Creating custom front end (where to start?)

[Sshado]

I am trying to get back into programming and what works best is having a project.  I decided I wanted to create my own Front End for my arcade.  Problem is that I do not want to "Reinvent the wheel", so is there any open source software out there for Front Ends?  I work best when I have a starting point that I can either add to or re-write).

Anyone have any ideas where to start looking for this?

Thanks!

[Gray_Area]

Look up the front ends and see whether they are open source. I think at least some are.

[shanghaiguide]

If you do make something, please make it SDL based. 
Pretty please

There are a bunch of open source frontends out there.

Wah!cade, LemonLauncher, GameLauncher, etc.

If you did it SDL based, it would work nicely in a lot of different systems, without being system specific.
PM me if you are interested in collaborating on something i'm currently doing, as I need a decent open source front end too

[nipsmg]

Here's another done in .NET: http://arcadefrontend.codeplex.com/

This will likely be windows specific, but you can do cross-platform development in .NET using Mono and SDLDOTNET/Tao and other cross-platform graphics libraries for .NET.

[Howard_Casto]

If you do make something, please make it SDL based. 
Pretty please

There are a bunch of open source frontends out there.

Wah!cade, LemonLauncher, GameLauncher, etc.

If you did it SDL based, it would work nicely in a lot of different systems, without being system specific.
PM me if you are interested in collaborating on something i'm currently doing, as I need a decent open source front end too

Way to mention FE's that are almost as old as the hobby.  Seriously, don't start with any of those. 

You are welcome to the source code to any of my old fes, but you'll hate me because they are all written in vb6.  I did one that I never released a couple of years ago called pacFE.  I built a pacman cabinet, so I wanted a really simple fe similar to those xx in 1 boards.

[nipsmg]

Also, if you're a .NET developer (or want to learn .NET) you might want to look at MonoGame: http://monogame.codeplex.com/

It's an open source implementation of XNA (which is a game dev library for windows / xbox 360). 

From the site:

What is MonoGame?

MonoGame is an Open Source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4 Framework. Our goal is to allow XNA developers on Xbox 360, Windows & Windows Phone to port their games to the iOS, Android, Mac OS X, Linux and Windows 8 Metro. Windows Phone 8, OUYA and PlayStation Mobile development is currently in progress.

There's some tutorials on their site. 

[mathew_123456]

You are more than welcome to go to town on my old project..

http://mercuryfe.codeplex.com/

Never quite got back around to finishing it. I had thought of rewriting it making it completely web based and O/S independent. I even started - still a fair ways off though. The only reason I thought of going down this path was that both firefox/chrome got joystick support with their latest builds - as well as real full screen. Which O/S doesn't have apache, PHP, mysql and firefox.
Still sticking to DB - nothing quite like querying wads of data with a nice bit of SQL!
Ahh life. Why do you always get in the way of living