Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum
Main => Project Announcements => Topic started by: markb on January 01, 2006, 01:04:25 pm
-
I've been toying with the idea for a while of having a icon based frontend for my Cab to give it a slightly different look than the Windows frontend. .
So after a bit of research I settled on Talisman desktop which is available on trial from here:-
http://www.lighttek.com/talisman.htm
Here is the cab - It's used for playing a lot of different games including Mame however I tend to play a lot of action/adventure games and 2 player racing games against my sitdown cab. The PC is an XP3000 with a Radeon 9800pro and 768mb so it has plenty juice for even the newest games and is capable of running something in the background
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v422/Easybeat/Upright.jpg)
Rather than start completely from scratch I adapted the Car PC theme (credit to the author) which was created as a touchscreen interface for use in a car.
So any way after a lot of work, in particular creating the icons, I now have an almost finished frontend:-
This is the main screen which boots up automatically. The frontend can be controlled via joystick however I have a trackball installed so it isn't really necessary.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v422/Easybeat/MainMenu.jpg)
All of the regular windows options are accesible from here however I am contemplating removing the bottom task bar or hiding it at least.
Selecting an icon can either launch the application itself or bring up a submenu. Here is the one for the games.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v422/Easybeat/Games.jpg)
Each of the icons on the right brings up a submenu as such.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v422/Easybeat/Action.jpg)(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v422/Easybeat/Driving.jpg)
The button in the top left returns to the previous menu also from the main page the setting icon at the bottom brings up this menu.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v422/Easybeat/Settings.jpg)
I've still got some work to do, I would like some sounds to play when selecting each of the menus and I'm not happy with a couple of the icons but so far so good.
-
looks interesting
I've just downloaded that talisman thingy to play with, although I'm writing my own frontend. who knows ?
-
hey, i know youre going to joystick control but geez that would be a great idea if you did it touch screen- provided you could touch the screen of course! looks good (",)
-
Interesting. I've been toying with the idea of writing a Flash based front-end myself...
-
Danny, I actually have a touchscreen but not in the cab as it is too small (15 inch ELO). Surprisingly I never thought about using the frontend on it but I've just finished trying it out and it works very well indeed. I use my touchscreen to play a few games but now I fancy turning it into a jukebox/games machine so I'll let everyone know how I get on with that one as even typing this post I have had several ideas.
Also I must mention another little App that was extremely helpful
http://www.deviouscodeworks.co.uk/imagicon.html
Imagicon was a very small program that I used for turning a lot of larger PNG, BMP and JPG files into the 128 x 128 icons that I used. Being free and 1mb in size it is very useful to have.