A new feature request for a FrontEnd developer?

[Cananas]

Hello,

Actually, I miss a feature in MALA, MameWah or AtomicFE that Advancemenu (I think the only one) has it. Advancemenu can list only the parent games -OK, nothing new- but, if you want to see what clones this game has, you can press a key and it shows (in the same or another windows) all of the clones this game has (including the parent), and you can select one to play. I hope you undestand me what I want to tell you.

Could it be possible to implement this? Anyone interested?

[Howard_Casto]

Well I can tell you why it isn't in there.  It would require an on-the-fly filter and building of the list. 

If you just want a listbox, with no artwork or anything I can tell you (and the other devs) how to do it though.  You can call mame with the parent rom name followed by -lc  That'll give you a list of all the games, with both the romname and game name. 

I think the reason this was never added though is because this would only work with mame, and fe devs are getting away from mame-specific options.  Depending upon how the backend is setup, doing it the old-fashioned way could take time.    Also advancemenu isn't fully skinnable, and to make a pop-up list in a skinnable fe would complicate the skin layout. 

It's a good idea though, I'll look into putting it into DK, just in a different way to avoid the issues I brought up. 

[Cananas]

I think the reason this was never added though is because this would only work with mame, and fe devs are getting away from mame-specific options.

But it would be possible to do this clone/parent relationship with console games. Haze makes with his Genesis/Megadrive emulator.

[Howard_Casto]

Not exactly.  Haze's emulator does that because he is a mame dev and purposefully wrote it to mimic mame. 

Technically speaking console games don't have a clone/parent relationship because they consist of a single rom, not multiple roms like mame games.

What I am trying to say is haze "faked it" for better organization.  In reality you can't do that in any other emu. 

[Cananas]

I understand what you say me. I want to say that I, you or someone could do a faked relation ships beetween, for instance, a US version a Japanese version and the European version of the same game, like HazeMD makes.

[Howard_Casto]

Yes but are you going to release clrmamepro dats?  Are they going to be updated as often as goodtools are? 

Do you see my point yet?

[Tiger-Heli]

You might check out EmuLoader - it has a grouped mode view like what you are asking for, and Ciro is adding console support to it.

It's Windowsy, though . . .

[Cananas]

Yes but are you going to release clrmamepro dats?  Are they going to be updated as often as goodtools are? 

Do you see my point yet?

Yes I see your point, but if there is no possibility to do that in the front end, no one will make those clrmamepro dat.
This is my point. I think it wold be an interesting feature. Of course, optional.

[Cananas]

It's Windowsy, though . . .

Yep, this is the question. A no Windowsy front-end with this feature... i wish someday...

[Tiger-Heli]

Ciro is also working on building his own .ini - .dat files to support console emulators (based on Mess), if that helps any other FE devs.