for diagnostics. The computer I'm running is a laptop with a Core Duo T2400 processor at 1.83 Ghz.

[ErikRuud]

So far the only one giving me trouble was MAMEWah.  It does not start or show an error.

This is from the log
     1250 : Entering idle loop
     1296 : FT_New_Face failed (there is probably a problem with your font file)
     1296 : The filename was <fonts\Arial.ttf>, also tried <fonts\fonts\ARIAL.ttf.ttf> and <c:\windows\fonts\fonts\Arial.ttf.ttf>

I copied the arial.ttf file from windows/fonts into Khameleon/fonts and then it worked fine.

I am very excited to see this. 

Thanks for your effort.

[gonzo90017]

I had the same error. Don't know if you got my bug report. Did the same as Erik Ruud now everything works fine.

I'm getting 99% cpu usage though with all skins.

[Cakemeister]

If you want to run MAME instead of my demo "emulator", you can use this attached mame.txt and rename it to config\mame.emu. Change the paths in the config\mame.emu to reflect your MAME installation, change the "Emulator" field in config\khameleon.kfg to mame.emu, and change the skin to whatever skin you want. Keep in mind that some of the skins use marquees for game names and the text may not look right.

You can generate game lists for Khameleon with my ListGen utility.

@gonzo: How are you measuring CPU usage? When I run Khameleon windowed and look at the CPU usage with Windows Task Manager it typically runs 40-50%. Also, I've fixed the font problem in the latest executable in the gonzo.zip file.

(EDIT Oct 16 2007 removed .emu file attachment)

[ErikRuud]

Great! I've got it launching mame now!

[gonzo90017]

I just click on run. Then CTRL+ALT+DEL.


How do you run it in windowed mode?

[Cakemeister]

You can run Khameleon in windowed mode by running it with the -windowed command line option. You can't do it from the khdemo.

Other command line options I have are:

-resolution=1024x768x32 (runs at specified resolution, you need the x's)
-skinfile=skins\mala.skn (run the Mala skin, overriding any entry in the emulator file)
-listwrap (list wraps around at the end a la Kymaera)
-nolistwrap (list does not wrap around, a la Mamewah)
-fullscreen (opposite of -windowed)

[gonzo90017]

I was able to run Mame37b16 succesfully. Is there a way to generate a list or is that still to come?
I'm still getting 99% cpu usage on both the 400 mhz and 1.5 ghz test pc's.

[Goz]

I'm getting 2% CPU utilization accross all skins can you tweak it to be a little more efficient? jk nice program

[Cakemeister]

My list generator currently runs only on versions of MAME which support the -listxml option. I don't remember what version that started.

I dimly recall writing a program some time ago called info2xml which converted the -listinfo output of MAME into XML. Maybe I could use that as input to listgen. I'll look into that.

[ErikRuud]

I have gotten it to work with the O2em Odyssey2 emulator except I can't get it to find the snaps.

I am seeing about 50% usage on my duo core laptop.  It does drop to zero when I launch an emu.

[ErikRuud]

I have also noticed that you have inherited the Kymaera quirk of repeating entries when the game list is shorter than the available scroll space.

[gonzo90017]

What cpu do you have Goz?

[Goz]

What cpu do you have Goz?

Quad core Q6600 overclocked to 3.4Ghz

[gonzo90017]

That explains the differences in cpu usage.

[youki]

Nice Job!   Sounds very promising! 

The Mamewah screen doesn't work for me.

But others , no problem.

I think you have a little bug in your scrolling routine. On the AtomicFE layout , i think you have a one pixel vertical row that should not be here.

Do you have have a config tool and a layout editor?

[Cakemeister]

Nice Job!   Sounds very promising! 

The Mamewah screen doesn't work for me.

There's a workaround for that, see above, it will be fixed in the next release.

I think you have a little bug in your scrolling routine. On the AtomicFE layout , i think you have a one pixel vertical row that should not be here.

I see that. Not sure of the cause, though.

Do you have have a config tool and a layout editor?

I have one but it is incomplete. You are welcome to contribute source code. 

[SirPeale]

Just when I was thinking Buddabing was working on something like this and who is Cakemeister, I see the little note under your avatar.

Yeah, what's with the new profile?

[SirPeale]

Kymaera has a DOS version.  Any thoughts to making one?

[Cakemeister]

There may or may not be a DOS version of Khameleon. The core libraries are platform and OS-independent, so only the display and sound code would have to be compatible with DOS. Kymaera used Allegro for display, which works with DOS. I could do that for the DOS version of Khameleon, but there is some stuff missing from Allegro that I would have to write, such as the movie handling code. And font handling in Allegro is poor.

I changed profiles because the buddabing AT houston DOT com email address is going away. Time Warner made a deal with Comcast and now Comcast is my ISP.

I chose not to register under one of my web-based email addresses because there are some sites that do not allow registration from web-based email addresses.

[youki]

Quote

Do you have have a config tool and a layout editor?



I have one but it is incomplete. You are welcome to contribute source code. 

I'm working on "something" for Atomic, but i think once it is done for Atomic, it could be usefull for Khameleon. But let me finish the thing for Atomic, and i will contact you to see if we can do something together.

I just noticed something... your Front End is called Khameleon ,  but AtomicFe's Mascotte is a Cameleon.

[Cakemeister]

I've written a little utility to convert the -listinfo output of MAME versions older than version v0.85 into XML. The XML can then be input to my ListGen list generator and it should be able to produce a Khameleon game list from it.

To do this, change the listgen.ini so that "reuse_mame_data" is set to 1 (or use the -reuse_mame_data parameter), and copy the output of info2xml to listxml.txt.

I tested the program with two or three older versions, I didn't test every possible variant. So if anyone finds a version of MAME that causes problems with ListGen of the kind "Parse error, expected foo and found bar", please contact me.

The info2xml utility can be found here. Source code is included.

[headkaze]

Finally got a chance to check this out! Very impressive Buddabing!

[headkaze]

I see that. Not sure of the cause, though.

My guess would be that you have a texture on a quad that your wrapping around? Perhaps you need to add a small amount to the texture coordinates, say 1.01f or something to that effect so there is no one pixel gap.

[Cakemeister]

I think that problem was due to the way OpenGL does antialiasing.

I changed the line

Code: [Select]

glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER,GL_LINEAR);

to

Code: [Select]


glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER,GL_NEAREST);

and the seam went away.

[Cakemeister]

I've also added a FPS indicator. Surprisingly, the MAMEWah skin is the slowest, even though it appears to be the simplest graphically. At 640x480x32 resolution, the Atomic skin runs at 350 fps on my machine and the MAMEWah skin runs at only 40 fps! The MAMEWah skin has a lot of text on it so I guess that text drawing is what slows the frontend down the most.