Home Page Forums Archives MacMAME (DEV) chdman...with a GUI...on Mac!

I decided to get off my butt and make a quick GUI for this handy app in Objective-C. It's a learning experience for me in Objective-C so it's really unpolished and I'm sure there are quite a few bugs but it passes the arguments just fine. I've been working on it for two days now and want one more thing before I let it loose (for those few who have a need for it). I want to give feedback when the program is working so I echoed the terminal but for some odd reason it's not scrolling smoothly at all. Well, on the long tasks anyway. It kinda jerks along and stuff. I'm sure it's having to do with NSTask and NSPipe so I'm wondering if any of you out there could help me out, I'd appreciate it. I've combed all the Internet and haven't slept for two days. Here a quick pic .

That link won't load for me?

Me neither.

Should work now. Copy and paste link. Like I said, it's not snazzy or anything. That'll come later. If I don't find out how to fix the scrolling, I'll release it as-is, although the program will show the beachball for long tasks. Thank goodness for preemptive multitasking.

Finally got it to work. Scrolls nice and smooth in a fixed font so tabs and what-not are lined up. Unfortunately, something else broke along the way. I can get an input chd only which limits the commands you can use or use input and output chds but can't use input by itself. Make sense? Don't worry though. I got an idea to fix it. I'm sure there's no rush for this

EDIT: I'll be out of town for a week so I won't be able to look at this till I return.

Okay, all done! If you want to download it and check it out, click here. I'm aware that there may be some bugs and I'll look into fixing them as fast as I can. For those that try it, I'd appreciate any feedback. Oh, and I'll release the source for this as soon as I clean it up. It shouldn't take long but you never know.

PS: It needs an icon.

I take it no problems... :whew:

I guess so

I would have love to test it, but I never bothered to download any .chd files... Uhm, I mean, I don't have any harddisk-based coin-ups in the basement

So some comments on the GUI itself...

• when looking at it, it looks rather intimidating...
• when you don't have the log open and you press start before filling out all the needed forms you get no feedback something is wrong
• Why is there a horizontal ruler on top of the window?
• Some explanation of the 'Command:' option would be helpful I'd guess

In short: it needs a mini-manual as well?

Arnoud

Some answers:

• The GUI does seem a little rough but most people will probably, at best, use the -info or -update command only.

• On the horizontal line at the top, I had some stuff there once that I removed. Kinda like the path at the bottom (which will probably be removed too. It was for my own debugging purposes.)

• You're right in that it needs a manual. I'm thinking of copying what I've put in the wiki into a ReadMe file.

• Any errors you get are reported in the log drawer (any needed fields that are left blank ala chdman). You can open the log window anytime to get that info. I'll look into adding an error dialog though.

I went home and finished what I could. But I'm on the road again so it may be a couple of days.

Well, I took care of some things on the GUI today. I added a fake tooltip approach that simply states what a command does when you select it. I'm working on another project at the moment. Other than that, I think it's usable for what most people need with it.

EDIT: If anyone can tell me what the chomp and copydata commands do, that would be great.

chomp seems to be for clearing out unused space at the end of the hard drive. I've never used it though & only worked that out by looking through the source.

smf

Yes, looking better now... Stil have no .CHD files to test it on, but it looks a little easier to understand now.

But one more thing: maybe disable the 'Start' button until the user actually selects an input file?

Arnoud

Finally got to my computer after over a month of being away from it. I said I would post the source for chdmanX, so here it is in all it's glory. Ph33r my skillz. :p If anyone wants to mess with it, be my guest.

I did a small update to the GUI when I was cleaning my computer. Nothing major but I do have a 2.0 release planned. Source will come later.