mamewah background

[Blacksmith]

 
In the world of customizing your game, how would this look...you boot up mamewah as your initial screen on your arcade machine and you have a cool background screen (like all of the other skins) and as you pull your joystick back or forward, it scrolls through your different platforms that you have loaded (nes, atari, visual pinball, mame, etc...) and as it scrolls, each different platform that is highlighted also shows the corresponding gaming platform picture in a side window box just like when you scroll through a particular game and the screenshot shows up in a window box on the side.

[headkaze]

Yes, it's called GameEx 

[Blacksmith]

Yeah, thats what I mean...but for mamewah!  Its gotta be out there...right?  Don't make me switch fe's.

[headkaze]

Oh sorry, I thought you were asking for a front end that does that. Well, I think it's a good feature. I mean it beats the hell out of selecting the menu, then picking the emu. I think MinWah is the guy to ask for this feature. I don't think it would be easy to do without the source code to MameWah.

Even if you wrote an emu selector that showed the console pic etc. after that it would launch MameWah, but then how do you get back to the main console selection menu again? It really has to be a feature built into MameWah I believe.

[Blacksmith]

thanks for the input.  maybe minwah can give it a look.

[2600]

? Why would you want to go through that extra step.

[Popcorrin]

The beta mamewah that is out is already capable of this.  Check out the mamewah forum over at mameworld.net.

[Minwah]

Some people did something to just about achieve this.  You just need emulator-specific layouts (& background images) and to map the 'previous emulator' and 'next emulator' inputs to something useful.

I can't find any example layouts but you would need to have a common part of the image for each system (ie a list of systems, pictures or whatever).  The relevant system would be highlighted depending which system (& therefore layout) is selected.  Not sure if that makes sense...

[SpamMe]

I've done what mamewah mentioned.
Here's an older version of my skin (I know it's somewhat difficult to see clearly):


The list on the right is a part of the emulator-specific background images, so that "Arcade" is highlit when mame is the active emulator, and "Nintendo" when the NES emulator is.
Up and down on the player 2 joystick are mapped to previous and next emulator, and the effect is that you appear to scroll through the emulator list when changing emulators.

This is a bit of a pain to setup the first time, but a collosal pain for maintenance later if ever you want to add/remove/reorder emulators. Additionally (for me, anyway) number of the images for individual PC games and video files also have bits of the background in them to emulate overlapping objects and transparency effects, and this only compounds the maintenance problem. </rant>

I personally like the idea of selecting a platform, and then a game. There was a beta frontend I was fond of called sigTV (thread | site) that did have top-level emulator selection, but the site appears to be gone.

[Timoe]

would you be willing to share your Mamewah themes/layouts?