Gamebase Port Possible?


Two questions, if I may. ;)

1: What is Gamebase?
2: Is the source code available?

If the answer to 2 is in the affirmative, please can you post a link to it. Then it can be determined as to whether or not it can be ported. Meanwhile, if the answer to 2 is negative, then it can't be ported.
 
http://www.bu22.com
GameBase is an Open Source "Emulator Frontend", released under the GNU General Public Licence. It is a program that attempts to make running games on various emulators very easy, so that you don't have to remember lots of command line parameters and config settings. GameBase is the Official Frontend for the GB64 Collection of C64 games.
 
(naw)mcx said:
http://www.bu22.com
GameBase is an Open Source "Emulator Frontend", released under the GNU General Public Licence. It is a program that attempts to make running games on various emulators very easy, so that you don't have to remember lots of command line parameters and config settings. GameBase is the Official Frontend for the GB64 Collection of C64 games.
I don't know about making emulators easy in-fact it made it harder for me :p. However it does sort games by year and genre.
 
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It seems that GameBase requires the Microsoft Visual Basic 6 runtime files, which are as far as I'm aware Microsoft Windows-only.

It is a bit outside of my experience, but I'm guessing that that would make a port more difficult (I'm not going to say "impossible", because I'm experienced enough to know when to say "I don't know." :p ).
 
Prometheus said:
It seems that GameBase requires the Microsoft Visual Basic 6 runtime files, which are as far as I'm aware Microsoft Windows-only.

It is a bit outside of my experience, but I'm guessing that that would make a port more difficult (I'm not going to say "impossible", because I'm experienced enough to know when to say "I don't know." :p ).
Well I would really love for all my games under emulator section to be sorted by year and genre, doing it manually would take forever.
 
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We had a project like this for the Pandora already.

Not sure if it's still being developed, but some one must remember the name. Was looking really nice.

edit: ZiB http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/47203-zib/
 
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Yeah, I wouldn't worry about porting this, it would just be better building something like this from the ground up. Like (naw)mcx linked it's already being worked on.
 
second exodous said:
Yeah, I wouldn't worry about porting this, it would just be better building something like this from the ground up. Like (naw)mcx linked it's already being worked on.
But can you use it to sort games I currently have or do you need to download a set list or something?
 
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TylerAW said:
second exodous said:
Yeah, I wouldn't worry about porting this, it would just be better building something like this from the ground up. Like (naw)mcx linked it's already being worked on.
But can you use it to sort games I currently have or do you need to download a set list or something?
You'll have to ask someone that is working on it. Do you mean if your rom files are named well they will appear all nicely in a list with descriptions and screenshots? That just needs to be built in, I know other programs do it.
 
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Maybe its just me, but it seems kind of useless having a frontend for an emulator, since 98% of Emulators have frontends to begin with. The only two I can think of that don't have one are DosBOX and MAME. And MAME's most recent versions have a semi-frontend (At least enough to get you started), and DosBOX doesn't feel right unless you type in all the commands ;)
 
I'm pretty much saying that a good majority of emulators have front-ends or GUI's built in. I mean, am I wrong there? Doesn't pretty much every emulator have a front-end? (Except Mame and DosBOX)
 
Yeah, but a nice cross-emulator frontend works wonders for HTPC setups and the like. It's the only way to ensure a nice, even theme throughout your computer.

I think that a multi-use frontend would be nice for the occasional boot on the Pandy... but ideally I'd like it for use as an entire GUI, like mini-menu, pmenu, xfce etc.



Come to think of it... AURGH! I nearly forgot about the Pandora Emulator FrontEnd! It's exactly what we're all looking for!

If you're reading this, how's development going? Waiting for a Pandy?
 
I've tried to use gamebase twice in the past, and both times I found it really awkward to set up, and it looked like it was made for windows 95. Personally I prefer running a separate emulator for each system anyway, because it gives me the illusion that I am actually booting the systems that I am emulating.
 
Eh, a lot of Linux emulators either have piss-poor or completely absent GUIs. Pretty much the only ones I cam think of with one are zsnes and bsnes. Everything else has a separate frontend or requires config file or command line config... which is bullshit for configuring controllers or tweaking settings and stuff, which requires closing the emulator and reloading it with the new settings over and over, ugh.
 
Snes9x-x, HuGo!, Gens for Linux, pSX, kxmame, gvba... Just a few more examples of GUI-enabled Linux emulators, off of the top of my head. I have yet to come across one with an absent or poor GUI, meself. :p
 
Eh, last time I tried snes9x it had some rather buggy frontend that had most of the options missing, but I think it was at least able to configure the controller, though I may have been thinking of nestopia. Also, I tried desmume and it was just ass. I can't get it to run well because a lot of the options in the windows one were missing, then it crashed so I didn't really care to edit the config file. :/ I also tried dolphin, whose interface was just the most broken thing in the world, but I guess it's the same amount of brokenness in Windows.

So I suppose the older consoles have gotten better for frontends, but the newer ones still have a lot of trouble. It's nice to see stuff like Qt and GTK+ becoming popular for freeware/open source projects, so they can just be moved over to Linux without stripping out the win32 api based interfaces. The next step is to just get emulator authors to stop using directx. :p

But this is way off topic. A decent frontend would be nice, but the pandora already has a bunch of frontends. It would be nice if these frontends could be expanded on for stuff that runs/plays in stuff, even usable for music, videos, ROMs, VM-based stuff... I think the only ones I know of that are that versatile are like, XBMC and a few other really large media center frontends aimed at consoles/desktops, but that might just be a bit big to run in the background at all times while you're playing a game, given the amount of RAM available. Such functionality for a basic list of files with an automatic "run with ..." option probably wouldn't be too hard, but if you want special fields like genre, year, etc or screenshots for things, it might be a bit more complex, depending on how much you want to add. I imagine for something aimed at the pandora, you'd want to keep it small on memory and light, so a full scriptable system probably would be a bit heavy, but then the needs would probably be a bit more specific, since most people will just want to use their PND games and apps, play music and video and play ROMs and things like that, so a simple "run with..." with a list of files would be enough.. then if it's reasonable, add the ability to show extra metadata from a file (maybe something that can be downloaded online?) like full game titles, genre, year, number of players, input methods, etc. Too bad I'm too lazy to do something like that. :/
 
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