Delurk and New Software Idea

[tedhowe]

Hi all...

I have been a lurker here for a LONG time... I first built my MAME machine about 2.5 years ago.

I am a programmer by trade, and now that I have my MAME cabinet networked to the rest of the house, I have a software idea that I thought might have some interest.

Here's what I am thinking... an add-on utility for MAME that would be fed the year of the ROM that is being launched and would shuffle play songs from an MP3 archive that match the year of the ROM.

Once the basic functionality is running, I could see adding in the ability to customize the list of ROMs and/or change the parameters of what years would be allowed for the shuffle (i.e. +/- one or two years, etc).

Any thoughts?

It seems like a small enough project to get started with and it would get me into doing something that could feed back to the MAME community with a neat little adder.

Comments welcome....



Ted

[Howard_Casto]

I think it's a a novel idea except for the fact that most of us don't want music playing while we are playing a game.  

[Cameronj]

It sounds cool to me! Go for it!

[Lilwolf]

haha I love it!  Great idea!

[eightbit]

Hi all...

I have been a lurker here for a LONG time... I first built my MAME machine about 2.5 years ago.

I am a programmer by trade, and now that I have my MAME cabinet networked to the rest of the house, I have a software idea that I thought might have some interest.

Here's what I am thinking... an add-on utility for MAME that would be fed the year of the ROM that is being launched and would shuffle play songs from an MP3 archive that match the year of the ROM.

Once the basic functionality is running, I could see adding in the ability to customize the list of ROMs and/or change the parameters of what years would be allowed for the shuffle (i.e. +/- one or two years, etc).

Any thoughts?

It seems like a small enough project to get started with and it would get me into doing something that could feed back to the MAME community with a neat little adder.

Comments welcome....

I'm not a programmer and know little about programming.

I like your concept. I have a friend thats a programmer that has been working on something for me. What I want is for another computer(old laptop) to display the marquee, screenshot and other artwork for the game that I am playing. I want to build this laptop into the marquee of my cabinet. Mame32 has a function to broadcast the selected game to all windows. He has it working using that but I'd like to use a different front end.

My question is how do you propose to catch what rom is being played so that it can play the appropriate music? Are you going to write your own front end?

Thanks for reading this,
Tim

You can reply here or email me at tim@hower.us

[papaschtroumpf]

In MameWah, could you simply read the debug.log file? I'm not sure when the file is written...
otherwise it seems all you need would be a wreapper/batch file that would broadcast the name of thegame, write to a file or whatever, then launch mame itself.
I like the idea, now anyone has a cheap laptop with an 8x22 inch screen for sale?  

[DAmnb]

As a novelty this would be great, nothing I would use all the time but sometimes it could be quite nice, I say go for it!

[eightbit]

In MameWah, could you simply read the debug.log file? I'm not sure when the file is written...
otherwise it seems all you need would be a wreapper/batch file that would broadcast the name of thegame, write to a file or whatever, then launch mame itself.
I like the idea, now anyone has a cheap laptop with an 8x22 inch screen for sale?  

I talked to my programmer friend today and thats exactly what he proposed. We didn't know about the debug file so we might have to look into that.

So what if the screen isn't the full width of the cab, though that would be the ultimate. I think you could still make it look good as part of a marquee. Or you could get all crazy and do like 3 screens wide.