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Big Blue frontend


bulbousbeard

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I know this is the Hyperspin forums, but I made a frontend for my Capcom Big Blue cabinet, and I just thought I'd share it with others since it was so much work.

Features:

* Runs at any resolution (320x240 to 3840x2160 tested)

* Works on 15khz arcade cabinet setups all the way through 4k resolution LCD monitors

* Runs any commandline program and will not need to be updated to support any new emulator or game that comes out

* Has 4:3 letterboxing for setups with widescreen monitors if that's what you're after

* Includes a fully playable mini-game that 2 players can play to determine who gets control of the next game selection

* Completely arbitrary game list order / fully configurable

* Is aware of your computer's time and changes the theme for morning, sunset, and night

* 6 layer parallax scrolling background for the arcade feel

* Full sound and music (optional)

* Fully configurable controls

What's unique about this frontend is that the frontend itself is a video game. Player 1 and 2 can fight each other to determine who gets to select the game.

I've also added a pixel shader so that the background scenery changes depending on the time of day.

Here's a video showing it running with letterboxing enabled and a 2 player game:

320x240:

http://i.imgur.com/alZw60o.png

640x480:

http://i.imgur.com/eLxrn1s.png

2560x1600:

http://i.imgur.com/GiOtrwT.png

Running at sunset with image scaling disabled at 2560x1600:

http://i.imgur.com/k6pLC3n.png

Running at night with image scaling disabled at 2560x1600:

http://i.imgur.com/kIYiTsa.png

You can download it here:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/fdrgva

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that is awesome nicely made my freind but can you make it so it opens up the games and runs them as well i so wanna use this is that what it also does and another thing which you could add is the other rampage monsters in the bg

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sorry freind i mean does it run mame as well its just i see when you click the games it shows the chars come up but i dont see it run in action in mame sorry if its a silly ?

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It will run MAME or any other program.

You can edit games.xml to choose which games you're going to launch and what you're going to launch them with.

Here is a typical game entry. You specify the title you want to show in the list, which directory you're going to run it from, the exe you're going to launch, the name of the thumbnail image (in PNG format) that's associated with it, and any args/parameters you're going to pass the exe.

mame.exe takes at least one arg for the name of the ROM, so the arg to run 2020 Super Baseball would be "2020bb":

<game>

<title>2020 Super Baseball</title>

<dir>d:\mame</dir>

<exe>ume64.exe</exe>

<thumbnail>2020bb</thumbnail>

<args>2020bb</args>

</game>

Say you want to run the PC game DOOM from Big Blue. DOOM is in your c:\DOOM folder, and its exe name is doom.exe, and you want to run it with a wad file. In the command prompt, you'd enter c:\DOOM\doom.exe -file mywad.pk3.

In Big Blue, you'd configure it like this:

<game>

<title>DOOM</title>

<dir>d:\doom</dir>

<exe>doom.exe</exe>

<thumbnail>doom</thumbnail>

<args>-file mywad.pk3</args>

</game>

The beauty of Big Blue is that it can run anything. It doesn't matter if it's the PC version of Street Fighter 4, a game in MAME, DOOM, or anything else. You can run anything that you can run from the command line.

This has the nice side effect of not having to update any frontend configuration when a new version of MAME or whatever comes out.

Note that these <game /> tags can go in any order, and the order you enter them into Big Blue is the order that they will appear in the games list. This gives you the ability to group games in a series even though it's not technically alphabetical order. For example, in a typical frontend, Metal Slug X would follow Metal Slug 3 even though Metal Slug 3 came later. In Big Blue, you can make games appear in their "proper" chronological release order.

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  • 8 months later...

This frontend is worth looking at. It's unfortunate you haven't gotten much attention from us. It looks nicer than GameEx and it's actually pretty unique. It would be great to support HyperSpin wheels on this. I love the concept of a simple minigame in the front end to decide which player gets to choose the game. This would be great for a cabinet loaded only with multiplayer games. Would be amazing if in the future it included multiple minigames at random, kind of like a Mario Party experience. Lots of potential here!

I love the apparent simplicity of the setup. I wonder what limitations there are when compared to HyperSpin's modules. If I ever get HyperSpin set up to my satisfaction I will definitely give this a shot.

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I like it.

I'm a fan of simple unified themes.. I like Hyperspin but a majority of my time is going to be spent decluttering it.

there's just SO much going on with all the different themes I think it actually hinders gameplay once the novelty of it wears off.

what is this mage in and how do you customize animations, etc on the FE?

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  • 1 year later...
1 hour ago, buddy540s said:

oh one last question what are the minimum pc requirements to run this pc other than handling associated emulators?

This guy got banned from here forever ago now so you aren't going to get an answer from him I'm afraid

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12 hours ago, Metalzoic said:

This guy got banned from here forever ago now so you aren't going to get an answer from him I'm afraid

He's also been an unruly troll on Reddit for ages, who got banned for running multiple accounts used to upvote and comment and troll other users who disagree with him. :)

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He's also been an unruly troll on Reddit for ages, who got banned for running multiple accounts used to upvote and comment and troll other users who disagree with him. [emoji4]

Doesn't surprise me. The guy was a massive tool.

Sent from my SM-G935V

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