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IV/Play suggestions
#395994 - 04/14/23 08:54 AM
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Decided to give this a trial.
Windows 10 latest updates (can't use Windows 11 - none of my machines fits Microsoft's ridiculous criteria).
Made a new folder, downloaded MAME 0.253 from mamedev.org, extracted. Copied over some ini files from my usual MAME folder. Downloaded ivplay and extracted into the same new folder.
Double-clicked it, started up. Unable to run any game because I hadn't adjusted the ini files I'd copied over. The error from ivplay is in a new popup window that hides behind everything. Lucky I noticed the extra unlabelled button in the taskbar.
Fixed my mistakes, tried again, this time the games worked. Looked in the instructions, found F1 and changed colours etc, all good.
No icons or artwork, appears the folder locations to store these are hardcoded and cannot be changed. The instructions say this is the same as MAMEUI - maybe it was, a long time ago, but MAMEUI has evolved since then. MAMEUI uses the folders specified in ini\ui.ini (used by MAME's UI).
So, my suggestions are:
1. Make the error message popup be at the front instead of at the back, and give it a title (instead of blank);
2. Allow configurable paths for icons, snaps etc etc - perhaps by reading MAME's ui.ini
What do you think? Or is it too much trouble?
EDIT: more issues
1. Unable to get history to display - works in MAME.
2. The background picture changes with each start of ivplay - it seems to randomly choose one from the folder.
Edited by Robbbert (04/14/23 09:31 AM)
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John IV |
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IV/Play, MAME, MAMEUI
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Reged: 09/22/03
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Posts: 1969
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Loc: Washington, USA
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Re: IV/Play suggestions
[Re: Robbbert]
#396006 - 04/14/23 08:17 PM
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1. Snaps, icons, extra image files exist freestanding in their associated subdirectories, which is quicker on an SSD and easier for me to maintain as a snap/ico creator. Maybe you had them zipped. You can alter their location in iv-play.cfg if you want them outside the usual default locations.
2. Errors from MAME.exe can go behind the window currently, not sure if that can be programmatically forced to the fore. There is an F1 toggle to ignore them.
3. History.xml and mameinfo.dat are supported. Put them freestanding in the root with the .exes to be found automatically on first run or from different folders by adding them as DAT files in the F1 dialogue. You have to toggle to them w/ whatever their alt-2, alt-3 slot/combo is if you have a bunch image types. Or just click the snapshot area in the upper right to toggle through the art views and 'none'.
4. Random bkground image selection is a toggle in F1.
I designed it and had it coded 5 years before baseline gained its current internal UI, so ui.ini couldn't be keyed off.
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john iv
http://www.mameui.info/
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Re: IV/Play suggestions
[Re: John IV]
#396008 - 04/14/23 11:47 PM
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1. The icons are all zipped, as are some of the others. I found the line in the cfg and pointed the icons to my icon folder anyway. I hadn't added other art types because I hadn't understood the concept of what you are doing. Once that was figured out, it worked well. Only trouble is sometimes when clicking in the art area the game can become unselected (seems random).
2. np
3. got that working, np
4. Found the switch - I had thought that 'rotate' meant that the picture was turned around 90 degrees or something, rather than 'random'. Once turned off it stayed with my selection.
For a minimal frontend, it works well, in fact much better than some of these 'full-featured' ones that I tried. You've done a good job.
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| John IV |
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IV/Play, MAME, MAMEUI
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Reged: 09/22/03
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Posts: 1969
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Loc: Washington, USA
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Re: IV/Play suggestions
[Re: Robbbert]
#396009 - 04/15/23 12:35 AM
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1. There's a 'hit box' area for the art area to be mouse-clicked on. If you click outside of that area (like down on the bottom right in normal art view) there will be a focus loss on the gamelist. Re-selecting the game will re-activate the art area.
I would also have liked to expand simple console machines to show their softlists when clicked on, but again this was years before MESS was integrated. It's a GitHub feature req.
Having looked at Arcade64 for the first time in a decade plus, I liked being able to change the game-list to show 32x32 vs 16x16 icons and still have them offsite by parent/clone relationship.
Ciro's front-end did that too if I recall. It's another feature req. I put in to GitHub.
Cheers -
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john iv
http://www.mameui.info/
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Re: IV/Play suggestions
[Re: John IV]
#396010 - 04/15/23 01:43 AM
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Since you guys are throwing around wanted features I'll toss out my couple...
-Just a small text line somewhere onscreen to show the rom/zip name and the source file name for the highlighted item.
-Have it release the shown art file so you can replace it while it's still onscreen without having to change the art type & then toggle through all the other types to get back to view your new file.
-Maybe line up Name/Year/Manufacturer(/Directory) with columns to line things up for some of us semi-anal-retentive folks .
That'd be it. Now, just to find the time to help add those...I'll get back to you on that...LOL
Thanks again John...
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Pessimist: Oh, this can't get any worse!
Optimist: Yes, it can!
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Re: IV/Play suggestions
[Re: Bad A Billy]
#396040 - 04/19/23 06:09 PM
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I would echo the above suggestion of showing the rom name someplace. There have been a few times I wanted to modify a .lay file or a graphic and wasn't sure what the specific romset was and had to websearch the full game name to find out what the .zip file name should be.
What I would also like to see is a split right column so I can have something like history.dat on top with snap on the bottom. Or even snap on top and cpanel on bottom. The ability to change what we want to see like how we have for the current artwork implementation would be great.
Regardless, thank you for IV/Play. It's such a fast and lightweight frontend that my old PC can still handle MAME where the other frontends require too much resources and gets bogged down.
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| John IV |
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IV/Play, MAME, MAMEUI
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Reged: 09/22/03
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Posts: 1969
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Loc: Washington, USA
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Re: IV/Play suggestions
[Re: McHale]
#396043 - 04/19/23 10:30 PM
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In the event you guys didn't know about it, you can alt-enter on a game and get all its pertinent info/properties including its machine name, just like getting properties on a file in Windows File Manager.
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john iv
http://www.mameui.info/
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Re: IV/Play suggestions
[Re: John IV]
#396044 - 04/20/23 01:36 AM
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Thanks for the reminder. I'm sure I knew that at some point, but I suppose that brain cell went MIA for some reason... 
I found it in the User Guide even! But I don't think I've looked thru that since you 1st released IV-Play...
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Pessimist: Oh, this can't get any worse!
Optimist: Yes, it can!
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