Any FE's with cascaded menu's?

[Jakobud]

I cant really think of any sort of Frontend out there with support for custom cascaded menu's.  Are there any that are capable of doing this?

I am envisioning something like this:  You start the FE, the first thing you see is a menu of different emulators you can choose from.  You choose Mame for example and a new menu appears where you choose "View by Genre, View my Name, View by Year, View by Controls, etc".  Then for example you could choose "View by Year" and another menu would pop up displaying "1978, 1979, 1980, etc" and you would choose whatever year you want and then finally another menu pops up that actually shows the list of games for that year.  And this sublevel, choosing the game would actually start Mame.

Of course with what I have described above is simply an example.  Ultimately, all the menu's would be completely custom definable.  Their contents would most likely be that of ascii files that you could edit by hand in order to create as many unique custom lists/menus/categories as you want.  The FE would make it very easy to switch from one menu to other sub menu's and back up to parent menu's.  

Of course the FE has to be a frontend made for arcade cabinets,i.e. no Windows looking crap, must be able to be controlled using nothing but a keyboard etc...

Anyways, this is a type of FE that I have been wanting lately and I have been experiementing with different FE's lately to see what I can find.  The one that comes the closest so far is Lemon Launcher simply because it supports infinite # of submenu's.  But the program is simple and I'm not even sure if it's in continued development.

Can anyone point me in any direction?

[AlanS17]

Sure. Look up Microsoft's website. Search for "c++"  

Seriously, I don't think such a thing exists.

However, if you want to go through the trouble you could probably make a cascaded set of seperate installations through Game Launch or some other low-intensity front-end.

[PacManFan]

I cant really think of any sort of Frontend out there with support for custom cascaded menu's.  Are there any that are capable of doing this?

I am envisioning something like this:  You start the FE, the first thing you see is a menu of different emulators you can choose from.  You choose Mame for example and a new menu appears where you choose "View by Genre, View my Name, View by Year, View by Controls, etc".  Then for example you could choose "View by Year" and another menu would pop up displaying "1978, 1979, 1980, etc" and you would choose whatever year you want and then finally another menu pops up that actually shows the list of games for that year.  And this sublevel, choosing the game would actually start Mame.

Of course with what I have described above is simply an example.  Ultimately, all the menu's would be completely custom definable.  Their contents would most likely be that of ascii files that you could edit by hand in order to create as many unique custom lists/menus/categories as you want.  The FE would make it very easy to switch from one menu to other sub menu's and back up to parent menu's.  

Of course the FE has to be a frontend made for arcade cabinets,i.e. no Windows looking crap, must be able to be controlled using nothing but a keyboard etc...

Anyways, this is a type of FE that I have been wanting lately and I have been experiementing with different FE's lately to see what I can find.  The one that comes the closest so far is Lemon Launcher simply because it supports infinite # of submenu's.  But the program is simple and I'm not even sure if it's in continued development.

Can anyone point me in any direction?

yeah,
check out EmuTron www.pacmanfan.com . You can define as many sub menus as you want. Downlaod the main distribution, and then get the multi-emu script. Each script can act as a separate menu, or you can have multiple menus defined in a single script.

You'll have to generate all the information that goes into the lists by using the etconfig program. You can launch multiple emulators, or applications.
-PMF

[Jakobud]

Sounds interesting Pacmanfan.  I downloaded it and messed with everything for about 10 minutes...and was extremely confused by everything.  Maybe I am just really missing something here.  I couldnt even figure out how to do basic things such as change the font displayed, or how to define what keys did what, etc...maybe i am just really overlooking something...i dunno.

I've been messing more Lemon Launcher....I never realized how nice and simple and great this program is.  You can configure all the submenu's very easily.  All you have to do is edit a few ascii text files to define all the menus and their contents and you're off   Looks like I'm gonna spend a little time in SortInfo and Excel to configure all my different lists I want until I figure out a way to automate it all.