4RCADE 5TICK — new MAME frontend (WPF/C#), beta.2 out, looking for testers

[4rcade5]

Hey everyone — first post here, glad to finally be able to join in.

I've been building 4RCADE 5TICK, a MAME frontend for Windows, over the past several months. It's fully portable (no install, just extract and run — nothing written to the registry).



The demo below covers some of its features in 4 minutes:

Demo video:

It's up to v1.0.0-beta.2 now on GitHub: https://github.com/4rcstick/4RCADE_5TICK



This was my first real programming project (I came from a web design/HTML/CSS background) and I leaned heavily on AI-assisted coding for a lot of the implementation — wanted to be upfront about that rather than have it come up later.

I'd really appreciate a few people running MAME — cabinet or not — giving it an honest look and telling me what breaks or what's missing, and generally just what they think about it. There are many more features planned for future releases, so all input is welcome.



Thanks for your time,

4RCHIMEDE5

[4rcade5]

Just added a full featured rom sorter to beta.3 with more features planned, including full joystick/controller navigation with a virtual keyboard.  No mouse and keyboard will be needed when I'm done implementing this feature, slated for beta.4 due to it's scope.

But some notes on the built in rom sorter.  No external file editing needed at all.

First - choose to either keep your existing folder structure or have it auto sort into categories using the folder structures from catver.ini.

Second - enable a base filter that uses data from bestgames.ini, including rankings, combined with data acquired from mame.exe -listxml for variant and cloneof details. Base filter will also remove all bootlegs, hacks and prototypes. If you want to see the removed roms, just turn off the filter.

Third - choose to filter by region, with the option to choose multiple regions and an option to add revisions and 2 or 4 player specific versions.

Fourth - choose to filter by the ratings included in bestgames.ini (Working on adding a user rating feature in the near future that will override the bestgames.ini ratings)

Still looking for beta testers.  I'm building this from the ground up in C#/WSP with an AI helper, however, the architecture and layout were all designed by me, with Claude only handling the coding and troubleshooting assistance.  I'm not using claude </code>, but giving highly detailed instructions on how I would like everything to work.

I'm still in need of beta testers for beta.2. See the above post for the github link.

I appreciate your time,

4RCHIMEDE5

[4rcade5]

Beta.3 is almost done.  Having fun with the theme builder.