MAMEWorld Forums - News - pfeMAME version 2.30 has been released today

This release has been quite a while in the making and its not all good news. The Windows version works just fine. Linux on the other hand is a problem. Packaging the application with the necessary drivers to work across all distributions is near impossible. That coupled with the poor options for packaging wxPython apps for Linux doesn’t help either. And still further is the lack of any serious work happening to release an updated version of the WxPython graphical toolset – its been almost a year since the last release and Linux support due to the move to Wayland is a real problem. So, for this release I will drop a packaged version for Linux but your mileage may vary.

On to the changes for this release:
- Fixed checkallroms that was somehow broken
- Some improvements to the auto-restart – not 100% yet but I’m learning. Hope to nail it for the next release.
- Some improvements to showing the video player in Linux under Wayland. VLC backend still isn’t supported due to no ongoing WxPython works in this area that I can see (Until the next release maybe?). The wx.mediactrl is supported as long as you use the right gstreamer library (you have to use an unsupported library as they patched support for the wrong library – go figure).
- Fixed the search control – was quite buggy
- On startup in Linux it will check for Wayland and warn you if its present due to the buggy support
- Ongoing works to improve the list control. I’m using UltimateListControl that is great but nobody seems to be supporting anymore and its full of bugs. So I’m manually patching it and distributing the patched copy for now.
- Fixed some tooltips issues
- Ongoing work in the ‘non-mame’ emulators window. Have added a defaults option that uses an xml file to set default values for some common emulators. It’s a very limited list as only the ones I personally play with are included. Feel free to send me others to add.
- Added a preference setting to disable all artwork. This used to be an option under Mame but they removed it a while ago so I have done it myself.

There are a lot of other changes / fixes so please read the changelog file.

You can download this release from here.

Please read the manual as it has everything you need.

Please report bugs. You can email [email protected] or use the features on the sourceforge site to create a ticket, leave a review, or chat.

pfeMAME is a front end for the Multiple Arcade Game Emulator (MAME) written in Python. It is cross platform (tested on Linux (Ubuntu), Windows, and MacOS). It also includes a graphical Tile View designed for MAME cabinets which allows control using joystick / gamepad. It supports favourite game flagging, MESS systems, Software Lists (for systems), per-rom input mapping, and launching of other emulation engines. It was written with a minimalist view in mind but also because there were some features that I wanted that other front ends just didn't provide.