Looking for MAME frontend, I know, I know

daughterdad

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I am asking here because I know some of you guys have mame units and I don't want to post at the other site. I rather deal with you guys (and gals) here.

I am looking for two different front ends already set up to be used on a PC.

1. A front end set up for a bunch of games (about 1000), generic but informative. Game name, screen pic, side art, history (?).

2. A front end set up for a driving MAME system set up in a driving style. Only a few games.

I have the roms, and mame, and related game info.

Just looking for a front end that is set up. Anyone up for this?
 
Hyperspin, its very animated and has a lot of really cool features.

I love hyperspin, and I am using it on my mame build... but to render all effects properly it needs a fairly beefy system to render all animations since it's flash based.

That being said, you can shut off a lot of bells and whistles and it is still quite usable.
 
I use Mala. It's a bit more stripped down from Hyperspin, but still has a lot of flexibility. I find it easier to work with, as well. The setup for Hyperspin is the real bear, though. Once that's done, they're both really solid frontends.
 
I am asking here because I know some of you guys have mame units and I don't want to post at the other site. I rather deal with you guys (and gals) here.

Aw, come on over, we are friendly... and I second Mala, any front end is going to take some set-up and learning, but I am very pleased with my Mala install.
 
Maximus Arcade is a good easy to setup front end, I love the look of Hyperspin but never could get it running properly, the setup was a pain, used to use GameEx before finding Maximus as another easy to configure FE
 
Another vote for Mala here. You're off and running pretty fast and it's easy to customize. My only gripe is the inability to change the executable for a single game. You can change the command line switches individually, but sometimes a certain game runs better on an older build and there seems to be no way to set this up. Most people would never bother with this, though.
 
If you've got the time to set up Hyperspin go there! Its real nice when its all setup and is easier now since they launched Hyperlaunch 2.0. Now instead of having 1 huge auto hot key script to launch the emulators you have 1 script for each emu. They have a lot of scripts already precompiled as well.
 
Maximus Arcade is a good easy to setup front end, I love the look of Hyperspin but never could get it running properly, the setup was a pain, used to use GameEx before finding Maximus as another easy to configure FE

Does Maximus support Arcade CRT's? I really liked it, but reading the docs, it does not appear to.
 
Does Maximus support Arcade CRT's? I really liked it, but reading the docs, it does not appear to.

Its minimum resolution is 640x480. You can display this on a low-res arcade monitor, but it will be interlaced, meaning the screen will flicker and text may also be hard to read. I prefer (and recommend) doing your game list in a more "native" resolution, such as 320x240. Mala does this and also won't cost you $25 to register.
 
Another vote for Mala. I've pretty much tried them all and its by the far the most stable I've found. Setup is very logical. If you have an older system (P3-ish) an older version of mame, tiny or micro xp with driverpacks, and Mala you can run 95% of the games out there without a hitch.

Mamewah ain't to bad either...
 
Does Mala let you save games? The current frontend I have saves the game when I exit back to the main menu which is great for saving high scores on games such as donkey kong which don't normally retain high scores when you turn off the machine.
 
I thought MAME did the saving. Mine does.

Mala just controls the emulators and helps you organize game lists as far as I know.
 
I just set up MALA on my MAME cabinet earlier this week and that was my first attempt at setting up a front end. It wasn't too bad really.

I have an odd (probably bad) combination of a vertical standard res arcade monitor and a 10 year old P4 1.7ghz PC in my cabinet that rules out Hyperspin and with only 288 lines of resolution across the screen it forces simplicity into the UI because you don't have room for animations or history with any kind of backdrop.

I found MALA pretty easy to use but kind of clunky and I couldn't find a lot of examples or info using vertical orientation and an arcade low res monitor.

But I'm pretty happy with the simple design I did.
 
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Thanks for this post. I realize it may have been posted a lot but new things become available from time to time. It's nice to have a current take on the topic. I have a MAME project that I have been working on, slowly. If Hyperspin doesn't work in a vertical setup then I definitely am going to use Mala. Here is my nifty marquee that I made for my Pac cab.
 

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