NOTE: Developer-speak highlighted in blue, to make it easier for non-devs to ignore.
So in case it's not obvious, one of the main points of my frontend is to embed MAME in it directly (well, not directly, it's still run in a separate process to prevent MAME crashes from crashing the frontend, but there is a shared memory based IPC mechanism that makes it look for all intents and purposes like MAME is running in the frontend), which lets me do things like render MAME anywhere on the screen that I want to; I've collected a bunch of 3d arcade models from Google 3d warehouse and am using them to house the game screen.
It also means that the in-game pop-up UI will not look like or be MAME's standard list-based UI. I intend to write a UI for these functions that is better matched to the front end.
I think these may be unique features of my frontend; I don't know if any other frontends ever have embedded MAME directly in this way.
Oh and one more thing - the technique I am using will allow me to embed other emulators as well, at least those that are open source and thus can be modified to work with my frontend; so I had hoped to, for example, integrate Daphne in as well and make it seamless so that those games that are best handled by Daphne will just run it and those that are best in MAME will run MAME, and this will all be completely seamless to the user who won't need to know what emulator is being run. Maybe I will incorporate MESS too someday ...
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