Flack

Here's the way I see it: 1. Size issue. I've only got space in my rec room for one MAME Cab -- that way you can play lots of games. 2. Cost issue. I'm not looking to spend big money. MAME Cab -- cheaper to build than buying a classic, especially if you have computer parts lying around. 4. Multi-cab. MAME Cab. 5. Obscurity. MAME Cab plays em all. 6. Maintenance. Definitely MAME Cab. All kidding aside, I would recommend either building or buying a MAME cab. Building one and staying under your $1,000 should be easy; buying one from an individual wouldn't be out of the question either. I don't really know anybody who only has ONE cabinet. Even if you managed to buy your favorite game of all time, you will eventually get sick of it. Of course the advantage to having a MAME Cab is that you can play all kinds of games, new and old, popular or obscure, etc. My MAME cabinet consists of a crappy old Nintendo cabinet with a computer stuffed into it and most of the people who come over still think it's a real arcade game. There's something magical about the shape on an arcade cabinet that lends to the illusion of it being a real arcade game. Half the time I explain to people that it's got "a computer in there" and they still don't get it. The thing you mentioned about maintenance also raised a flag for me. A MAME cab is essentially a big piece of wood with a computer in it. The worst that can happen is something computer-related can go wrong. If you can fix your PC, you can fix this. If you can't, you can always find someone (usually about half our age, hah) who can figure out the problem. When it comes to fixing arcade machines, it's a big do-it-yourself scene. Don't get me wrong, there are lots of people out there willing to help with advice and information, but at the end of the day if the machine you have needs a cap kit for example, you've either got to disassemble the whole thing and take it in and pay the $100 or learn how to do it yourself. Monitors and asthetics seem to be the two biggest things all of my games need worked on at the moment. I own a LOT of classic cabinets (Karate Champ, Gauntlet II, Rampart, Q*Bert, Shinobi, etc) but if I could only keep ONE I would keep my MAME Cabinet. I like it's versatility over the authenticity of the others. Also keep in mind that you can slap emulators on that MAME cabinet as well if you want to have some NES or 2600 games on there. You can also add an MP3 player and/or music video player to it for a little game room entertainment machine. I've got about 15 gig of 80's music videos on mine. BTW: No offense Keilbaca, but $300 for an empty cabinet is crazy. I own 20 working games and haven't paid $300 for one yet. You can pick up dead cabinets for $5 or so at auctions usually.

Nope, just an oversight on my side -- I just made a down and dirty app and didn't plan on anything other than C:\ ... I'll have to add that to the next version.

http://www.robohara.com/software/ffe-alpha07.rar Getting closer. I added quite a few things this time around, including support for DOS based games, sound, and fixed a few bugs I was running in to. I also wrote a little app called INI Maker (included) which will churn out those INI files for you. Let me know what you think! Next up on the table ... screen sizes.

One thing I didn't mention is that the 21" monitor we used in my friend's cabinet sticks out the back. You can kind of tell in that second picture. Due to time contraints, budget limitations, and my friend's "don't care" factor, we left it. I didn't run into the same problem on my other MAME Cab because the monitor is mounted "flat". The monitor angle on those Taito cabinets looks pretty sharp, and you might run into the same problem I did. We probably could have solved our problem by taking off the monitor's case (or at least the back half). Like I said, the cabinet we built was going into a dark corner of my friend's living room and he decided that he didn't care if the cabinet had a back or not on it, so we never had to solve the problem.

I couldn't get rid of my Duck Hunt cart for a buck. How much profit can there be in counterfeiting these? Maybe in their spare time these criminals set up a money press to make fake pennies as well.

When I was a kid, my cat used to love to watch us play Video Pinball. It purred, it stared at the screen, it tried to follow the ball and it pawed at the screen whenever the ball came near her ... but then again, so did my sister.

On the two MAME cabinets I built, I simply made wooden "shelves" to hold the monitor. Once I figured out where I wanted my monitor to sit, I built a wooden shelf underneath it. Then I used 4 or 5 2x4's behind, on top, and next to the monitor to ensure it wouldn't ever move or shift. Here's the picture of the shelf in place. Here's a shot of it with the monitor sitting on it and 2x4's blocking it in. If you're interested, here's a link to the entire build. http://www.robohara.com/videogames/article...php?file=tsmame

Funny how Karma works. Congrats!

Hey guys ... just wanted to let you know, I haven't stopped working on this yet. I added an MP3 player to the main menu for background music but I don't know how practical or useful that is. I also added some sound effects when cruising through the game list but again, I don't know if one would file that under cool or annoying. The "skip 10 games forward" thing is now working, thanks again for the code. It's been a busy week or so at work, but hopefully within the next few days I can get everything back together and working and post another release.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...AMESE%3AIT&rd=1 It's big, it's dead, it's been (for the most part) gutted. I bought it thinking it would be cool to stick a computer in and make it an mp3/mpeg jukebox, but ... blah blah blah, too many projects, not enough time. Thought someone semi-local might be interested in this one.

Actual game names are supported. In the INI file under config-roms, you would have to add all your games and then add a friendly=name name under each one. I'll probably create another simple utility to help generate those lists eventually. Supporting sound effects would be simple, just finding them or making them would be the hard part. Same thing with game labels. I doubt it'll ever support fading graphics.

Thanks! I know it's a long way off from being a finished, polished program but it's on its way! Simple, consider it done! Oops, that was supposed to be working. I'll have to see what's wrong in the code. This one will be working soon. Hm, tell me more about this one. Do you think people will have more than one picture per game? I thought about adding another picture window for marquees ... Explain this one to me further. Do you mean terminating the front end when you launch an emulator? You wouldn't want to do that in a mame cabinet, but might want to if just using it on your PC. I'm sure I could set a toggle within the INI file to make the program react either way. Thanks for the good ideas, keep 'em coming!

I will try and update the readme tonight to mention all the new features and explain how the background/skins work. If you want to use the solar one (I think it looks a lot better) just rename the ffe.ini (solar) to ffe.ini and that should change everything. If you want to start preparing for the real thing, start downloading or making screenshots, and naming them the same thing as your roms. Then you can put them in the screenshots directory, and your daughter will be able to pick the games by screenshot! I have a huge collection of Atari 2600 screenshots and I think I have all the MAME ones as well.

Try alpha 6 and see if it works for you. http://www.robohara.com/software/ffe-alpha06.zip Remember that this is still an alpha ... I've got a few more things to implement before I can really call it a beta. If there's any other features you would like to see added, now's the time to let me know! This weekend I plan on implementing an mp3 player.

Just to give you an idea of how configurable it now is, here's a theme I created in the last 10 minutes. NO coding changes were done to change this theme -- I simply replaced the background picture with a simple space one and changed the text colors to show how quick and simple it is to configure.

Made a lot of changes over the past day or so. The background graphic can now be easily changed. It simply needs to be an 800x600 JPG file. The name of the file can be specified in the new ffe.ini file (under config-ffe). Also in that file are RGB color codes for most of the text that appears on screen. You can now change the black text to any color you want to match your background themes. You can also change the background color of the list, and of the text in the list (haven't figured out how to change the highlight color yet). I've also included a background template in both JPG and PSD formats for people to be able to make their own backgrounds. I removed most of the extra text from the program (like the instructions) and moved that to the background graphic -- people can change it however they like. I'm still at a little bit of a loss about resizing stuff ... I plan on doing some reading over the weekend about what you were talking about and see how much work is involved. I asked a general question over at BYOAC about popular resolutions for MAME cabinets, and there was a low one for arcade monitors, 640x480 for people running televisions, and then high end for people running PC monitors. Depending on how difficult it is to alter the sizes, it might be easiest to just create three different forms and make three different downloads available. Corny, but simple. Here's a screenshot of the front end running my new "solar" template. I'll try and get a build online tonight before I go home from work.

Just came up with these. Enjoy. River Raid Shoot all enemies. Slow down to get all the fuel. Avoid hitting walls. Football Three on three Action Pretty much like the real thing Except more flicker. Barnstorming Fly through the red barns Then over all the windmills. Don't touch either one. Basketball A one on one game. Purple and green guy shoot hoops. It's 3D, sort of. Berzerk Arcade Translation Kill robots by shooting them No diagonals. Bowling Ten frames of bowling It's got dozens of options None of them are fun. Burgertime Just like the arcade. Make burgers, avoid white blob It's an egg, I think. Chopper Command Fly and save people, This game seems so familiar. Oh yeah. Choplifter Zaxxon Remember this game? One of the first 3D games. Well now it's 2D Frogger Hop. Hop hop. Hop hop. Hop hop hop hop hop hop hop. Hop hop hop hop splat. Journey Escape Other than the name Nothing like the arcade game. Don't stop believin'. Keystone Kapers Chase the criminal Avoid the toys, catch your man then do it again. Pac-Man Eat all the pellets. Avoid the ghosts and repeat. Get used to blinking. Pitfall Simple game to learn. Run, jump, swing. Played it for years Still haven't beat it.

So if a person were running 800x600 on their MAME cabinet, this would work perfectly. Different resolutions create problems. I know how to resize the form (sorta), but I don't know to keep the graphics lined up. I assume there's a better way to do this than to maintain a separate version for every possible resolution.

BTW, I'll be interested to see how bad the GUI looks on your side. It worked fine on 2 of my machines and was totally screwed on my laptop (which uses custom font sizes, that may be the culprit).

The MAME list could probably be generated on the fly, although it would probably make more sense to make it a stand alone app that only ran when MAME was updated instead of running every time the program runs. The poor man's way to do it would be to have users download MAME.exe, put it in the folder, then make a small VB app which runs that command line, reformats the data and writes it out as an FFE friendly file. It ain't pretty but it would work. I added all the changes we've talked about and my first (bad) attempt at a GUI. http://www.robohara.com/software/ffe-alpha05.zip

I used mame.exe, then did mame.exe -listfull and exported that to a text file. Once there it was simply a matter of caressing the text into the right format (ie: about 10 search and replaces in Word).

Got the double mouse click and the enter key working. I originally left them out just because I had MAME cabinet on the brain. I suppose I should add a clickable button for returning to the main menu as well. I guess now the biggest thing left is the GUI itself (I am so bad at designing them). I've been imagining a living room setting with the screen shots appearing on a television, or maybe an arcade cabinet with the games showing up on the monitor. I'll probably include a graphic template so people can design their own backdrops, and put the color choices in an INI file so they can be easily edited as well.

It's all personal taste of course, but my personal favorites are FCEU for Windows and VirtuaNES. I tried the updated version and it works. Nice work man. How about navigation and launch from a mouse double-click and keyboard return? Thanks, at least it's working now! I tried the code you provided and it worked as well (I was doing essentially the same thing but under list1_keypress and it wasn't working ... works under keydown or keyup, go figure). Including the mouse double-click and keyboard return are super simple. I also used MAME to create an entire ROM list and included all the friendly names. I forgot how slow MAME32 is when launched from a command line. I also added a "loading" note just so it doesn't look like the program is locked up!

The only thing I can't figure out how to do at the moment is intercept the arrow keys while within a listbox. What I want to do is make the right arrow key jump through the list more quickly.

Using the INI files has opened up several new possibilities. In one INI file (per system), I have now included friendly names, game specific switches, comments and more. Cool! I still can't come up with an easy way to automate the creating of those files, but the good news is everything in them is completely optional. I'll probably have 0.4 online before I go home this evening.