MameWah vs. AtomicFe

[dommer]

I'm looking into using both of these FE's.

[youki]

Hi Dommer,

Both are in active development.  I think Minwah is still working on his front end too.

I'm may be not the right person to compare both front end. And in fact i really don't know others front end. Before making Atomic the only Front End i tested was Advmenu under dos.

But i think functionnaly there is not lot of difference between frontend. A FrontEnd is a Front end just a menu which run programs.

With Atomic you can run all what you want. Even if you have the feeling you can not, you could always find a solution using .BAT , .VBS , wrapper...etc..  but it is the same thing with MAMEWah and others.

The difference between FE are mainly configuration tools , and layout capabilities, and documentation.

The weak point of Atomic is Documentation (not really up to date) , and configuration tools could be better.  (i never tried MAMEWAH so i can not compare , it is just my feeling).

Now, i 'm concentrated on the development of the engine of Atomic and try to make it the "ultimate FrontEnd" (i know it is pretentious!..    But it is just to chalenging me!) . Then i will concentrate on the Configurations tools and Documentation.

the next version of Atomic will have lot of major new things not yet visible on others FE.

I try to give a really Active Support and really try to solve all issues you could have.
But, here too, MinWah is very Active too.

[Minwah]

Both are in active development.  I think Minwah is still working on his front end too.

Yes I am:

http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=arcadeospc2jamma


I would just try both FE's and choose the one you like best.

[Tiger-Heli]

My 2cents -

Atomic seems to work better "out-of-the-box", if you just want to point it to MAME and be up and running with the default options.

MAMEwah is much more difficult to configure initially, but once you figure it out, it is very easy to customize.

FWIW.

[Minwah]

The weak point of Atomic is Documentation (not really up to date) , and configuration tools could be better.

Same with Mamewah...for those who don't already know...

[mahuti]

Luckily for us... OTHERs have done some documenation on Mamewah....

Hm... maybe I should make a wiki site for arcade related documentation. sure seems like there needs to be one.

[papaschtroumpf]

Both are very good front ends. I'm using mamewah because I'm lazy and I've been using it since before I had a cab, so I'm familiar with it, whereas I had a little more trouble setting up AtomicFE when I first tried (which was a pretty early release and it had a few bugs that prevented me from using it, but that have been fixed since then).

Documentation and help on mamewah is a little easier to come by because it's been around for a longer time, and a few people (stuzza, JCrouse, ...) have spent time documenting it and making sample ini files available.

Both mamewah and Youki are doing an excellent job at supporting their front end, both by fixing any problems and helping newbies in a non-abusive manner.

I really suggest you try both, start by downloading a layout rather than make your own.

For mamewah, make sure you read the ini.txt in the docs documentation, and check out JCrouse's web site (the CPViewer web site) because it has "pre-canned" ini files for all sort of emulators. Somebody (I think screaming) also made a windows based configuration manager for mamewah if you don't like editing ini files by hand, do a search on these boards.

Atomic's setup is graphical, similar to the look of the mamewah config utility.



You should be able to set both up in just a few hours.

[gonzo90017]

That's a great idea mahuti. I'm sure alot of us would really appreciate it.

[SpamMe]

Haven't used Atomic much, but I wanted to point out that its skinning support seems to be a bit more robust/flexible, allowing animation, layering, and (based on the screenshots I've seen) marquee lists as well as normal text lists.

[Minwah]

Haven't used Atomic much, but I wanted to point out that its skinning support seems to be a bit more robust/flexible, allowing animation, layering, and (based on the screenshots I've seen) marquee lists as well as normal text lists.

I haven't used Atomic either, but I agree you seem to be able to achieve more impressive graphical treats!

[TOK]

Your mutual respect for each other leaves one obvious conclusion...
We need either MAMEfe or AtomicWAH that combines the best features of both front ends. 

[JoyMonkey]

Your mutual respect for each other leaves one obvious conclusion...
We need either MAMEfe or AtomicWAH that combines the best features of both front ends. 

And also supports multi-layerd skins with transparent PNGs!

[Minwah]

Your mutual respect for each other leaves one obvious conclusion...
We need either MAMEfe or AtomicWAH that combines the best features of both front ends. 

It's probably not quite that simple!  Still, youki is free to nick any features from Mamewah (few haven't been done before anyway).  In the future Mamewah should be able to do some nice graphical stuff too, I just need to learn some new stuff 

[Howard_Casto]

Your mutual respect for each other leaves one obvious conclusion...
We need either MAMEfe or AtomicWAH that combines the best features of both front ends.

[youki]

And also supports multi-layerd skins with transparent PNGs!

Atomic already support that.

I haven't used Atomic either, but I agree you seem to be able to achieve more impressive graphical treats!

The next version will be really impressive... believe me.. the current one is nothing in comparison! 

It's probably not quite that simple!  Still, youki is free to nick any features from Mamewah (few haven't been done before anyway). 

I never try to  nick features from mamewah volontary. As i said i never used it, i started from a blank page. But as i made a front end it is normal we have some similarity. And i answered to demand of users so some of them used Mamewah so i suppose they asked me for some of your features.

Your mutual respect for each other leaves one obvious conclusion...
We need either MAMEfe or AtomicWAH that combines the best features of both front ends. 

I already thought about a collaboration.   For now is to early , be in few version of the Atomic Engine it could be possible. I will contact you MinWah  to see if you agree to do something together.