Suggestion for Howard

[Mike]

Simple enhancement. Sounds dumb but would be simple to do and useful. Howard you did a great job on Lazarus but I've noticed as I use it that there is no great one setup on it for multiple emulators. Basically my plan is to create a menu that loads before the current frontend that will allow you to call in to the frontend to load a different frontend or a different setup for the same frontend for what type of games you are displaying. For example say I want to play an nes game. When I select nes from the menu I will call a setup for lazarus that has a background and layout setup that I want for nes games. Same for like pinball, snes, sega and so on. Because on each setup I want the backgrounds different and the layout changed to work well with the data I want to display. Basically it should take no time at all to create this menu but Howard it would be nice if from the command line you could call lazarus and load different setups. Either way it's not a huge deal because I can always put multiple copies of Lazarus on the system. Plus I want to do this because the 3-D arcade is so cool but basically I've found it only works well and is useful with a certain number of games in it. Which is fine but I still want to have another way to get to all games. Maybe I'm off my rocker and I'm the only one who has a need for this. If anyone would want this after I write it let me know. It should probably be done in a week or so.

[)p(]

Plus I want to do this because the 3-D arcade is so cool but basically I've found it only works well and is useful with a certain number of games in it. Which is fine but I still want to have another way to get to all games. Maybe I'm off my rocker and I'm the only one who has a need for this. If anyone would want this after I write it let me know. It should probably be done in a week or so.

yeah most people prefer a listbox for a large number of games...I prefer the cylinder arcade and paging menu's for those big lists..I also feel that a listbox is a bit out of place in 3darcade and Howard's one is allready perfect...so instead of adding a listbox to 3darcade we plan to make our fe's work together :-)

peter

[Howard_Casto]

Simple enhancement. Sounds dumb but would be simple to do and useful. Howard you did a great job on Lazarus but I've noticed as I use it that there is no great one setup on it for multiple emulators. Basically my plan is to create a menu that loads before the current frontend that will allow you to call in to the frontend to load a different frontend or a different setup for the same frontend for what type of games you are displaying. For example say I want to play an nes game. When I select nes from the menu I will call a setup for lazarus that has a background and layout setup that I want for nes games. Same for like pinball, snes, sega and so on. Because on each setup I want the backgrounds different and the layout changed to work well with the data I want to display. Basically it should take no time at all to create this menu but Howard it would be nice if from the command line you could call lazarus and load different setups. Either way it's not a huge deal because I can always put multiple copies of Lazarus on the system. Plus I want to do this because the 3-D arcade is so cool but basically I've found it only works well and is useful with a certain number of games in it. Which is fine but I still want to have another way to get to all games. Maybe I'm off my rocker and I'm the only one who has a need for this. If anyone would want this after I write it let me know. It should probably be done in a week or so.

It's one of those "I would if I could but I can't."  You see if you look at my skin files they are all based on a 640*480 screen. (in twips, not pixels) When a skin is loaded the screen is resized to 640*480, the elements are arranged and then i use a scaling class to resize eveything at once.  The whole time you get a nice blank screen while it is loading. When you go into the options and shange a skin, wht happens is it changes the skin value and then reloads the screen and the old screen is destroyed.  

What does all of that have to do with anything?  Well what it means is skin changing is both slow and touchy.  If I implemented this, you would get a blank screen for a few seconds every time you switched screens.  Also if you changed based on the game type (nintendo, ect) then it would changed even more often in a mixed list environment. I also figure that changing the skin that often would lead to crashes.  I really shouldn't allow screen switching now, but I really like the option and it does ok as long as you don't changed a lot of times in a row.

I've had this suggestion several times, and it's not that I'm ignoring anyone, it's just I can't do it right now.  

Sorry