Mame Gui Ideas Etc.


DaveC

Internal Development
Joined
Mar 4, 2004
Messages
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The MAME port is really nice as it is for a first release. This is outstanding work and Franxis has worked miracles.

I have a couple of ideas that would enhance it.

Yes we all know that a .fxe frontend would be nice. Not going to go into that further.

One other thing may be even more useful though. That is to have a config file .CFG that would go with each ROM. Franxis would know the best way. I thought of a MAMECFG dir with the ROMZIPNAME.CFG files in that but can be done many ways.

What this would do is when a game is loaded it would read the CFG file and set up all the parameters automatically such as Clock speed, sound options, frameskip, even screen orientation. This would help because games all run better with different settings. Pac-man runs better w/FS1 and 133, while others need FS2 and 166 and some you may want to run at FS0 and 144, on and on... I always have to load a game, then go back and forth then play around tweaking with the settings a bunch of times to get it at its good combination of settings. It would be great if this could be saved for each game so that you don't have to try to remember what games work best with which settings every time.

Hell, this could even be used for an eventual frontend/launcher. The frontend could read this .CFG file and it would then know which .fxe to load! It would solve many problems :)

I think it wouldn't be too hard to add, and would make things much nicer, just an idea. What do you think?
 
I'd wait until reesy has put in his z80 core first, for me thats the most important thing before front ends etc.

As far as configs i'd rather have an auto frame skip like dr.md etc. it just saves on messing with the settings, sort of a plug and play feel.

-Craig

www.gbax.com
 
Yes, you are right having Z80 is more important. I would rather have that before this GUI enhancement too. It would be nice to have someday though.

It is only an idea though and wouldn't have to be done right away, it could be done further down the road. Just something for Franxis to think about.
 
I agree that there are more important things to implement, like the core, at this time, i'm not that damn lazy that I can't hit a couple of buttons to change some things before loading a rom.
 
KickinWing posted on Mar 11 2005 at 08:17 PM said:
I agree that there are more important things to implement, like the core, at this time, i'm not that damn lazy that I can't hit a couple of buttons to change some things before loading a rom.

It is not about being "lazy" is is about being user friendly. I have many times went to load a game and was trying to remember - Hmmm now is this one good at fs0 or was it fs1, and what clock speed did it need to run well? lets try this.... no too slow, ok lets try 166 oh now it is too fast, lets see here oh yeah, change the FS to 0 yeah that is it, but that is going to drain the batteries. Ok, how about 144 Mhz and FS1, yeah that looks fine, perfect.

After doing this for every game it would be nice to be able to have those parameters come up automatically the next time if you save the parameters. I don't see the problem doing this. It is not like it would require an entire re-write of the emu or something.

Yes speed and improving the sound quality is much more important. But this would be nice in the future after all of the speed/sound etc improvements are done.
 
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Couldn't somebody just make a program where they select the rom they want, then it looks into a database and tells them which .fxe to use, and then launches the .fxe.

---Wait! Nobody do that!! I will...My skillz are good enough.---
:ph34r:
 
DaveC, about 68000 and cyclone, to get an idea just how fast cyclone is try the C++ core version of dr.md that reesy sent to beta testers a while ago ;)

-Craig

www.gbax.com
 
heh, man was that slow. The M68K core from Castaway is alot faster than Musashi, not as fast as Cyclone but much better than Musashi. I had alot of problems getting it to work correctly though, I might have another go though and see if I can use it instead of Musashi.
 
craigix posted on Mar 12 2005 at 08:05 PM said:
DaveC, about 68000 and cyclone, to get an idea just how fast cyclone is try the C++ core version of dr.md that reesy sent to beta testers a while ago ;)

-Craig

www.gbax.com

Oh yes I know that the cyclone core is much faster than the C one. The thing with MAME though is the speed problem is not the only the CPU core but a bunch of other things, mainly the emulation code itself. Cyclone would surely speed it up alot but because the rest of the code is so big the games would still run pretty slow.

DrMD is fast because Reesy's emulation code is fast as well as cyclone.
 
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DaveC - that's a great idea. I think the gui is the most important thing that needs to be fixed on mame at the moment. A frontend / loader like epsxe has would be great. And your idea of a config file for each rom is an excellent way of achieving this.

Unfortunately I have no programming skills but I thought I should drop my two pennies worth in and support your idea. It seems the others were a bit dismissive.

By the way big ups to Franxis for his coding abilities - I am now able to play 'Speed Rumbler' (which I knew as Rush n Crash back in NZ) on a hand held and its bringing back great memories of wasting huge chunks of my days during university in the 80's playing it at the corner store.
 
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