MAMEWorld Forums - News - pfeMAME version 2.1.0 released

pfeMAME version 2.1.0 has been released today

A number of bug fixes and a few new features. Most notable new feature is the ability to play game videos (see the manual for detail). Full list of changes are below. Note that there are some issues with features under the latest version of Ubuntu and I think this is due to the move away from the X server. I need to do some more digging.

Also note, in this release there is currently no pre-compiled version for Linux - you'll have to do it yourself until I get some time, or give me a few days and it should be done.

You can download this release from HERE. Builds are available for 64bit Windows and Linux and the source code is also available.

Please read the manual as it has everything you need.

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

Changes in this release;

• Reinstated the pfeMAME.png file in the root pfeMAME folder. While it’s not used by any part of the code, in Linux it can be used to create a desktop icon and in some distributions they will automatically see that icon for the desktop.
• Updated the code that tries to open the pfeMAME manual. It needed to check first for the existence of the pfeMAME manual file itself before trying to open it.
• Fixed the problem with the manual not always opening under Linux builds – depended upon the folder name – if it included a space (like the Builds do) then it wouldn’t work. Contrary to what everyone says, I did have to encapsulate the path in quotes.
• Added a method to make a game a favorite by clicking in the favorite column for that game. Did the same with star rating. UPDATE – Have actually commented this out in the source code as it was causing an unwanted problem when you use the cursor keys to scroll and the mouse pointer was hovering over the rating or favorite column (every game was then selected as a favorite). Will come back to this later.
• Added a method to reset the game emulation engine back to the default MAME for any games that have been selected to use a different engine (e.g. sega model2/3)
• Adjusted the panel size for the MAME controls popup window so that it displays more detail and fits better on the screen
• Fixed a bug in the filepaths.py window sizing that was causing very different size issues across different platforms and even within different display managers under Linux.
• Suppressed the option to play games with different emulation engines under Linux as there is no support for the model2/3 engines that I am aware of.
• In tile view I have changed some of the textctrl objects to statictext as under newer versions of Linux I was having problems with borders being displayed
• Fixed a bug that was creating duplicate entries in the runs.dat file once the number of runs exceeded 9. The method I was using to locate an entry in the file was incorrect and didn't allow for numbers above 9 (Due to 10 being 2 digits not 1).
• Added some highlighting of the messages and game information headings to make them a bit prettier
• Removed the unnecessary print() commands in the open manual code – what were they doing there I don't know.
• Added gio open as a method to open the pfeMAME manual as under Ubuntu 17.10 the old gnome-open has been depreciated and should no longer be used
• Finally fixed the longstanding indexerror exception raised by the ultimatelistcontrol object in Linux only when trying to move or drag the pointer over the header. Never found out why so have just implemented an override for the GetItem function and added a capture for the exception so I no longer get an error.
• If systems support is not enabled, do not look for systems at all when building the database from scratch. This can speed things up on slower systems.
• If in preferences a setting has been changed that requires a restart of pfeMAME, you will now be notified by a pop-up-prompt when the preferences window is closed.
• Added a game video play function. A new folder ‘video’ is available in file paths. If a video is available for the currently selected game, a caption under the game image will say that a video is available. If in preferences you have selected to auto play game videos, then the message will say that the video is auto loading in 5 seconds, after which it will automatically play.
• Replaced the message window delimiter with a global one (also made it longer)
• Added date/time stamp to the messages window
• Removed the listverticalsize variable as it was static and not needed
• Removed the preference to scale game icons as if you dont select this and you have a very large icon library like me, the application will essentially stall on startup as it will take forever to read each icon to find its size in order to set the maximum row size.
• Implemented a preference for game icon scaling size as a fixed value of 16, 24, or 32 pixels. 16 is default but 24 kind of looks nice.