I have two questions though (and sorry if these have already been answered):
1. Can I control the volume of individual videos? I have 5 running at a time and want the main selected one to be 100% but the others to be on less, say 50% for ambience.
2. Is is possible to have more than 1 favourites list for an emulator? I tend to have a large list (around 500) of all the games I play, and then a much smaller one (of about 50) which I use more often.
Many thanks!
Great work on the layout! To answer your questions: 1 - all the videos are mapped to the same volume control. So all you can do with the current version is to disable sound completely for a video or have it play at the "video" volume.
Layouts can create their own sounds (look up add_sound in the documentation) and those get played at a separate volume... so you could try doing that to create some ambient sound with your background videos. If you feed a video file to the add_sound command it should be able to load and play just the audio track.
For #2, the favourites lists are saved by romlist, so you could have a setup with two identical romlists with the favourites for the first being the large list and the favs for the second being the small list. The frontend also allows you to assign custom "tags" to individual games and filter based on those tags, so you could do one of your lists using tags...
you mean once the list has been generated, it still works in the back ground to flesh out those names? i have it running now with the attractman layout and all my moms have the file name. i'll leave it on and see if this works.
Hi Tony, the frontend doesn't do any background work to try and get names, so nothing is going to happen. The only time it will try to populate the list is when you run the "generate romlist" option for an emulator. With mame, it doesn't try to use the net but rather runs the -listxml command. You should double check that you have the path to your copy of mame configured correctly and that mame is returning xml info when you run "mame -listxml" from the command line. If it is then try re-generating the romlist in attract-mode.
Thanks raygun, that worked exactly as expected! Now I have a unique background for each emulator. My only other request/suggestion would be to have a text fallback option when an image is not available. For example, I have a wheel configured which shows the marquee of the game, but I don't have marquees for every game. It'd be nice if there was an option to display [Name] or [Title] if no artwork is available for a certain game instead of having a blank space in my wheel. My current workaround is to put a default Wheel.png in my layout directory, so at least I have a box so the wheel doesn't look broken.
You could try something like this:
fe.add_text( "[Title]", 10, 10, 100, 50 );
fe.add_artwork( "marquee", 10, 10, 100, 50 );
which should add the game title to the same spot as the marquee artwork. The game title should only show up if a marquee image isn't drawn over top of it...