The Ideal Epsxe Frontend??

[favian]

i've searched day and night for the ultimate espsxe frontend..
all i found were all small frontends.. tiny applications with little information and offered very little outside of epsxe's own gui...

so i wanted to see i anyone was interested in developing a proper fullscreen full fledged frontend for epsxe.. i've drawn a composite (in mspaint lol) that shows what i think a great ps1 frontend would look like..

Among its features:

- Full Screen GUI Support
- User Defined Cover Art For Each Game
- User Defined Screenshots for Each Game
- User Defined Description for each game (synopsis, genre, developer, year released, country of origin)
- Configure Location of ISO (e.g. c:\isos\ghost in the shell\gits.bin)
- Navigate GUI with gamepad (DirectInput Support) (perfect for users of PS1 control adapters)
- Launch epsxe with parimeters you set in the configuration menu
- Built In ISO ripper ala PSXeven (http://batard.psxfanatics.com/)
- User Definable Interface (like a wallpaper)

The inspiration?

I (and many others) have a very large collection of original (NOT bootleg games) a lot them are rare or imports.. Some i dont want to be handled too much, like lunar, arc the lad, vandal hearts, rhapsody.. etc for fear of them getting scratched.

It would be much more convenient to rip all your games to ISO and run them from your computer connected to the tv (tv out) and then using the PS1 control to navigate the interface.. Sure beats sitting down and clickin around and playing on a monitor! Play the games the way they were meant to be played...

good idea or no? anyone up to the task?

my personal amateur concept art below:

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Last edited by favian; November 5th, 2005 at 19:12..

[gameman733]

uhh, while i dont see anything wrong with posting ideas, posting 3 different copies in 3 different threads is NOT a good idea. Expect to have 2 of them closed.

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[favian]

i deleted the other two.
thanks for the heads up

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Last edited by favian; November 3rd, 2005 at 06:01..

[Hairybudda]

Thats pretty do-able, although I have more important things to commit to.

[favian]

i think its important that i emphasize that the burden of providing gamecovers/screenshots and descriptions would be on the user, and not the developer.. to ask a developer to compile all of these things is absurd. which is why i think its up to the community to compile as many covers as possible. i already have many, many are readily available off amazon or a simple google search.

the frontend would be for use exclusively with ISOs that the user creates themselves.. the ability to rip isos through the frontend would be a nice touch but not a priority...

the function of the frontend would be so you could much more easily navigate your PS1 collection without having to handle your CDs, and have a sort of 'media center'-esque interface where you could select the game via its Game Cover, organize and rank the games.. organize by developers/genre etc...

the game descriptions.. (such as synopsis, year released, genre, origin, developer/publisher) can be provided and inputted by the user.

this has been done for MAME32.. if anyone has used that frontend, they know what i'm talking about.

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Last edited by favian; November 3rd, 2005 at 06:04..

[favian]

Originally Posted by Hairybudda

Thats pretty do-able, although I have more important things to commit to.

how difficult would it be to create something like that? out of curiosity.

[Hairybudda]

Originally Posted by favian

how difficult would it be to create something like that? out of curiosity.

Not difficult at all, tie it in with a database of some sort and all it boils down to is basically writing a stupid VB interface and some ADO tomfoolery.

If you added a webserver to the equation with similar funtionality to freedb that could be updated by end users, then cataloging your collection would be a fairly painless task.

If I don't end off getting drunk over the weekend, I might hack something together to demonstrate.

[favian]

lmao, sounds good

[gameman733]

Im with Hairybudda. I don't think it would be very hard to come up with the basic system (everything minus the netcode). CD ripping MAY be availble through a 3rd party library if you dont want to code one yourself (I wouldnt have the first clue on how to do it). VB would have most of the stuff built in otherwise (netcode included there).

__________________

Desktop: CPU:Athlon XP 2400+ Mobo:Shuttle AK32VN Memory:256MB PC2100 DDR-RAM + 512 PC2700 DDR-RAM
Video Card:Apollo Geforce 6600GT + HDTV out Hard Drives: Maxtor 120GB 7200 RPM + Maxtor 120GB 5400 RPM + Maxtor 20GB DVD+RW: Lite-on LDW-401S 4x Running XP Pro SP2

Linbox (R.I.P, Dead Motherboard)(server): CPU: 1.4ghz Athlon Mobo: ECS K7S5A Memory: 2x64MB SDRAM Video Card: ATI Rage something Drives: hda: 6 GB HD hdc: DVD-rom Drive Running Debian Sarge

[favian]

the net stuff was something i wasnt thinking about, but an online database sounds neat.. i think that the media portal (http://mediaportal.sourceforge.net/) uses an online database for dvd covers when it scans your video files. that seems a lil complex to me, but a basic system would be suffice (for me at least, luxuries aside).

i think that once the frontend has been around enough, users would have contributed and compiled enough gamecovers, that it could be released as a huge lump zip and released through torrent. i wouldnt mind seeding.

But you've seen in the mame community that this sorta thing has worked... no reason why it wouldnt work or wouldnt be appreciated here! <3 PS

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Last edited by favian; November 3rd, 2005 at 04:19..

[gameman733]

i think that once the frontend has been around enough, users would have contributed and compiled enough gamecovers, that it could be released as a huge lump zip and released through torrent. i wouldnt mind seeding.

I think 1 big zip file with all this info may be a little much, but I dunno. Its mainly text and jpgs (hopefully, we would have to put a limit on that) so it wouldnt be so bad to distribute. We could also have this as a separate, optional package.

__________________

Desktop: CPU:Athlon XP 2400+ Mobo:Shuttle AK32VN Memory:256MB PC2100 DDR-RAM + 512 PC2700 DDR-RAM
Video Card:Apollo Geforce 6600GT + HDTV out Hard Drives: Maxtor 120GB 7200 RPM + Maxtor 120GB 5400 RPM + Maxtor 20GB DVD+RW: Lite-on LDW-401S 4x Running XP Pro SP2

Linbox (R.I.P, Dead Motherboard)(server): CPU: 1.4ghz Athlon Mobo: ECS K7S5A Memory: 2x64MB SDRAM Video Card: ATI Rage something Drives: hda: 6 GB HD hdc: DVD-rom Drive Running Debian Sarge

[favian]

agreed but thats too soon to talk about

[Hairybudda]

I decided to spend half an hour on it to quickly sketch the layout in VB:



If there's any serious interest in something like this and I can find the motivation, I'll officially take it onboard and develop it. The 'Config' text is grayed out because the mouse is over it (haven't touched any DInput yet, so I'm just ****ing about with mouse right now), and you don't see any games on the left because I've not written any directory parsing code yet. Pretty much enerything is hardcoded, but at least you can see it's workable.

Also, to do with the netcode side, I have a couple of servers online I could use temporarily until something more permenant becomes available.

Also, i dislike the idea of torrents with game-art and such. I'd much rather it was stored on a centralised server and populated by the community as it would save a lot of hassle for end-users.

Lemme think about it for a day or so and I'll get back to you on it.

[favian]

wow i'm really impresed! are you sure you dont want to leave netcode stuff until last? i agree with the centralized server stuff as well, less hassle...

[Hairybudda]

A bugger it, I suppose I'll do some work on it for a couple of hours. I'll keep you guys posted.

[Hairybudda]

A little more progress


Theres a third box that isn't populated because the config file doesn't have a third game entry. I'll keep you guys posted.

[favian]

lmao @ motherb*ches..... wow. its coming out quite nicely...

can you create fields for specific details each game?

e.g.

[Title]
[Year]
[Company]
[Genre]

[favian]

i would love to be able to do this sorta stuff on my own.. what would i need to learn to be able to do this?

[Hairybudda]

Originally Posted by favian

lmao @ motherb*ches..... wow. its coming out quite nicely...

can you create fields for specific details each game?

e.g.

[Title]
[Year]
[Company]
[Genre]

I will be able to eventually, yes, I'd rather get the core of the thing layed out first though. Im planning on going customisable, like with foobar2k formatting strings and such. I've only been on and off playing with this for a grand total of about 2 hours, and it's already reminding me of why I hate VB.

[Hairybudda]

Originally Posted by favian

i would love to be able to do this sorta stuff on my own.. what would i need to learn to be able to do this?

You would need to learn a programming language, although I couldn't recommend one as some people react better to different languages.

[edit] Im gonna pack it in for tonight and pick me up a bottle of vodka

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Last edited by Hairybudda; November 3rd, 2005 at 19:51..