Wah!Cade 0.99pre8 "Could it be?"

[Balki]

Hi,

A new release of Wah!Cade is out...

Available from the usual spot:
http://www.anti-particle.com/wahcade

Wah!Cade is a GNU/Linux friendly clone of Minwah's excellent MameWAH.

Cheers,

Andy

[boxman]

Excellent, thanks for all your work porting this!

Is it now possible to run wahcade without a window manager? I currently have to run blackbox and then wahcade from within that. I'll test it out later.

[Balki]

I think you'll still need a basic window manager...

[boxman]

Yep, just tested it.

I'm trying to make a wahcade session that loads automatically from gdm for my cabinet. The reason I want to do that is because it shaves a couple of seconds off the boot time and completely hides the OS, so no mouse cursor or anything.

Wahcade loads if you do this but it crashes if you try to go into a menu or start mame.

If anyone else wants to try this for some other program this is how you do it in ubuntu (change name, comment and exec to whatever you want to load):

Code: [Select]

sudo gedit /usr/share/xsessions/wahcade.desktop
Then add this to the file and save it:

Code: [Select]

[Desktop Entry]
 Encoding=UTF-8
 Name=Wahcade
 Comment=Arcade Front End
 Exec=/usr/bin/wahcade
 Terminal=False
 Type=Application

Then you should have a new option on the GDM sessions screen.

I don't really know too much about the inner workings of linux so I have no idea if this will actually ever be possible or if there is a better way to do it, but it would definitely be great if it did work.

I currently have gdm automatically log in and load blackbox, which then runs wahcade from its autorun script. It works perfectly fine but the mouse cursor still shows for a couple of seconds.

This is my only niggle with wahcade, other than that it is perfect, so thanks again!

[dirkomatic]

I enabled autologin, but skipped the ubuntu boot screen, etc.  It's all in verbose mode in text.  Like you, I still have the arrow displayed very briefly, but I live with it....

Wah!Cade is great for Linux users and Andy is very good at releasing frequently and fixing bugs...

[bloodyviking77]

do you need to be running gdm? if you're going straight into X then I would have thought gdm is unnecessary and you could just "startx" with wahcade set to run in your .xsessions file?

I'm actually in the process of (maybe!) changing my cab over from a framebuffer/SDL only setup to run X (mainly so I can run zinc as well as mame - its a slow CPU!).

Whats been holding me back (other than lack of time and a dodgy ethernet cable that needs replacing) is managing the X session appropriately. I don't really want a heavy window manager so have been looking at ratpoison and awesome ... but initial tests haven't been very encouraging (squashed windows and generally crappy appearance). blackbox is next on the list to try ...

[boxman]

Aha! I knew there would be a better way, thanks! If wahcade ever works without a window manager this will be perfect but for now I will be loading openbox then wahcade.

I tried blackbox but it seemed to load a bit slower than openbox, plus it has that bar on the bottom too. Pekwm might be good for this purpose but I haven't tried it yet because openbox works ok.