MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: Command.dat 0.230 out!

I have tried to reach out to a few MAME devs about fixing the presentation of the command.dat but absolutely no one has responded to my requests for help, which is a little discouraging.

When the command.dat was initially conceived, it was conceived with fixed width font in mind. All of the whitespace throughout the commands was very carefully laid out in order to make it look good with the fixed number of spaces per line that we had available. Now it's rendered with the same variable width font that MAME traditionally uses, and it comes out looking very strange, like every line has it's own concept of where the moves should appear. I'd also like to restore the colors that certain buttons had.

I've been poking through the source code, and I've study rendfont.cpp and cmddata.h quite a bit. I also looked a bit at menu.cpp and submenu.cpp, and I see how it handles things like the configuration menus where the name of a setting is left justified, and the value for that setting is right justified. This would be good for the command.dat, left justifying the name of a move, and right justifying the move input. But I just don't see how to marry that system from the menu to the External Dat View. Even better would be having two left justified columns so all of the move inputs lined up nicely.

I was hoping a dev might be able to help point the way. I understand not being interested in working on this system, and I would have appreciated and respected a response saying so. But to have my inquiry completely ignored really sucks.

I'll keep taking a look at it and see if I can come up with a solution, but without some assistance, the chances of my success are small.

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Edited by Procyon (05/24/21 03:22 AM)