Khameleon front end 2nd public beta now available

[headkaze]

You can play with the key repeat delay in the Advanced options in konfig.

I don't know what will happen with the older Ipacs. It might or might not work. I have an Ipac but I don't know how old or what model it is. What model(s) of Ipac don't have a key repeat?

More info about it can be read in this thread

What about key-repeat (Typematic)?
In USB mode key repeat is supported as on a normal keyboard and is handled by the PC. In PS/2 mode key repeat is not generally desirable for gaming because sending unnecessary strings of key-presses to the PC can cause unwanted clutter on the PS/2 interface and steal CPU cycles. It is useful though to have key repeat outside of gaming, for example for scrolling up and down game lists in a front end. The I-PAC solves this problem by implementing a selective repeat on up/down only, for scrolling through lists. If you have a need for repeat on all inputs, this can be supplied on request.

Judging by this IPACS in PS/2 mode have a selective repeat for up/down. But I'm not sure if this is the case on older IPAC's. My MiniPAC for example does not have key repeat when pressing Up or Down.

[ErikRuud]

I am pretty sure that my IPac is more than old enough. The current IPac utilities don't work with my IPac and the one that does work can't be used under Win XP or 2K.  I have to use an old Win98 machine if I should decide to change my key settings. 

I will test it out tonight.

[Cakemeister]

I have reproduced Erik's video and snap problems. His snaps are png files that have 4 bits per pixel. I am expecting paletted png files to have 8 bits per pixel. I can fix that. Also, his .AVI files are encoded at 24 bits per pixel, where I am expecting 32. That's also fixable.

[ErikRuud]

Would the snap issue be due to my older version of MAME? (0.76)

[Cakemeister]

I guess older versions of MAME produced the 4-bit pngs, so yes.

But I've already fixed it, it was just a few lines of code to add.

[ErikRuud]

Ok, I just checked it out and my PS/2 iPac does not do key repeat.

However Khameleon deals with it just fine.  If I hold the stick in any direction Khameleon continues to scroll.  Kymaera did as well.

[Cakemeister]

FYI I've taken down the existing binary in preparation for uploading a new binary, but for some reason I couldn't upload it.

A revised binary will be up soon.

[Cakemeister]

Okay, the new binary is up now. Get it here.

Mostly bugfixes, but I have added per-emulator artwork paths and I have greatly improved the way the animations work.

[ErikRuud]

Excellent!

So far it is working perfectly on my laptop.

The snaps and videos are displaying correctly and the background music stops when a game is launched.

I really like the SQL filters for building the game lists.

I "fixed" the Mala skin by changing the Y coordinate for the "Movie Preview" as shown:

Code: [Select]

                    <Y>
                        1930
<!-- 2048 -->
                    </Y>


[ErikRuud]

I have been playing around with some of the skins and came up with this:

[Cakemeister]

That's pretty cool. Can that "space" part be a movie? It would be neat to have the nebulas and stuff swirl around.

Have you ever seen the Drempels screensaver/desktop background? Having that as a background would be pretty neat, too. In fact, since the source code to Drempels is available, I just might make that happen.

[ErikRuud]

Drempels looks interesting.

A few months ago I started messing around with some ideas I had for writing my own front end.  One idea was to have animated backgrounds that would be callable pieces of code.  Sort of like WinAmp visualizations.  Then Khameleon came along and I stopped working on it.

I had put together a Java app to test out some of my concepts.  A lot of the code was borrowed from various tutorials that I found on the internet.  Google Ping and ZoomyBackground.

I was also working on ideas for animated image objects.  The MAME logos in these screen shots could move around.

[ErikRuud]

As an added bonus I left the Ping game logic in place.

[Cakemeister]

I looked at Drempels but I'm not going to make it happen because it has a lot of inline assembly code in it, which is not machine portable.

The ZoomyBackground looks pretty cool, although it will be a bit of work to translate it to C++ and make it work with my data structures and classes and OpenGL. I just might make that happen because it will add some pizzazz and splash to the frontend.

[headkaze]

I looked at Drempels but I'm not going to make it happen because it has a lot of inline assembly code in it, which is not machine portable.

The ZoomyBackground looks pretty cool, although it will be a bit of work to translate it to C++ and make it work with my data structures and classes and OpenGL. I just might make that happen because it will add some pizzazz and splash to the frontend.

The best bet would be to use shaders for those sort of effects. I think it would be great to have "shader plugins" that add some crazy visual effects and transitions. Check out NVidia's FX Composer.

[Cakemeister]

That's pretty interesting.

As it happens, I just spent a lot of time working on getting shader programs to work. It would not be hard to modify the code to run an arbitrary shader program on the background image or any other image for that matter.

I only support GLSL shader language, hopefully anyone who is savvy enough to write a shader program can get around that restriction.

Thanks for the idea.
 

[headkaze]

That's pretty interesting.

As it happens, I just spent a lot of time working on getting shader programs to work. It would not be hard to modify the code to run an arbitrary shader program on the background image or any other image for that matter.

I only support GLSL shader language, hopefully anyone who is savvy enough to write a shader program can get around that restriction.

Thanks for the idea.

To give you an idea of what you can do with shaders, check out these two 2d games especially things like explosions and transitions. Notice how the whole screen will distort using simple wave algs and shaders. It's where FE's really need to go I think and I even reakon there is some room for particle effects too. 3d is fun innit

[Cakemeister]

Okay, shaders are in.

I ran an example vertex shader:

Code: [Select]

void main(void)
{
   gl_TexCoord[0]=gl_MultiTexCoord0;
   gl_Position=ftransform();
}

and an example fragment shader:

Code: [Select]

uniform sampler2D current_texture;

void main(void)
{
   vec4 current_color=texture2D(current_texture, vec2(gl_TexCoord[0])).rgba;

   gl_FragColor=current_color.gbra;
}

which results in the attached screenshot, when the shader was run on the background and overlay images in the dk skn.

[RetroBorg]

That's real nice.