Mamewah scrolling question

[vitaflo]

Now that the cabinet is built, the first thing a lot of people have been saying when using the frontend is "wow, the game list moves, not the highlight, that's weird".  I never thought about it much until people started saying this.

So the question is, is there any way to change this?  Right now when you press up/down the game list itself moves up and down and the highlight stays on the same part of the screen.  What I'd like is the highlight to move up and down and the game list to stay stationary until the highlight gets to the top or bottom of the screen.  Then the gamelist would scroll normally.  Doing page up/down still does paging, but puts the highlight on the top or bottom of the screen depending on if you're paging up or down.  Check out any long scrolling list in Windows or on a website for an example of what I mean.

Any way to do this?

[eightbit]

Hmmm, I see what you mean but I like the way it does it. One of the reasons (the big reason) I choose to use mamewah is because it didn't look or act like windows.

[Minwah]

Now that the cabinet is built, the first thing a lot of people have been saying when using the frontend is "wow, the game list moves, not the highlight, that's weird".  I never thought about it much until people started saying this.

So the question is, is there any way to change this?  Right now when you press up/down the game list itself moves up and down and the highlight stays on the same part of the screen.  What I'd like is the highlight to move up and down and the game list to stay stationary until the highlight gets to the top or bottom of the screen.  Then the gamelist would scroll normally.  Doing page up/down still does paging, but puts the highlight on the top or bottom of the screen depending on if you're paging up or down.  Check out any long scrolling list in Windows or on a website for an example of what I mean.

Any way to do this?

Some veteran MAMEWAH users may remember that this is exactly the way it used to work.  From the v0.90 section of whatsnew:

Game list now scrolls slightly differently - keeping selected game in the centre of the screen

I decided to change it because I had a few mails from people who didn't like the way it was.  Also, I preferred the 'new' way, as you can always see what games are above / below the selected game.

I don't plan changing it atm (I honestly think you would like it less anyway), but maybe I'll add the option in a future version

[eightbit]

Don't change it!  

[papaschtroumpf]

Don't change it!  

I second that!

[vitaflo]

I don't plan changing it atm (I honestly think you would like it less anyway), but maybe I'll add the option in a future version

I wouldn't want you to change it outright, I'd just want an option to do it either way (defaulting to the current way of course).  It's not a huge deal, just something I've been getting comments on from people so I thought I'd ask.  You're probably right though, if you added it in I'd probably not like it, even though the current method confuses me from time to time.

Perhaps even better would be a "smooth scroll".  Animate the list up and down instead of jumping from game to game.  I seem to always get lost as to where the game I'm looking for is because the list just sorta jumps in place and doesn't look like it's actually "scrolling", if that makes sense.  Perhaps that would help people understand how the scrolling thing works better who are new to the arcade, since it would give a little more visual feedback to the user.

[eightbit]

Perhaps even better would be a "smooth scroll".  Animate the list up and down instead of jumping from game to game.  I seem to always get lost as to where the game I'm looking for is because the list just sorta jumps in place and doesn't look like it's actually "scrolling", if that makes sense.  Perhaps that would help people understand how the scrolling thing works better who are new to the arcade, since it would give a little more visual feedback to the user.

How fast is your PC vitaflo? My 2ghz scrolls pretty smoothly. The jerkiness of scrolling is probably because it reads the game information each time you select another game and their is file access involved.

[vitaflo]

How fast is your PC vitaflo? My 2ghz scrolls pretty smoothly. The jerkiness of scrolling is probably because it reads the game information each time you select another game and their is file access involved.

2.2Ghz.  It's not the speed of scrolling per se, since you can make it even faster if you change the delay time in the frontend.  This I have no problem with.  What happens now is when you, say, page up, the list of games on the screen is simply replaced w/ the list on the next page up.  What I'm thinking of is that the list would visually move down the screen, you could see it move, instead of just replacing the content in the list.

It's much like the difference between hitting a link on a web page that says "Go Up" (like on the bottom of this page for example) and it just "jumps" there, or instead actually scrolling up past all the content and actually seeing it on your way to the top.  It just gives you a better feel of "where you are" in relation to the information you're seeing.  I hope all that made sense.  Perhaps I'm not explaining it well, and perhaps it's a useless feature.  I'd rather have trackball and spinner support for scrolling over this anyway.  

[eightbit]

2.2Ghz.  It's not the speed of scrolling per se, since you can make it even faster if you change the delay time in the frontend.  This I have no problem with.  What happens now is when you, say, page up, the list of games on the screen is simply replaced w/ the list on the next page up.  What I'm thinking of is that the list would visually move down the screen, you could see it move, instead of just replacing the content in the list.

It's much like the difference between hitting a link on a web page that says "Go Up" (like on the bottom of this page for example) and it just "jumps" there, or instead actually scrolling up past all the content and actually seeing it on your way to the top.  It just gives you a better feel of "where you are" in relation to the information you're seeing.  I hope all that made sense.  Perhaps I'm not explaining it well, and perhaps it's a useless feature.  I'd rather have trackball and spinner support for scrolling over this anyway.  

I think I know what you mean but that would defeat the purpose of moving a page at a time. When I hit page down I went it to jump not slowly scroll there.  I l00ked at some other windows programs and they all work that way. When you push page down it jumps one page.

You can hold your joystick down and it scrolls, isn't this what you want?

Instead of trackball support I'd like to see joystick support, though I can get what I need with joytokey. I'd hate to see things like trackballs or joysticks added if it caused instability in the FE. The 2 biggest reasons I choose minwah was because it didn't look like windows and it worked. I  tried many other frontends and all were either a major pain to configure, buggy or both except mame32 which is just to windosy.

[vitaflo]

I think I know what you mean but that would defeat the purpose of moving a page at a time. When I hit page down I went it to jump not slowly scroll there.

That would really be the only problem, the "scroll" speed.  I guess I'm just used to using a Mac, since that's my primary computer, and things don't just pop up or move by jumping, things are animated (though quite fast).  Guess I'm just used to that.

I do agree MW is the best frontend by far.  There isn't much I would change in it.  In fact, even this request is a pretty picky one.  It's almost perfect the way it is.

[Minwah]

I see what you mean vitaflo...I guess I can just settle it by saying I'm not going to change it!    I think it is one of those things that is just a matter of personal preference.  I quite like the way it works so I'll leave it for now at least.

As for mouse/joystick support, they are both things I'd like to add.  I did try mouse support once, using a cheap way of monitoring the mouse cursor position (& re-centre the cursor once it reaches the screen boundaries).  It worked OK, but not good enough.  If anyone knows how I could do this better (using hooks?) then let me know...

I'll be looking into adding some joystick code at some point fairly soon hopefully - I just don't have a PC joystick atm

[vitaflo]

I see what you mean vitaflo...I guess I can just settle it by saying I'm not going to change it!    

That settles it then!