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Joined: Mar 2007
Posts: 298
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Senior Member
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I suppose that only paid frontends are good enough for Windows MAME nowadays, such as GameEX or LaunchBox. Has anyone here tested them?
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Joined: Feb 2004
Posts: 2,458 Likes: 156
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Very Senior Member
Joined: Feb 2004
Posts: 2,458 Likes: 156 |
Negatron is probably the closest front-end in spirit to qmc2. It's cross-platform and free, too.
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Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 16,985 Likes: 83
Very Senior Member
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Very Senior Member
Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 16,985 Likes: 83 |
Ironically given what we were just discussing, Negatron doesn't work with stock MAME -listxml. It needs a patched MAME.
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Joined: Feb 2004
Posts: 2,458 Likes: 156
Very Senior Member
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Very Senior Member
Joined: Feb 2004
Posts: 2,458 Likes: 156 |
Negatron does work with stock MAME - only mounting loose media on drives from slot cards requires patched MAME. But that doesn't work properly in qmc2 either since Bletch changed how listxml works in 2016 or whenever it was, and fixing it properly so it can be done with static data requires completely ripping out and replacing the options system yet again.
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Joined: Mar 2007
Posts: 298
Senior Member
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Senior Member
Joined: Mar 2007
Posts: 298 |
I tried to use Negatron but it supports computers/consoles only and NegaMAME supports arcade games only. The developer said to me that he wants to merge NegaMAME into Negatron in a near future but until that happens, I'm looking for another alternative.
Tested both Launchbox and GameEX and GameEX is pure crap!! For a paid frontend, I was hoping to see a more decent piece of software, but instead it is a very heavy mess and it freezed my machine before I was able to start using it... garbage!!
On the other hand, Launchbox has a more decent interface but I need to test it further to see if it does everything I need.
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Joined: Jun 2017
Posts: 50
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Joined: Jun 2017
Posts: 50 |
I am not taking over maintenance of qmc2. I have enough going on in real life and a big enough MAME to-do list that it isn’t going to happen. FWIW I dislike qmc2 as a front-end. It’s very cluttered, it shoves all sorts of things into a tree view when they’d be better presented as information pages, on Mac it has widgets that look native but don’t behave the same way as native controls. After looking at the core code, it’s deep in technical debt, and needs a serious rework of its data layer. You’d likely be better off taking the data layer from minimaws (which covers 99% of what a front-end like qmc2 uses) and building something on top of that. I wasn't suggesting that you do the builds. One of the users should be able to handle that. You've already gone past the line of duty! I suppose I'm so fond of QMC2 because it seems like a natural evolution of the mameui and messui, I used 15 years ago. You might want to blame QT for you look/feel issues. Thanks for the info on minimaws. I'll try and take a look at it.
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Joined: Jun 2017
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Another problem I have with Negatron is that while the author says its operation is intuitive, I must judge that our intuition is somewhat different, as I find I need to refer to the documentation, quite often, to do even the simplest things. Setup is a breeze, though, compared to QMC2! It's plug-n-go.
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Joined: Mar 2007
Posts: 298
Senior Member
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Senior Member
Joined: Mar 2007
Posts: 298 |
Another problem I have with Negatron is that while the author says its operation is intuitive, I must judge that our intuition is somewhat different, as I find I need to refer to the documentation, quite often, to do even the simplest things. Setup is a breeze, though, compared to QMC2! It's plug-n-go. I agree with you, Negatron is NOT intuitive at all!! That's the point that led me to stop using it really quick. QMC2 and LaunchBox on the other hand are quite intuitive, as soon as you get used to some specific behaviors on each one of them. At this moment I'm trying to use LaunchBox and I'm enjoying it, despite the fact that you have to use commandline parameters manually to every single game you have in your collection. This is kind of annoying but fortunatelly, I don't have many games/systems in my collection. However, if you have a huge amount of games/systems, you will find LaunchBox very painful to configure.
Last edited by RColtrane; 01/04/20 09:56 PM.
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Joined: Jun 2017
Posts: 50
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Joined: Jun 2017
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I have the rebuilt "fixed" qmc2-mame executables (x86 and x64). Anyone have a place to host them? The x64 zip or rar, with best compression, is over the 5mb limit of the qmc2 bug tracker.
Last edited by MusicLovr; 01/16/20 09:39 PM.
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Joined: Aug 2004
Posts: 1,458 Likes: 9
Very Senior Member
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Very Senior Member
Joined: Aug 2004
Posts: 1,458 Likes: 9 |
Just upload the complete packages to zippyshare, mega or some other filesharing site. For longevity and as an alternate, I can copy them from there onto my site, and they will be available to anyone.
It will be up to you though to compile and make available new versions as needed.
Last edited by Robbbert; 01/17/20 12:07 PM.
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