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Favorite Front End
Todd H:
Over the years, I've gone from Gamelauncher to Mamewah to Hyperspin. Gotta say Hyperspin has quickly become my favorite.
Aabra:
I just made up a new preview video today for my movie themes so I figured I'd post it here just for fun as some people are probably confused. :) I realize that there are other front ends for movies but I like having the trailers start right away when browsing through the movies. Call me crazy but I think it's much cooler than staring at some boxart with no sound. :D
Havok:
My XBox 360 is my movie front end...
8)
kaptainsteve:
The reason I like Mala is that it is easy to set up and easy to use while in a cabinet.
I don't like too many choices and selections on the main menu. Let the frontend open mame up automatically and then the user just has to pick some games. Too many choices is just too much to think about for those who want to play games, not read/navigate menus. I want people to focus on choosing a game, not navigating or waiting for videos to stop playing in order to play a game.
Finally, Mala is pretty easy to set up and get going. I dont' want to start worrying about collections of attract videos and all this artwork collections that go into folders that I dont' know what their name is? I mean, isn't the snap and marquee folders in mame enough of this nonsense? I like the idea of hyperspin, or should i say Ultracade, but for me to use it I would want it just to load up the snaps and marquees from default because I don't want to have to devote too much time to gathering videos and graphics and organizing and setting it up right.
My favorite frontend of them all was Ultramame because it was so simple and looks like, if there was a real "mame" arcade cabinet from the 80's, that it would be it's frontend. But, the only reason I don't use it now is that I can't install it anymore, it's got some bugs and I can't figure it out.
Ok, so I'm lazy... so what?
Aabra:
--- Quote from: kaptainsteve on October 06, 2008, 06:46:05 pm ---The reason I like Mala is that it is easy to set up and easy to use while in a cabinet.
I don't like too many choices and selections on the main menu. Let the frontend open mame up automatically and then the user just has to pick some games. Too many choices is just too much to think about for those who want to play games, not read/navigate menus. I want people to focus on choosing a game, not navigating or waiting for videos to stop playing in order to play a game.
--- End quote ---
I don't think you're referring to Hyperspin here but since you mention it later on I have to assume that you are. If you're not then please forgive me for this assumption. In Hyperspin to get from the main menu to actually playing a game takes 2 clicks. Once on the system (Mame, Sega Master System, NES, Movies, or whatever you want) and once on the game. My grandmother could use this without getting confused.
I'm also not really sure what you mean by waiting for videos to stop playing... I don't think *any* front end forces you to wait for the video to stop playing before you can select a game.... I mean that would be awful.
--- Quote from: kaptainsteve on October 06, 2008, 06:46:05 pm --- I like the idea of hyperspin, or should i say Ultracade, but for me to use it I would want it just to load up the snaps and marquees from default because I don't want to have to devote too much time to gathering videos and graphics and organizing and setting it up right.
--- End quote ---
I created a little video here as it seems that a lot of people believe that Hyperspin can't do this. It absolutely can and does. You don't need individual themes at all. This is still a work in progress though as you can see for SNES as the wheel images don't exist yet - they're still being created so we're currently forced to use Hyperlogo to generate them. It still looks pretty good though. The completed NES default theme though obviously looks better.
Admittedly in its current incarnation (Beta) you have to set up a lot of this manually which isn't that hard but a bit complicated for the average user. Once it's all done however you'll simply download a torrent which has everything already setup in its correct directory. (with maybe the exception of most videos which you'll have to download from emumoves if you want them) After that you'll simply run the config program to set the rom directories and emulators that you want to use - and that's it.
That's the direction that BadBoyBill is taking the program in.