"remote" front end idea

[EightBySix]

Had an idea today. My project is designed so that when you start it up, it goes directly into the last played game. Choosing a different game will be done via a fairly basic interface. This is partly because I'll be running a low spec pc, and while I like the look of the nice front ends they seem to be quite demanding for someone who only wants to play the classics.

I thought it might be cool to run the interface on something else, such as an iPad.  My project is built into a table, so it would be quite natural to have it next to me. The app could have all the nice interface bells and whistles, hi scores, play stats, etc and then I could use it to select the next game. It would only be an optional way to do it. If I made it html5 I could make something that would work on the phone too.

All I would need is the machine running mame (or an additional machine such as a rasberry pi) to host a basic web server, and then tweak mame a little bit.

Maybe it could open and close the table too  

[Gray_Area]

Front ends are capable of loading a game on start. If you want not to see the FE the first time around......there are fairly simple, though necessarily 'manually-coded', ways of doing that.

But you're welcome to create your own.

[EightBySix]

I was not aware of that - thank you!

I really must look into them more.

Still. I like the idea of integrating with an app or website. It's in the "just because" category now though, if front ends will hide away until needed.

[lanman31337]

That's not a bad idea.  Keep roms and emulators central, access them from within the house from any computer.  Win!

[Le Chuck]

If you wrote an app for your machine and put a blue tooth transmitter on your machine you could make that happen.  The app would only work when it was tethered to your device and could allow game selection and high score saving. You could also have a leader board function and all your friends could download the app so they could choose games and track scores on your machine as well.  Then you could have push notifications for every time a high score was set.  Then you could build in functionality that would allow anybody playing the same game to record a high score if they do the same setup on their machine and then and then and then and then charge 99 cents and retire.

It's almost too easy:

1) Awesome score tracking app
2)
3) Profit.

[Gray_Area]

Careful, Chuck. Perhaps you missed Driver Man's interest in that....

[Le Chuck]

Careful, Chuck. Perhaps you missed Driver Man's interest in that....

AKA Cat or Kitty or something?  Yeah, saw that.  The big difference... Driver Man is batshit whereas I'm kidding.  Still makes one think tho...



Maybe I should patent MAME

[drventure]

Very interesting idea. But it would seem to be pretty situation specific (ie most people run normal cabs and would want to be able to pick a game via the cab interface).

Still I could see the front end (or whatever) on the cab pushing play statistics up to some server component on a website that you could then browse to via any browser, html5, javascript client whatever for reviewing highscores, or whatnot.

And technically, pushing a game selection down to a running cab from a site shouldn't be particularly tough.

But I don't know of anything that does that right now...

[yotsuya]

Interesting- his 'Crazy Tilt' app is in the Android store, but I noticed one of his  '5Star' reviews comes from one of his banned aliases here. 

[Gray_Area]

Very interesting idea. But it would seem to be pretty situation specific (ie most people run normal cabs and would want to be able to pick a game via the cab interface).

Still I could see the front end (or whatever) on the cab pushing play statistics up to some server component on a website that you could then browse to via any browser, html5, javascript client whatever for reviewing highscores, or whatnot.

And technically, pushing a game selection down to a running cab from a site shouldn't be particularly tough.

But I don't know of anything that does that right now...

I think his idea is more for mobile devices, where people don't want an FE in the way.

[headkaze]

GameEx has a feature called "Game Extender" which allows you to control the FE via a web broswer. Here is a screenshot of it running on an iPod.

[jrock2004]

I give a +1 to GameEx. It has the ability for remote management from a mobile device