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Geek Culture / What is the best MAME frontend?

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Jeku
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Posted: 1st Nov 2005 00:04
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Hey duders,

Anyone here use MAME or other emulators? If so, what front ends do you prefer? I would like it to eventually be housed in its own arcade cabinet, and it needs to be able to run MAME at the very least.

http://www.mameworld.net/

There's a bunch of front ends on there, but it would take me a year and a day to try them all So far my favourite (for looks and retro-feel) is 3D Arcade. You design your own arcade and walk-around it in 3D. To play a game you just walk up to it and press the button. It's pretty sweet, but not practical for the amount of games I plan to have installed.

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Richard Davey
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Posted: 1st Nov 2005 00:29 Edited at: 1st Nov 2005 00:30
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I just use MAME32 and the front-end that comes with. Works fine for me and I use it a *lot*! But it'd be useless for a cabinet unless you fancy attaching a mouse somewhere to it.

People don't quit playing because they grow old.
They grow old because they quit playing.
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Jeku
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Posted: 1st Nov 2005 02:03
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Yah, that's what I'm currently using. The only problem is, like you said, there's no way to go through the list with a joystick I might just have to make my own front-end in DBP--- come to think of it, that's not a bad idea.

I've seen a cool front-end called AdvanceMenu, which allows you to make a bootable DVD (using their own small version of Linux I presume). You just boot it up and it locates the ROMs from the DVD, but then you can't save any data. I'd imagine that it would work just as easily off a local hard disk though

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Grog Grueslayer
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Posted: 1st Nov 2005 07:26
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I use Mame32 too. That 3D Arcade sounds cool though.
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PiratSS
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Posted: 1st Nov 2005 07:53
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I also agree, I used Mame32 a few years back Thought it was discontinued however.


http://www.ggrpg.com
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Van B
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Posted: 1st Nov 2005 12:26
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The problem with a lot of front ends is that they expect a text file listing of the roms in the menu - like often it's tricky to get a full list of your games up there and accesible, I'd probably go the whole DBPro route. One thing to look into is that processor usage cheat, so you could put your front end into a 'relaxed' state when not in use.


Van-B

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Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 1st Nov 2005 15:53 Edited at: 1st Nov 2005 16:00
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text file lists are SO easy to make! In windows, you can just do:
dir c:myfolder*.rom > c:mamemy_rom_list.txt

I'm gonna look into this...

EDIT: Where do you get ROM's from? What kind of game platforms are these roms from? Are we talking a Playstation emulator type app, or an Amiga emulator, or a Spectrum emulator?

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Mattman
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Posted: 1st Nov 2005 16:21
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I thought they were mainly just retro arcade games.
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Van B
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Posted: 1st Nov 2005 16:40
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Yeah, it's like a zip file full of chips converted into files, quite scary stuff - that's why they're stored in zips.

It would be a matter of loading a zip file into mame to play it - a lot of roms are copyright free these days, I imagine theres sites that you can download roms from. Luckily for me one of my mates is a big MAME fan and has a fermidible collection of mame roms.


Van-B

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Jeku
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Posted: 1st Nov 2005 17:18
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I'm not sure if it's legal in your countries, but you can often buy a complete set of MAME ROMs, where you pay for duplication but not for the ROMs themselves. And you won't get the MAME emulator on the discs. I'm not advocating this in any way, but that's for the man that must have it all. There's also many legal ROMs out there, as VanB said.

And it's not a matter of just looking at the ZIP file names, as they're often not descriptive enough. There's places you can go where you can download a list of the ZIPs next to their full name, and all their details etc. I believe it's a large XML doc. That's what you need to use to lookup.

I also noticed that Twin Galaxies are allowing people to record their games using the built-in MAME recorder for submission to be entered on the official high score list. There are quite a few games that I can get onto the scoreboard for! http://www.twingalaxies.com

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