An icon based frontend for my Cab

[markb]

I've been toying with the idea for a while of having a icon based frontend for my Cab to give it a slightly different look than the Windows frontend. .

So after a bit of research I settled on Talisman desktop which is available on trial from here:-

http://www.lighttek.com/talisman.htm

Here is the cab - It's used for playing a lot of different games including Mame however I tend to play a lot of action/adventure games and 2 player racing games against my sitdown cab. The PC is an XP3000 with a Radeon 9800pro and 768mb so it has plenty juice for even the newest games and is capable of running something in the background



Rather than start completely from scratch I adapted the Car PC theme (credit to the author) which was created as a touchscreen interface for use in a car.

So any way after a lot of work, in particular creating the icons, I now have an almost finished frontend:-

This is the main screen which boots up automatically. The frontend can be controlled via joystick however I have a trackball installed so it isn't really necessary.

All of the regular windows options are accesible from here however I am contemplating removing the bottom task bar or hiding it at least.

Selecting an icon can either launch the application itself or bring up a submenu. Here is the one for the games.


Each of the icons on the right brings up a submenu as such.


The button in the top left returns to the previous menu also from the main page the setting icon at the bottom brings up this menu.



I've still got some work to do, I would like some sounds to play when selecting each of the menus and I'm not happy with a couple of the icons but so far so good.

[c64rulez]

looks interesting
I've just downloaded that talisman thingy to play with, although I'm writing my own frontend. who knows ?

[danny_galaga]

hey, i know youre going to joystick control but geez that would be a great idea if you did it touch screen- provided you could touch the screen of course! looks good (",)

[RayB]

Interesting. I've been toying with the idea of writing a Flash based front-end myself...

[markb]

Danny, I actually have a touchscreen but not in the cab as it is too small (15 inch ELO). Surprisingly I never thought about using the frontend on it but I've just finished trying it out and it works very well indeed. I use my touchscreen to play a few games but now I fancy turning it into a jukebox/games machine so I'll let everyone know how I get on with that one as even typing this post I have had several ideas.

Also I must mention another little App that was extremely helpful
http://www.deviouscodeworks.co.uk/imagicon.html
Imagicon was a very small program that I used for turning a lot of larger PNG, BMP and  JPG files into the 128 x 128 icons that I used. Being free and 1mb in size it is very useful to have.