Emu/Frontend sound question

[skorch]

Hello everyone.

I was hoping I could set up Mame and a Windows frontend on my PC so that when I play a game it plays an MP3. What I'm hoping is to mix each song with background ambience from an arcade. Depending on which game I select, say Ms. Pac-Man, an MP3 will be randomly selected corresponding to the year of the game.

Has this been done and if not is it possible?

[youki]

I did that on an earlier version of Atomic.  You could play Pacman while listening another Mp3.  But it was too CPU consuming , and it was not a so great feature.  It is really better you play pacman on your PC while listening a normal cd on a Hifi! 

[SpamMe]

Would it need to get the song year from the id3 tag?

[Howard_Casto]

It's possible BUT:

1.  Games have their own music, adding such a feature wouldn't kill their music or sound effects.  (Pacman and classics excluded, but still)

2.  Windows mame version use directx for the sound channels. Depending upon your sound card, playing mame while playing a game will lower the sound quality of one or the other.  Also depending upon the media player you are using the eq's of the player and mame can "fight" each other, causing the volume of the song to be either too low or too high.

3.  As it's already been said, it wastes resources.

4.  The front-end itself should NEVER do this.  The main reason being playing a mp3 takes a few resources, but keeping a fe active in the background takes a TON of resources, even on the simplier ones.  if you display all the artwork for a game, that's about 5 megs of memory there.  Most modern fe's have a memory footprint of at least 10-megs. 


 

[skorch]

Thank you for the info.
Too bad it isn't easily done at this time, I thought it was a great idea.