Any "Tivo-like" FE's besides HTPC?

[Jakobud]

I've messed with HTPC and its dog slow and confusing and not customizable enough.  Are there any Mame FE's that are similar in style to that?  Where you can have menu's and submenu's and sub-submenu's that you can navigate around in, to choose your emulator, game, etc?  I am envisioning something where you can make your own custom submenu's so you could theoretically have different lists setup for how you want to choose your game.  Like if you want to choose your game by year, or by genre, or alphabetically, etc... any FE's like this?  Seems like so many of the FE's coming out require so many buttons.  Seems like you should be able to make an FE like this that is controlled using the joystick and a single button.

[Howard_Casto]

It's impossible to have a fe run on a joystick and a single button.  That button would be for running the game, but what about exiting?  What about changing to other gamelists/sorting/ect?  A fe needs a minimum of 4 buttons unless it only has one big gamelist (which is nasty and just plain wrong imo).  

Anyway......

Several fe's let you make up lists based on year, genre ect...
So you could make say an 80's gamelist and that way it filters off all the other games.

The reason you can't sort the actual gamelist based on those categories is farily obvious.  You have 4500 entries, unless they are sorted aphanumerically it would be really easy to lose your place.  There have been arcade games for almost 40 years afterall, and there are approx 235 caterogies in the catver.ini.

I think in a media library environment it makes a lot of sense, but not so much on an arcade cabinet.  The biggest thing is to change the sort order on the fly like that would only *easily* be done with an internal database.  Most (not all) of us use simple arrays at this point.  If it were easier to add I'd say "great idea" and jump all over it, but as is I don't think it's usefulness outweighs the amount of time it would take to add.

[Jakobud]

It's impossible to have a fe run on a joystick and a single button.  That button would be for running the game, but what about exiting?  What about changing to other gamelists/sorting/ect?  A fe needs a minimum of 4 buttons unless it only has one big gamelist (which is nasty and just plain wrong imo).  

By saying "one button" I was ignoring the 'exit' button.  That of course would be needed.  I think it would be very very possible to have an FE that ran with only one button besides that though.  You wouldn't need buttons to change gamelists and do sorting if there was some sort of 'tivo-like' menu/interface that I already described.  I think this would be very possible. Just seems logical that would could have a FE where the first thing you see is a menu where you choose how you want to pick your games:

1. By Year
2. By Genre
3. Alphabetically
4. By Console/System
5. etc

You make your selection using the joystick and the one button and it goes to submenu where you would choose (for example) the year, or the genre or console type or whatever.  Ultimately the FE would just allow a (virtually) infinite number of customizable submenu's so you could sort and create the lists however you want.  I'm just curious why no one has come up with something like this.  Seems like if anyone here could come up with something elaborate like this, I think it'd be you HC.  I don't 'think' it would require a full on database for it.  Lemon Launcher (a little known and simple but very innovative Game Launcher clone) mimics this idea the best that I've seen and it just parses user made text files.