Arcan-FE (win/lin/osx) scriptable frontend.

[demeth]

This is the first release of a "small" project I've been working on now and then for the last year or so, while being bored out of my mind on the bus to and from work. In essence, it is yet another front-end, with a twist or two. The backstory is quite simply that the plethora of available ones didn't really fit my needs or morals, and I was sortof curious as to what could be done to "push the envelope" without resorting to some seizure-inducing flash animation.

From the project page @ http://sourceforge.net/projects/arcanfe

" Arcan is a portable and fully scriptable frontend for launching games, emulators and other full-screen applications in a visual appealing way, as seamlessly as possible. It is mainly targeted towards advanced hobbyists that wants to get their hands dirty and dabble with light programming as part of larger build projects e.g. HTPCs and gaming cabinets, and is as such not directly intended for "plug-n-play" type of use.
"

With that said, the two included example themes works pretty well as quick and neat frontends on their own (screenshots on the project page).

In essence, it is all about trying to reduce the 'barrier to entry' for designing something really custom (rather than switching a few images in an xml- file) and for experimenting with more 'wild ideas'. The usual bells and whistles from other frontends are in place. There are prebuilt packages with installation and usage instructions (check the 'quickstart.pdf') available for windows (mac and linux will follow shortly, albeit they should compile from source without much trouble assuming CMake/ffmpeg/OpenGL/SDL*/Ogg dependencies covered).

For those on Linux, there's an extra tasty little nugget in the sense of 'internal launch', meaning that some emulators (I've tried with mame, mess, scummvm and a few others) can be launched in the background, have their rendering and input hijacked and exposed as scriptable entities (try playing pong with you being both players using mame as the ball for a little mindf*ck).

Enjoy! ;-)

[gonzo90017]

OpenAl32.dll was not found

[demeth]

OpenAl32.dll was not found

That one is a mess (hey, it's creative..), comes with some audio drivers and not with others.
Include one in your package and chances are you'll replace hardware acceleration with software emulation.
Until I patch the installer with some script that looks for support and only installs AL if none is detected, use:

http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/Downloads/oalinst.zip

That said, keep 'em coming. I only have a Win7 dev. box in a dusty corner somewhere (unless there's money involved, I avoid win- development like the plague), but whatever issues appear with WinXP and others interest me, as I can't really test them myself. There's a classic "DLL-hell 2.0" problem involving the build system, .rc and .manifest specifications and MSVC runtime redistribution that can cause a "The application failed to initialize properly" problem on some installs (that tends to goaway if you install development tools, go figure) that I'm looking into.

Update: fixed one of the possible sources for the "failed to initialize" (at least got it to run in a clean VirtualBox session) and made the installer behave a little less horrible.

[demeth]

Was struck with a dash of holiday spirit(s) -- packaged and uploaded ubuntu 11.10 (32 / 64) .debs for linux guys who don't like watching their compilers work. A test-run went something like (might be helpful to someone):

dpkg -i arcan-0.1.1.deb
apt-get install -f install
apt-get install mame

mkdir ~/.arcan
cp -r /usr/local/share/arcan/resources ~/.arcan
mkdir ~/.arcan/resources/targets
mkdir ~/.arcan/resources/games
ln -s /usr/games/mame ~/.arcan/resources/targets/mame
ln -s /mnt/nas/mame/roms ~/.arcan/resources/games/mame
ln -s /mnt/nas/mame/videos ~/.arcan/resources/movies
ln -s /mnt/nas/mame/snaps ~/.arcan/resources/screenshots
cd ~/.arcan
arcan_romman.rb builddb --mamegood --mameskipclone --mameshorttitle
arcan dishwater

[demeth]

Added a bunch of fixes and tweaks.

As to not spambump this forum, I added a quick n' dirty page at wordpress for future updates.
Go there for updates, detailed patchnotes, file- links and a short config&run demo;

http://arcanfe.wordpress.com

Enjoy!

[Howard_Casto]

Good luck with this I'll try it out when I have a chance. 

Just a word of advice from an old timer.... you need pics of the thing, videos if possible. 

Setting up FEs is time consuming, and very few people are willing to do so when they can't even get a preview of what it looks like. 

[demeth]

Good luck with this I'll try it out when I have a chance. 

Just a word of advice from an old timer.... you need pics of the thing, videos if possible. 

Setting up FEs is time consuming, and very few people are willing to do so when they can't even get a preview of what it looks like. 

Pics in the "about" menu page, vid at the bottom of the 0.1.2 post ;-)

[alfonzotan]

Good luck with this I'll try it out when I have a chance. 

Just a word of advice from an old timer.... you need pics of the thing, videos if possible. 

Setting up FEs is time consuming, and very few people are willing to do so when they can't even get a preview of what it looks like. 

Pics in the "about" menu page, vid at the bottom of the 0.1.2 post ;-)

Pretty cool, looking forward to trying out the OSX version.  Nice work.

[demeth]

Good luck with this I'll try it out when I have a chance. 

Just a word of advice from an old timer.... you need pics of the thing, videos if possible. 

Setting up FEs is time consuming, and very few people are willing to do so when they can't even get a preview of what it looks like. 

Pics in the "about" menu page, vid at the bottom of the 0.1.2 post ;-)

Pretty cool, looking forward to trying out the OSX version.  Nice work.

Since it's really designed to follow a more UNIXy model of paths, resources etc., there are a few OSX quirks currently (particularly with the internal launch stuff), but wait an hour or two and there should be DMGs available that works from a bundle and don't pollute your /usr/* like building from source would. There are some issues with fullscreen (even the windowed approach, seems like when you set your window to have a higher render priority than the menu, you get into a weird priority inversion situation where your main-app gets priority over child apps, and SDL + fullscreen-mode has "issues" on its own.. OSX 10.7+ is really turning into a worse pain than Win32 for low- level coding, to the point where I've gone from a bunch of hackintoshes and a MBP as main dev. environment, to retreating to linux/BSDs everywhere :/

[NOP]

how are game lists created?  is the list file format custom?  I'd be happy to add your format to the available outputs for romlister.

I realize I could probably figure it out by downloading and using your FE, but well, you know, I'm lazy.

[demeth]

how are game lists created?  is the list file format custom?  I'd be happy to add your format to the available outputs for romlister.

I realize I could probably figure it out by downloading and using your FE, but well, you know, I'm lazy.

The FE is database oriented (so the resources/arcandb.sqlite is, surprise, SQLite3) and any actual filtering "which games do we want to show" are really up to the scripts(ok, "theme") currently running. The default ones just take all games defined in the database as it is, but there is support for the catver, family etc. relations. There's a tool (arcan_romman.rb, packaged as arcan_romman.exe on windows, it's hiding behind the 'Build DB' shortcut) that take a huge bunch of arguments used to populate the DB (in resources/scripts/romman_base.rb you'll see the SQL queries currently used) alongside a few importer scripts that try to help making stuff as automatic as possible, but it's really for the terminal junkies ;-)

The file-structure imposed is basically some kind of targetpath (whatever program will be launched) and a gamepath (rompath, whatever your terminology).
Every entry in the targetpath has to have a corresponding folder in the gamepath where whatever data the target needs are stored. This might be subpar for windows- folks (don't know how well the vista/win7 symlink- solution actually work), but it kindof makes sense in the embedded projects I have from where the FE originated ;p
 

[demeth]

how are game lists created?  is the list file format custom?  I'd be happy to add your format to the available outputs for romlister.

I realize I could probably figure it out by downloading and using your FE, but well, you know, I'm lazy.

The http://arcanfe.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/grid-theme-guide-part-1/ perhaps helps to illustrate what's going on better.

A quick n' dirty hack I'd consider for using romlister to get specific subselections, would be to just export them as lua scripts (like the resources/scripts/symtable.lua hack) to get a table with the specific setnames or games, and they can in turn be used to index the gamelist from the internal db.

[Gray_Area]

"quite simply that the plethora of available ones didn't really fit my needs or morals"

What did you mean here, particularly the latter?

[Howard_Casto]

"quite simply that the plethora of available ones didn't really fit my needs or morals"

What did you mean here, particularly the latter?

Just remember... when this thread eventually goes to post hell... I didn't ask that. 

[demeth]

"quite simply that the plethora of available ones didn't really fit my needs or morals"

What did you mean here, particularly the latter?

Just remember... when this thread eventually goes to post hell... I didn't ask that. 

(Slow as hell at responding, sorry for that, I'm in the process of skipping town and moving) In short -- Well, lets not go there, it's the usual hotpot rant about piracy, open source, not supporting lock-in happy vendors etc.

So on a more pleasant subject, I scraped together part two of the theme programming tutorial,
http://arcanfe.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/grid-theme-guide-part-2/

Slowly turning into something more usable. Anyhow, back to disassembling my cabs :'(

[demeth]

Shameless bump -- It's that time of the month again so updated with 0.1.3 -- check youtube-channel / wordpress page (arcanfe.wordpress.com) for changes.
A few computers broke during the move so running a bit blind (think VirtualBox for any dev work that's not linux) so packaging / testing was mostly manual labour this time around (blergh). Enjoy!

[demeth]

New version, lots of change beneath the surface and a fair enough of them above it.

Annotated video of the changes 'Gridle' theme can be found at:


(main url)
http://arcanfe.wordpress.com