A Universal Emulator Frontend

[oneandoneis2]

Just something that came up in the conversation about the Gp2X being too geeky for FHM readers - it would be nice all around if the playing of emulated games could be simplified.

Essentially, it revolves around making the emulation invisible to the user: Instead of loading the emulator and then from within the emualtor, running the game, the user runs a frontend that shows all emulator ROMs, snapshots, and so forth, that are available on the SD card. The user chooses the game he wants, and the frontend then starts the emulator and loads the ROM for him. The user doesn't need to care about, or even know, which games are run by which emulator. He just has to know what game he wants to run, and off he goes.

It would be an improvement all-round, because all games available are viewable from one location, and it cuts down on the number of steps needed to play a game. It would also make the Gp2X more attractive to slightly less-geeky users, it's up to you if you want to consider that a good thing or not

Of course, there are complications to overcome - like knowing which ROM belongs to which emulator - but completely ignoring such practicalities, it would be nice if it could be done. .

 

[Squidge]

This has been asked for before, as well as asking if each emulator could have the same front end.

Nothing came of it then as people code emulators for fun, and so they want the front end to look how they want, not because of some standard saying so. (Note: This is not a flame!)

However, if people supported being able to run roms from the command line (very easy to do), then a universal emu could be made by someone completely different and just run the relevent emu. Then the devers of the emus could work on what they think is the most fun.

 

[michaeljustman]

The programmer of such a program would just have to (assuming all of the emulators support command line arguments) know the command line parameters for every emulator released (more can be added in later versions or there can be a configuation file that has such information), but the user would still have to set it up and specify the location of each emulator and the roms.

It might be just a difficult to set up as all the emulators themselves, but it's definitely a good idea.

One thing that might be nice would be if one could exit back to the front end without having to exit from the emulators menu, but this would probably have to be implemented in the emulator itself.

Also if the frontend could have its own key combo for making or loading a save state (similar to Hotkey v0.1 maybe) by somehow telling the emulator to make a save state. This way one could load and save states from the frontend.

All just thoughts...

 

[BenRoshi]

Is it really that big of an advantage over releasing perhaps a starter pack of some sort? It could come with the latest emulators, labeled for their respective systems. Remember, people need to get roms to use this emulator, which shouldn't be an underrated task. If they can go through the effort to steal a game, don't you think they can learn a few menus?

 

[Vimacs]

uhm, selector?

 

[TKF15H]

The actual front-end menu is the least of my worries. What actually bugs me is that every emulator had different shortcuts for saving/loading state and exiting.

 

[jpic3yk]

The actual front-end menu is the least of my worries. What actually bugs me is that every emulator had different shortcuts for saving/loading state and exiting.

I agree, this is one of the biggest issues with emulators on the gp2x

 

[Kannibaal]

The actual front-end menu is the least of my worries. What actually bugs me is that every emulator had different shortcuts for saving/loading state and exiting.

I agree, this is one of the biggest issues with emulators on the gp2x

Maybe we can use the wiki to propose a standard i.e. the GP2X-EMU-STANDARD which provides info about which keys to use:

I.e. Left-Right shoulderbutton together to exit an application.
Start key to select file options. etc. etc.

If the standard is made and known then the emu programmers can tell when they release a new version that it is GES compliant.

If not then people can complain about it and ask for it to be GES compliant. B)

Just a thought..

Marco

 

[TKF15H]

Simplest thing: When the user presses L+R+start the emu calls a little menu app that lets the user decide what he wants. That way there only needs to be one short-cut. Having many different shortcuts can be bad for emulators that require a lot of buttons (like the PSX).

 

[Javacat]

The actual front-end menu is the least of my worries. What actually bugs me is that every emulator had different shortcuts for saving/loading state and exiting.

I agree, this is one of the biggest issues with emulators on the gp2x

Maybe we can use the wiki to propose a standard i.e. the GP2X-EMU-STANDARD which provides info about which keys to use:

I.e. Left-Right shoulderbutton together to exit an application.
Start key to select file options. etc. etc.

If the standard is made and known then the emu programmers can tell when they release a new version that it is GES compliant.

If not then people can complain about it and ask for it to be GES compliant. B)

Just a thought..

Marco

A few people tried putting a standard together when the GP2X was first released, I think it was even added to the wiki, however I don't think anyone paid attention to it.

 

[Magnulus]

A few people tried putting a standard together when the GP2X was first released, I think it was even added to the wiki, however I don't think anyone paid attention to it.

That is a real shame. Standards can be quite useful, I think. Like the W3C standards for web coding, etc. Of course, only Opera and one more browser actually fully and correctly SUPPORT all the standards, but it's good that they're there, and if a set of standards for usability of emulators was made and given enough hooplah when released, etc, and didn't just reside within the wiki, that could have a nice effect.

Make a nice little logo for it and allow people to slap that to their emulator sites if their games comply to the standard.

 

[Javacat]

I've done a quick search and I think that this is the orignal thread about the standards.
The entry in the wiki is @ http://wiki.gp2x.org/wiki/Common_User_Inte...Recommendations.