FE developers: Would this be a difficult option to add to Front ends?

[AllisterFiend]

I have been following Mccoy178's thread about his Dual Monitor Cabinet at "http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=50889.0", and I really like the idea of the two monitor set up as I have this also (my second monitor is an LCD monitor and I plan on using it to display the control panel layout of a particular game using Johnny5).

  I am in the process of designing a new layout for my front end and would like to be able to use the secondary monitor to display extra information about a game that is currently selected on the main screen.

  For example, I would have on the main screen the basic info like the list of games to select from as well as a snap of the game selected, on the secondary monitor it could have the picture of the cabinet, flyer, even a mame intro movie playing, history...you get the picture.  Of course, both monitor layouts would be designed using a layout editor like it is done now.  Then after the game is selected, Johnny 5 would kick in and place the control layout on the secondary monitor if that is what you wanted it to do.

  I'm not a programmer so I'm not sure if this would be a difficult task or not, but I wanted to throw the idea out there since mame now supports multiple monitors and I'm seeing people here at BYOAC use the secondary monitor for games such as punch-out as well as other games.

  Also, this might already be a possibility with a current FE that I am not aware of yet, if it is could you let me know, the two front ends that I am most familiar with are Dragon King 0.99 and Atomic FE.

  Dual monitor support could be added to the fe wiki in the list of supported features.

Thank you for any info.

Allister Fiend

[youki]

AtomicFe don't support dual screen yet.

It is on my future enhancement idea list. But for now, i don't have Dual Screen to be able to develop that feature.

I guess DK should already support that.

[Howard_Casto]

Dk's dual screen support is limited. As a matter of fact it is so limited that I'll be ditching it next release.   

I'm working on a stand-alone app (dualie) that'll display stats, j5, ect on a secondary display.  I'm not sure when it'll be out though as just the other day my primary hd failed and I lost some data, most notably some of the recent source code to dk and dualie. 

[headkaze]

Dk's dual screen support is limited. As a matter of fact it is so limited that I'll be ditching it next release.   

I'm working on a stand-alone app (dualie) that'll display stats, j5, ect on a secondary display.  I'm not sure when it'll be out though as just the other day my primary hd failed and I lost some data, most notably some of the recent source code to dk and dualie. 

Man I just recently had a HDD failure on my primary drive on my dev machine. All my source code is in my user directory and that got damaged so when I rebooted my machine it created a new user directory with all the options set back to default! Luckily this was after a recent total re-install of the machine, so everything was already backed up on a separate HDD. I had done a recent update to one of my applications, so to rescue the source I used a program called ReadNTFS which runs from DOS and allows you to copy files to floppy. I recommend you give this a try as the Recovery Console will not let you access many folders.

[Howard_Casto]

Well does it just let you read the drive, or actually recover the data?  Because I can already read the drive, I hooked it up as a slave after I got my new drive installed.  That's how I managed to get most of it back.

Basically it did the same thing you described.... screwed up the xp install so bad that it thought it was a new install and then got progressively worse to the point that xp wouldn't even boot. 

The drive had two partitions, a small partition for xp (and that's about it) and a large partition for everything else. 

The xp part turned out to be in decent shape, ironically and aside for xp being gone I managed to get my desktop files, cookies, ect all back. 

The big drive "threw up" on me during the install of my new harddrive and managed to trick my mb into thinking it was the boot drive and screwed up the ntloader crap on my new drive.  It also managed to totally screw up it's own file index. 

Now xp managed to reconstruct it, but I lost what looks like the last three programs I accessed, Dragon King's source (just one module file luckily, which was empty).  A new helper app for dk, which is totally gone, and my led wiz demonstration app.  Everything else apparently survived. 

My fear is that by accessing the old drive again is gonna screw up my new install.  I didn't think that was possbile, but considering it's done it already I guess it is. 

Sorry, just venting.