Frontend/gamebrowser For Emulators

[eyekicks.com]

Hi everybody,

first, i am new here and my english ist not very good, sorry. :/

I have a wiz and use it mainly for emulation. I am enjoying playing games of my childhood, and, more than that, i like the feeling to have these games in my pocket. A piece of childhood on the way, sort of.

I am a little bit disappointed about the not so good looking interfaces of emulators. To example, the c64-emulator for iPhones has a nice gamebrowser, where you can see the games in some kind of virtual racks. Because i have done some interfacedesign in my life, i've tried to make some custom screens of a "gamebrowser" for my wiz, actually for SNES and c64:

These are 320x240px, but they are possible for any other resolutions, of course. I have made a testvideo for the "effect" of the screens:


Of course this is only a fake, the screens are just "inserted" in the snes-emulator. This is something i like to see when i do "gamebrowsing".

So, maybe here is someone who develops emulators? How about getting in contact? Maybe other people like to browse through games in a nice way, too?

 

[torpor]

This is a great idea and all, but where will the content come from? The big problem with making these browsers look so great is sourcing the box art, getting a screenshot collection, and so on ..

I definitely think there is room for improvement in a lot of emu interface, like you .. I just hope the emu authors agree and will look at making the setup of such a collection of art feasible. Its a lot of work to get these inlays and screenshots organized in a way that doesn't consume tons of space/time/energy ..

 

[eyekicks.com]

The big problem with making these browsers look so great is sourcing the box art, getting a screenshot collection, and so on ..

Yes, this is a big one-time-work, but it's not that big -- the browserscreens can be masks, and the inserted images of screens and boxes are very small. It is possible to collect all the images and resize them with an action in photoshop, to example. But you are right, of course this is the main problem ... but not impossible.

 

[glezmen]

lol, this is very, VERY similar to the idea I have
I already started to work on it, but because of lack of time it's still at the first phase (the libraries for using emulator rom files are done)
the difference is that I want to see ALL roms in one list (so you have only one list, don't have to select the emulator first), with filtering, rating, categories, etc

 

[fettouhi]

Looks very nice!

 

[RZZ]

I completely agree with you eyekicks.com,
at least I would like to have a snapshot box in every emulator, MAME first of all

 

[crow_riot]

i also like the idea very much, could be very handy to have one big game launching application.

one problem i see is though, is configuration, because emulators have so many different per-game settings that it could be quite annoying to replicate all that in this all-in-wonder interface.

 

[Azerty16]

Really a great idea!!!
It will be great to have a standard style for all emulator!!

 

[skeezix]

One of the largest hurdles (for some systems) is trying to recognize the games; for c64 and atari st and amiga for instance you might have any number of cra k groups different version of a crack; if you save on the virtual disk, the crc will change. You have to make guesses about the contents based on filenames, or people map a filename to a list of many games on it. Youcan try to guess too with fuzzy matching too..

For gba, snes etc its a piece of cake

Ive no great solution for ST beyond a mapping cile detailing whats inside..

Jeffphone

 

[StarG]

Thats exactly the problem i see in usual iso-game detection too. Current ROM schemes for systems like PSX do even disregard their own disc id. As for non-fixed-roms the single crc based detection is too simple minded.

The way i would proceed would be to have a file listing from the adf ordered by file size descending (e.g biggest files first), take the 3 biggest entries with full path + filesize and create a hash from that list - voilá take this as an unique identification tag. This approach tries to reduce noise a bit by disregarding changes to the (amiga-style) startup-sequence scripts & intros and concentrates on larger data files (which are probably left unchanged en contrast to the (cracked) binaries).

 

[rbtbr]

Hi everyone,

i'm very new to this whole "linux-based-handheld" topic.

I just ordered my WIZ an hour before @evildragon.
I'll use it 90% for my SNES-Collection cause i'm tired playing these awesome games just on TV.

That's my story so far.

----

This gamebrowser is looking awesome IMHO.
Is this project still active?

So here's my question/offer:
I got some skills in photoshop-batch-programming/renaming etc. and would do some work.
Since google is a friend of mine, i found some great offlinelists (or no-intro dats) where we can find box arts and an ingame screenshot. (<- i don't know yet if this it's allowed to use this)

Because i dom't know anything about the folder-structure of the emulator, i've no idea how to link the finished pictures with the games.

Of course this is only a fake, the screens are just "inserted" in the snes-emulator.

Isn't that OK?! Preparing pictures of all games an "inserting" them into PocketSNES?

OK, i hope this is gonna work and i'm very sure that there are many people outside who will love this!

----
Please excuse any wrong english grammar or vocabulary. My native language is german.

 

[eyekicks.com]

Preparing pictures of all games an "inserting" them into PocketSNES?

Maybe i have said this wrong (as i told, my english isn't the best). The pictures are not inserted in the emulator, they are inserted in the video BETWEEN the sequences of the emulator. That was what i mean with a "fake", and that's why i've said "inserted", not inserted.

EDIT: Und ich seh grad, Du kommst auch aus Deutschland -- also: Die Bilder sind einfach nur in das Video geschnitten worden, die sind nicht wirklich Teil des Emulators. Ich wollte das Video so aussehen lassen, wie es wäre, WENN die Bilder Teil des Emulators wären.

Hier der Thread im deutschen Forum: http://forum.gp2x.de/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=10698