Ok I've been waaaay too busy to code right now, but atm my focus is treating the rust on my car and I got rained out today. So I had the inspiration to write a quickie (read done in a day or so) project.
As some of you may know, I've been obsessed over the past few months in regards to having mamehooker interface with tablets and portable devices to display supplimentary info. That's kind of stalled mamehooker progress to be honest. Doing the programming on the MH end of things is quite simple, but I'd have to write an android app, an IOS app and a pc app and that would just take too much of my time atm. I wanted to do this for real-time interaction, but honestly there aren't a whole lot of instances in which real time interaction would be needed.
Thus the idea for this stand-alone app.
I'm thinking of calling it "You've Got Manuals!" because I'm a sucker for puns. Basically it's a command line app that allows you to email manuals (or whatever really) to a portable device.
How it would work is like this:
1. You have a host email address, preferably a dedicated gmail account (because it's web-based). This is the account that actually sends out the emails and manages accounts.
2. To "register" a device, you would simply send an email entitled "Register Me!" to this account from your mobile device. The next time the command line app runs, it will check the email and add this address to it's sender's list. Likewise, to unregister a device you would send a email entitled "UnRegister Me!".
3. The command line app could be run from any number of devices (frontend, mamehooker, ect) whenever mame or any other emulator is launched. The CL would be "YGM.exe P1=\manuals\pacman P2=\manuals\puckman P3=\manuals\puckman_c\" where p1=p3 references three potential folders. This is for rom/parent/driver relationships. It would email the contents of the first folder found to all registed addresses.
4. By "email the contents" I mean it would search for either body.txt, body.html, or a series of images or pdfs. If it finds body.txt it uses that file as the message for the email to be sent. If it uses body.html... it uses the html file for a html email and embeds any locally linked images into the email. If there are images or pdfs, they are added as attachments if a body is defined, or embedded into a blank html email if no body is available. Of course the fact that you can send a html email gives the whole system a lot of flexability.... one could link to an online manual for the game... or embed a youtube video, ect...
I've already sent some test emails with embedded images to my outlook (home) address, my gmail account, and my hotmail account. In all three instances the html shows up just fine and so long as I embed images, they show up in the email, even if images are blocked by the email client. Even my android tablet, linked to my hotmail account, has no problem displaying html images.
So opinions or suggestions would be welcomed, but make em fast because I've already started on it. I think the only real drawback of this system besides the lag (email can sometimes take a while) would be the fact that your mame cab would need an internet connection.