I am making a prototype for each of our options. They will each have their own thread.
All of these prototypes are just examples to illustrate what I am talking about. They are not the final product. They are not even beta. They don't share any code with the final product.
But they should be enough so we can discuss the merits of each. Please post any and all comments. I prefer you say something stupid than nothing at all. This is a huge decision that will change the course of RU. I am betting the entire site on this decision. All feedback is appreciated.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kong
A. Download and install an exe. Use an existing offline FrontEnd and house the roms, images, configs etc in cloud so you don't need a big empty hard drive and you don't have to hunt for them or configure anything.
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Pros: Easiest to program as most of the work is done by other people. End product can be robust. Techy users can heavily customize it.
Cons: Non-tech users will find it strange/new. When viewing a system/category with thousands of games like MAME it seems clunky. I think I can fix this but not 100% positive.
If you have a hard drive named "R:\" or if you do not have a hard drive named "C:\", then this will not work for you right now.
The demo is just for MAME/Arcade using default MAME settings which means no score support and the default button layout is different than ours. Press tab in mame to see what the defaults are. Of course all of this will be fixed in final version.
Download and run the attached batch file. If curious/suspicious you can open it in notepad and see what it does.
First it mounts a 1TB read only cloud drive, named R:\, full of roms (mame only for now). You can use this just like any other hard drive except you can't write to it. I'm working on making it writable but not sure if that will be possible or not.
You can use the drive with other emulators or front ends if you want. This is just like having every mame rom on an external drive.
Next it will create a short cut on your desktop to R:\.
Then it will launch that shortcut. Double Click ui.exe. Then uou can pick any MAME game to play.
It plays large and advanced games. I had CHD games working yesterday which can be over a GB. I broke something today though and CHDs aren't working right now. But the rest is.
You can't change any of the default settings in the front end yet but in the final version you would be able to edit everything.
Linear Mode
