Any MAME frontends that seamlessly incorporate online/Kaillera functionality?

[slapaham]

Sorry for all the posts but I was also wondering whether there was a frontend that functions with just buttons and sticks and has online functionality? If not, what is the likelihood of developing one?

[youki]

Hi, there is lot of Front End that can run with only stick and button

Mine AtomicFe ,  but also MameWah, Mala, Khameleon and Hyperspin for the Free ones.

there is a list on the Wiki page.

http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/Front-Ends

Concerning online functionality , what you need from the Front End side??

[slapaham]

Hi youki...

Oh, I understand that, I have used several frontends in the past. I meant do any of them allow for online functionality to be controlled through the frontend using simply the joysticks and buttons... it seems a shame having gone to the effort of hiding the PC environment that it is then ruined when you take MAME online...

[youki]

I have never used Kalliera , i don' t really know what is , in fact.

I thought it was a kind of mame version that allows multi-player to play online with mame.

What is his specifity that prevent it to run with Front End?

I think we can find a way to do a plugin for Atomic or Mala  to manage it.

[slapaham]

Not sure, only seen a youtube video of it functioning. It looks a bit 'MAME32'. You select the game you want to play online, right click, select that you want to play it online, it takes you to a list of regions and pings, you select one that looks favourable. Then I think you choose a game, click a button to say you want to open a new game and wait until someone bites. Once they do, it runs the game as per usual. It would be great if a plug in could be devised. I think a lot more people are using this now and it looks quite good from what I've seen. I wouldn't want that authentic feel of my cab to be comprised using it though!

[youki]

I think with the plugin system of Atomic we could do something. The plugins allows to interract graphically with the Front End. It means you can for instance  do some menu to manage connection that are drivable with button and stick and that looks nice  (i mean no windows look) and really integrated in your layout design.

The problem being to see if Kalliera allows technically external tool to access his connection functions.

Unfortunnaly i have no time now , to dig into that. But if somebody have time or already did , may be he could give us more details.  Then i could eventually make a plugin.

[Lilwolf]

I asked the kaillera team a long time ago about incorporating it into my frontend...  I was hoping that I could search for people looking for a game... then automatically launch into that game.

Basically I a "just run our version... and have them do it in our interface"... IE, no help. 

I thought it would be cool, when you launch a game, to register yourself as wanted to play that game online...  then chime in when others want to join... if they quit... give them the option to restart online and go...   Or just search the games... and have the UI look integrated with the front end... but no help... and without it... you would need to support a full mame build.

[youki]

Is Kalliera open source?

[Fyrecrypts]

Is Kalliera open source?

No, it's not.

[slapaham]

Is there any other software that allows you to play MAME online other than Kalliera? How about Xai Link? (or at least I think thats what its called?) If it is, then I know a great deal has been done with it in the Xbox scene indicating it can be modified to suit needs...

[youki]

I have just looked a video on youtube about kaillera.

Indeed it seems difficult to do.  But nothing is impossible with windows and it is quite challenging.

How much people would interrested by this kind of feature integrated in an Front End like Atomic?

[Space Fractal]

If I remember correct MAME team doesn't like Kaillera and such application, simply because its is not open source and hence it might broke license, because the source need to been shared?

Hence no need to add it to the frontend.... But for other emulators it might not have issues like this.

[slapaham]

I'm not endorsing doing anything underhand but surely the coding would lie in the frontend and not in MAME?

I reckon there would be a huge amount of interest if it's feasible! Although, I'd much more interested in a Mala plug-in as that's the frontend I currently have.

I always thought it was very interesting concept and I'm hearing more and more people using it.

[Space Fractal]

Eventuelt (I have not checked Kaillera), I think a standalone application would been nice (which can been started like mame)?

[headkaze]

I wrote a program a while back called "MultiMame" (before that other program of the same name) that attached to the Mame process (vanilla Mame) and was a proxy between the kaillera dll and Mame. It worked except that it would get out of sync eventually because it did not have per-frame syncronisation with Mame.

This program wouldn't have broken the Mame license either like a certain other version of Mame does. Maybe one day I will have a look at the code again and see if I can get it to sync somehow. Perhaps it would work with a diff patch or something. Another problem is I wanted this to be something that would work "behind the scenes" without the need to interact with the kaillera server selection screens etc. But I'm pretty sure I could have sorted that out using inter process memory writes or by sending messages to the window. Anyway it's an interesting concept that I might re-visit again some day.

[slapaham]

I think the layout would need some real thought... I like the idea of it being incorporated directly into the frontend. Not sure how you'd do it - although, I think incorporating it into one of those pop up menus that frontends such as Mamewah and Mala use would be good. Perhaps the game you have highlighted when you press the menu button becomes the game you can select to go online with through the menu system? However, that then begs the question how you'd browse online game locations, pings, etc... perhaps there is someway you could set your location in the ini file, it automatically matches that through Eventuelt, or whatever you're using (which would be hidden), same goes for ping, you'd set the lowest you'd be happy with in the ini file and again it would match it up, and then that just leaves matching the game... I know I'm over simplifying this, but in my mind that is how it would work in basic terms. So all you'd have to do is click 'connect online' (or something along those lines) on the menu system and the frontend would put the game online and allow participants to drop in on the game or search for games available.

Hope that wasn't too crazy a suggestion!

[headkaze]

Actually when I said "inter process memory writes" I also meant reading it directly as well. For example I wrote a model2 wrapper before it had command line support and that would read the listbox contents from it's memory and then double click on the correct game automatically. So I was thinking of using a method like this where the proxy program opens the kailera server selection window but keeps it hidden in the background, reads it's contents and then displays it to the user in some cab friendly way. From there the user selects the server and the proxy app then simulates the user selecting the item in the listbox. You can pretty much simulate any user interaction with a window either by sending it messages or by reading and writing to the process memory directly. So it's all very feasible. The problem isn't so much that, but the actual syncronisation with Mame. It needs to be able to halt Mame on a frame to keep the clients in perfect sync.

In my tests all you had to do was jump around a few times in Street Fighter and the two players would eventually be in different places on each screen. If someone with a bit more Mame experience can suggest some methods to keep it in sync then it could work.

[TheShanMan]

While I've never used Kaillera before, a cab friendly Kaillera is a cool idea. Hope this idea comes to fruition.

[slapaham]

Is anyone working on a solution for this? I would certainly like to contribute (if I can) but let's just say programming isn't my strong point!

[mud409]

Sorry to bump such an old thread, but the subject's relevance makes it necessary.

I wrote my own frontend to launch kaillera games on various different clients, and emulators (through command line for frontends, or standalone gui. If anyone is interested I can post it). Anyway, I had the n02 p2p client dev add some settings (started in feb client) to make this process more painless. If you open your n02.ini in your emu folder (if it's not in emu dir, you're running an old version), it should look something like below. ATM I forget what all the settings do, but the important one is auto=1. This will automate everything, and use the settings in n02.ini. So all you have to do is write gamename and IP to ini, and script the emulator to load kaillera. Pretty simple.
[p2p]
sdlg=0
auto=1
enlist=0
lcip=192.168.0.1:27888
sgam=Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (rev 1.2)
port=27886

If you guys want, I can post my script (which is forever a WIP), or define the ini's keys better.

[headkaze]

Kaillera is not supported by the MAME Dev team because it breaks their license. CS MAME on the other hand is.

PS GameEx has built in support for it.

[mud409]

Kaillera is not supported by the MAME Dev team because it breaks their license. CS MAME on the other hand is.

PS GameEx has built in support for it.

So this means we're not supposed to script kaillera for our FE's? Or every emulator must abide by MAME's laws? Or that we can't compile their open source software to how we see fit (do you keep your nag screens?)? I don't get why everyone has to mention this when talking about kaillera. I didn't even mention MAME!

Sorry for being so pessimistic, but after you've heard that comment enough times, it'll happen.

As well, while the emu end of kaillera is closed, the p2p client I was referring to is completely open. It's also the best way to connect online for a good 60% of the games emulated.

Finally, CS MAME isn't perfect. It only supports games with save states, and other various factors will determine your gameplay. So some of us have no choice but to play our games on kaillera, and have been for years. Personally my aforementioned frontend has support for CS MAME, Kaillera MAMEs, nFBA & FBA, & GGPO. I can also launch Genesis and SNES through it with ease. It's exactly what you were explaining with your model1 wrapper, but on steroids. It could make almost any arcade cabinet's frontend at least 80% online.

It's all about the options, and having as many of them as possible; never know where you'll find a match at.

[Lilwolf]

I think the issue is developers aren't working with kaillera since they feel like its probably going to die (heck, I didn't think anyone used it anymore).

If you where going to add anything, seems like cs mame would get people more excited, and you could talk about it on mame forums without getting kicked off.

Here, I don't think anyone would have a problem with the support.  But it might not be a selling point.

btw, I never had that much luck with Kaillera.  I brought this up a few times in the past, and nobody really seemed interested.

I personally would love to see csmame working with hyperspin.  Like maybe a middleware pieces to launch the games, I'm just not sure how to handle the 'I would play these 10 games if others are interested'... and add that to a frontend well... plus notifiy you if your ingame.

[mud409]

They're simply not working with it because it's not open source. The lack of, or bulk of, kaillera community has nothing to do with it.

As for having an online service that not many people seem interested in; have you tried to play arcade games on XBL or PSN lately? Take MK games for example, near impossible to get a decent online game that's in the same country as you (you can't even buy umk3 on xbl anymore). Kaillera now has a lot of the MK players from console merging over (plus p2p is better than most console netcode). Kaillera mame also has features you won't find anywhere else. Like 4 player 2v2 games (that's 4 players connected, 1 per character), in games like mvc and umk3.

Try the P2P version, you won't be disappointed. The only problem right now is that currently the waiting for games, and force port features are down (will be fixed soon). So you have to forward your port manually, and find the person you want to play with somewhere else (chat clients, forums, etc).

Finally, here's the problem with development of emulated arcade games with any netcode; most people's computers SUCK! Processor lag/frame skipping causes lag spikes. While they may be able to play these games offline perfect, online is a different story. This is one of the major reasons that 0.64 is the most popular mame for online. This is also why CS MAME will take quite a while to take off.

PS Hyperspin's hyperlaunch script could easily be modified to work with CS MAME.

[atmavan]

Sorry to bump such an old thread, but the subject's relevance makes it necessary.

I wrote my own frontend to launch kaillera games on various different clients, and emulators (through command line for frontends, or standalone gui. If anyone is interested I can post it). Anyway, I had the n02 p2p client dev add some settings (started in feb client) to make this process more painless. If you open your n02.ini in your emu folder (if it's not in emu dir, you're running an old version), it should look something like below. ATM I forget what all the settings do, but the important one is auto=1. This will automate everything, and use the settings in n02.ini. So all you have to do is write gamename and IP to ini, and script the emulator to load kaillera. Pretty simple.
[p2p]
sdlg=0
auto=1
enlist=0
lcip=192.168.0.1:27888
sgam=Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (rev 1.2)
port=27886

If you guys want, I can post my script (which is forever a WIP), or define the ini's keys better.

could u send me more details about your script? Actually I want to automate connecting emulators to Kaillera server without GUI of kailerra. Does your script allows to do this? Anyway you can send what you have to my email. Thank you

[Haze]

You're *far* better off using MameHub these days.  More modern, more secure, still actively supported by the devs and still being developed.  If you have feature requests they might actually be listened to there, although what you're requesting sounds a bit pointless.

http://www.mamehub.info/