Another Arcade Emulator Plugin - Anyone want to help me with the development of it?

As always when the exams are getting closer, I spent my time in projects I shouldn't. This is what came out this time:

I missed the old days using my old xbox as an emulator box and wanted the same on my htpc. I tried several multi emulator frontends, but all of them where optimized for a 4:3 cabinet. As I have a 16:9 LCD, they all where really ugly.
After that, I tried to integrate it into XBMC. I tried the launcher plugin, but honestly I could get it to work the way I wanted and I didn't like the configuration inside of XBMC. So I did my own plugin.

I took a complete different approach: Instead of a big plugin, I have a very small plugin that takes a xml file and creates the folders and files I want. The second part is a editor for those xml files written in java. In the editor, you can manually add files and folders in a tree structure, or you can automatically add roms and search for corresponding icons in another directory.

Here are some screenshots:










This plugin is not yet finished or ready for a release. If someone is interested in working on this plugin please pm me. I have already set up a svn for all the source code.

Jack

too bad you don't have time for it, everything looks really nice.

that would be a must have for the wife and i....

jack83 Wrote:I tried several multi emulator frontends, but all of them where optimized for a 4:3 cabinet. As I have a 16:9 LCD, they all where really ugly.

Ummm... can't you just switch your LCD into 4:3 mode to letterbox the thing rather than having it stretched to 16:9? Letterboxing isn't really ugly. It's necessary. Even my old widescreen standard def set can autoswitch between the two.

Anyway - as most games of earlier eras, and many TV shows, aren't in 16:9 (1.78:1) how would you expect to optimise for widescreen without cutting off parts of the picture?

Ah, come on. I don't stretch the picture. IMHO having black bars which could be used to display something useful IS ugly. For the same reason, you could always keep your XBMC in 4:3 and only switch to 16:9 if you are watching something in that format.

Great stuff!!! =)
I really hope you continue working on this thing after your exams.
If you need some help with concepts, ideas etc. message me (I already have some concepts that could help you )

i would very much enjoy working on this project... if you get this, send me a message... i can't pm you :-(

thanks,
jason

That looks awesome man. I've tried a few mame guis and I never really dug em too much. Running from within xbmc would be the shit. The coverflow option especially

The project I liked most was callled Hyperspin for Mame, that was decent. But required users to download art pieces 1 by 1 froma site to get even a moderate setup right hassle.

So what more is there to do? The screenshots show, setting up rom dirs, roms sitting there in the xbmc gui. Do they launch ok? do they quit ok? What do they launch in, Mame?

The games launch in the emulator you want e.g. mame and you get back to XBMC. There are only two problems right now: In some skins like aeon, the covers have to be in this poster format to look god. MediaStream dos not have this problem.

The second and main problem is getting everything into my editor. I first tried a all in one gui, but it was not really user friendly but it worked (Thats how I made these screen shots). My current approach is wizard based and works currently only for mame. It looks good, but it takes very long to create these wizards for a specific emulator.

So if someone is willing to help, I can give you access to the java source code and you can create a wizard for the emulator you want

I don't know how much this plug-in crosses paths with the work leo2 is doing, but I would have to think there would be some benefit in people working together.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=40715&page=9