It seems as if there's always "one more thing" to do and one more week to wait, so I've opted to release what I have now rather than wait for everything to be completely done. The victim in this release are CD-based skins; they are not quite ready for prime time, as cover art isn't available yet and CD numbering isn't working properly.
This version does contain four usable skins: the default skin, which has on-screen buttons suitable for a touchscreen; a "classic" skin which looks like the 2.41 version; an Arcade Jukebox 8 clone which will work with any Arcade Jukebox 6 background; and an experimental "high-density" skin with no background at all yet that supports 15 labels (30 songs) on the screen at once.
The other big loser in this version is documentation; I haven't written any yet. Most of what you need to know is in the comments in jukebox.ini. There is no configuration GUI, so all configuration changes are made by editing jukebox.ini.
I know this is a rough release, but if I wait until it's completely polished it'll probably never get out...
NOTE: This beta version keeps a debug log in a file called allegro.log. This file has the potential to grow
very large in an extended session.
The beta can be found at
http://webpages.charter.net/celamantia/jukebox .
Here is the changelog for this version:
- Added multiple resolution support.
- Added rotation support.
- Added skin support.
- Added TrueType font support.
- Added OGG Vorbis support.
- Added multiple dot-matrix font sizes to support multiple resolutions.
- Added support for multiple song paths.
- Added ID3 support.
- Added function to release unused time slices so jukebox no longer uses 100% CPU in Windows.
- Added mouse support.
- Added mouse cursors to jukebox.dat.
- Added touchscreen (invisible mouse) support.
- Added icon support. Icons can both send messages and respond to messages sent by the jukebox.
- Added new default skin with on-screen icons for mouse or touchscreen use.
- Added support for button- or joystick-based GUI navigation (up, down, left, right, tab, select).
- Added support for single (Arcade Jukebox-style) title strips in addition to the standard double (45-style) title strips.
- Added support for CD-style title cards; in this mode, songs are sorted by album, not artist.
- Added splash screen/indexer status display.
- Added file version block.
- Added BTN_EXIT; the ESC key is no longer hardcoded to exit.
- Added BTN_PAUSE.
- Added a "radio mode"; if BTN_RADIO is pressed, the PlayStimulator value is overriden to a one-second delay, causing music to play continuously until BTN_RADIO is pressed again.
- Added ability to disable unused displays.
- Added ability to adjust the number of lines in Now Playing and Coming Up displays.
- Added album name to Now Playing display when at least 5 lines are displayed.
- Added ability to specify number of titlestrips per page; removed hardcoded setting of 8 titlestrips per page.
- Added JPG support.
- Added Unicode support.
- Added key repeat.
- Added joystick/gamepad support.
- Added a configurable brief delay between songs.
- Added a slight delay before the automatic select when AutoSelect is enabled.
- Rebuilt indexer; eliminated need for jukelist.
- Rebuilt music API.
- Jukebox will now play in the background while MAME plays in the foreground (in Windows) if the hardware mixer supports it.
- Changed screenshot function to output BMP files instead of PCX.
- Moved play counts to song database.
- Moved graphics from datafile to individual files to support skins.
- Moved symbol definitions to jukebox.dat.
- Moved control definitions to separate ini file; default file is controls.ini.
- When using Artist Sort, the word "The" at the beginning of an artist name is now ignored for sorting purposes, so "The Beatles" now sorts under B rather than T.
- Songs are grouped on labels by album and in track order (when known) within an artist.
- Fixed major bug that was causing excessive CPU usage (labels continually redrawn).
- Fixed bug where songs wouldn't start in the background in Windows.
- Fixed bug where SongPath wasn't actually working in Windows.
- Fixed bug where files with a # in them could not be played.
- Fixed bug where read-only files could not be played.
- Fixed bug where last titlestrip wasn't being displayed.
--Chris