Femamegp2x Update

[bomberman]

Since I heard several rumblings in regards to this a while back I updated the femame binary to support mame4all 1.6. I also updated the cfg and the driver file for the newest set with a recent filter. Due to how mame4all starts its frontend I had to name it mame.gpe, so be sure to backup your old one.

Get your fix at the archive.

CODE
http://archive.gp2x.de/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,0,0,0,73,2764


New snapshots done as well. All 2255 supported.

titles - CODE
http://archive.gp2x.de/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,0,0,0,73,2765

snaps - CODE
http://archive.gp2x.de/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,0,0,0,73,2766

 

[Tag5]

Awesome, have now downloaded it but will shortly be leaving for work. Will give it a whirl tonight.

 

[quartercast]

And what is "Femamegp2x"?

 

[bomberman]

And what is "Femamegp2x"?

It really just stands for (F)ront(E)nd for MAME on GP2X. The original FeMAME was a DOS version but I don't think this version has any relation to it. For this to work I only fixed the two lines of code that prevented it from starting mame4all with the higher gamelist. Updating the cfg and drivers was the real work. Some people like the fact that they can choose a filter for their games. If this makes a resurgence then maybe Franxis will include the feature in his new frontend.

 

[Franxis]

Awesome

Cheers

 

[naples39]

Excellent. Thank you sir.

 

[imhotep]

Been waiting for this a long time. Thank you so much.

Question: Can't see titles or snaps. Where do I place them in the directory?

 

[bomberman]

Been waiting for this a long time. Thank you so much.

Question: Can't see titles or snaps. Where do I place them in the directory?

Femamegp2x supports titles OR snaps in the images folder in your mame4all dir. The zip has them as images.snaps or images.titles. You have to rename whichever one you want to use. Maybe I could add a second picture window, but that would obscure the list too much.

 

[imhotep]

Maybe I could add a second picture window, but that would obscure the list too much.

Yes it would obscure it. I had the strange idea that you had added support for both titles and snaps through a toggle feature. That would be pretty cool though!

Edit: I seem to have lost the ability to change game specific options (the ones when you first boot) like frequency, screen orientation, etc.

 

[bomberman]

Edit: I seem to have lost the ability to change game specific options (the ones when you first boot) like frequency, screen orientation, etc.

femamegp2x does not support these options, they are in the mame4all frontend. That's why I mentioned (above) that Franxis may want to include the filter feature in a future update. I did not enhance the original program, I only allowed it to work with the mame4all romset. The drivers and config were my main input. I could look at the code to see if I can create a swap option if both image sets are in place.
Also, since the exit in mame calls mame.gpe it may be that Franxis could incorporate a -frontend flag to ensure that another frontend can be used. Since this is not my program I don't foresee an update with all the features that are already in the mame4all frontend.

 

[imhotep]

Edit: I seem to have lost the ability to change game specific options (the ones when you first boot) like frequency, screen orientation, etc.

femamegp2x does not support these options, they are in the mame4all frontend. That's why I mentioned (above) that Franxis may want to include the filter feature in a future update. I did not enhance the original program, I only allowed it to work with the mame4all romset. The drivers and config were my main input. I could look at the code to see if I can create a swap option if both image sets are in place.
Also, since the exit in mame calls mame.gpe it may be that Franxis could incorporate a -frontend flag to ensure that another frontend can be used. Since this is not my program I don't foresee an update with all the features that are already in the mame4all frontend.

Thanks for the explanation as it clears everything up for me. It obviously makes sense to have both gpe's in the program folder and use whichever one is preferred (for the time being at least).

 

[bomberman]

This may help some folks:

I made a copy of mame, named it mame.fe, and hex edited the frontend it calls (@0x4E86B4) to femame.gpe. I also updated the femamegp2x.cfg to run mame.fe instead of mame. This allows me to run femame.gpe and mame.gpe in the same dir. Best of both worlds until we have a official -frontend parameter or snapshot viewer available.

 

[Manjuu]

Nice work bman; must have taken you awhile to finish. I really like this frontend for MAME GP2X.

Too bad that it lacks the configurations found in MAME4ALL. The most important setting for me is the rotate screen.

Can't it just use the config files that the original frontend already generated?

 

[bomberman]

Nice work bman; must have taken you awhile to finish. I really like this frontend for MAME GP2X.

Too bad that it lacks the configurations found in MAME4ALL. The most important setting for me is the rotate screen.

Can't it just use the config files that the original frontend already generated?

Updating the filters and gamelists was the hard part. Fixing some stuff in the original source and recompiling was easy after all that.

I thought that the cfg files should still be valid if a game was setup through the original MAME frontend. I tested a game with some changed parms and it seems only mame.gpe recognises the cfg, not mame itself. maybe there is a program parm that may work.