Home Page Forums MAME MAME UI quirks with slots and possible solutions

I think the solution the Shideravan gave is very good, especially when you remember that there are many systems with very buttons on each input, and in such cases is always confusing to configure each control attached...

Well, I would not call it a solution. I don't know if scrollable menus is something implementable in MAME interface, but if it is, that's my suggestion

That's why I said to use the parent slot's path first, omitting the host driver. So you'd get "isa3:Mouse X" and "isa5:Mouse Y" and so on.

I'll see if there is any way to skip the intermediate slot name ("com")



yeah but this is not something really related to the UI. what you want is to be able to "load" pre-configured pads into the emulation and this definitely belongs more to .cfg files, than to the interface itself. since I have never fully understood the logic behind our current configuration loading (e.g. who has precedence over the others when you reset emulation without a full reboot), it is off topic w.r.t. this discussion

This solution looks a lot better than our current handling anyway. While this one ...



... is very prone to fuck up the UI window size fwiw.

I don't think having them as prefixes is the way to go, it makes more sense to have them as separators between each group.

But we currently number everything (like player inputs, hard drives, cdrom drives). Maybe for the time being, just number them.

TX Baud #1
RX Baud #1
etc

I agree numbering is pretty lame, but we seem to be saying it's ok for everything else.

Getting rid of dislot.c and making everything slotable will get rid of the double tag problem and hopefully the recent speed/cheat problem in carts. I have it planned out and want to get going on that next.

for a MESS GUI user, it should go like this....
1. the user runs MESS and selects the system from the GUI list; the menu bar then changes to suit the system
2. user plugs in any required hardware by selecting the items from a 'add hardware' menu. the 'add hardware' menu has sub menus with grouped components for easy selection. add checks should be done on the fly to ensure it is possible to add more than one of the same item IF it was possible on real hardware and also check to see if multiples or mismatched hardware can't be added based on the current configured machine. warnings should pop up to tell the user what is wrong and why and how to solve the issue or to allow an auto-add to just fix it (i.e to add a CDROM to Amiga 3000 requires adding a SCSI controller first)
3. a menu item can be selected to save that configuration for later use
4. a menu item is selected that 'runs' the configured system

This is basically how WinUAE works and as we know it is one of the most popular emulators out there and very user friendly.
Another dedicated emulator for the Enterprise64/128 (EP128emu) works the same way.
These 2 emulators are a real pleasure to use. Whoever is doing this GUI thing should be looking at the best emulators and GUIs out there and learning from them. MESS has a long way to go to get to where they are.

I quite like it too, but I think it would be easier to have everything in the same menu rather than in separate ones, with inputs for each device being hidden/revealed at user choice, so that e.g. you start with a list



and by clicking on each entry you open the list of the corresponding inputs to be reconfigured (or hide them if they are already shown)... e.g.


this will require some work before being fully functional, but we have anyway to redesign the menu handling in view of future developments (when the "root" device will cease to have a privileged role), so it might be a good moment to move in that direction

for the moment, I have modified the inputs to look as follows

SMS


IBM 5150 (serial mouse)


IBM 5150 (null_modem System Configs)


which is a first step towards the design above.

Next, I will if I can avoid printing the "P1", "P2", etc. parts in the slot inputs

Thanks for the feedback

This already happens: the entries in the TAB menu varies per-system: try launching a system with tapes against one without
They are just not in a "menu bar"



A menu for this exists (the Slot Device menu), but it currently is not prompted before emulation starts. Probably we should display it first by request... I will look into it



Once we get other device cfg issues sorted, this will be easy, I think.