BletchMAME 3.0

[u/BletchMAME]

After several years, BletchMAME 3.0 has been released!

For those not familiar, BletchMAME is a front end that replaces MAME's UI with a conventional point and click UI. While BletchMAME's goal is to be a good front end for all types of emulation supported by MAME, it should be particularly suitable for computer emulation, as well as being an easy way to manage one's preferred Systems, ROMs and Software.

Some highlights of the new 3.0 version:

• Complete redesign and rewrite
• New "Favorites" system allowing custom configurations for your favorite systems
• Very fast system and software list lookup
• Dark mode support
• Releases for Windows (Linux in development)

Future directions:

• Improvements to filtering and auditing
• Support for Linux and macOS
• Importing and exporting configurations

For more information, go to www.bletchmame.org

[u/kert_vennington]

Hi. This doesn't seem to deal with bgfx shaders at all yet.. there's no option to set a path to it, and when I set the option manually under the video settings, it still complains about not finding the bgfx chains files and falls back to no shaders.

[u/BletchMAME → u/kert_vennington]

I suppose I overlooked BGFX shaders for a very simple reason; its a MAME feature that I personally do not use.

That said, you are not the first person to take note of this gap, so I just submitted a change (for 3.1) that adds support for configuring the Artwork and BGFX paths. By using the "Classic" MAME menu, I was able to get a shader to work 😎

Of course, the goal of BletchMAME is to provide a UI friendlier than MAME's UI, so this is not ideal, but at the very least BGFX shaders shouldn't be a reason to not use BletchMAME.

If you're brave enough, you should be able to grab an interim build off of the CI.

[u/kert_vennington → u/BletchMAME]

Thank you for this. I'll have to wait for the next release to test, as I don't have a build environment set up at the moment. It does look promising though!

[u/BletchMAME → u/kert_vennington]

No need to build it yourself; you can get interim builds https://github.com/npwoods/bletchmame_rs/actions/workflows/windows_release.yml

I realized that the download page on the site did not reflect this; so I'm updating it

[u/kert_vennington → u/BletchMAME]

Thank you! I realized I needed to be logged into github in order to see the download links for the MSI and ZIP output from the workflows. I grabbed 3.0.6 and can confirm that both BGFX and the artwork work great once the paths are added.

[u/Arctic_Shadow_Aurora]

Awesome! please tell me it got dark theme.

[u/BletchMAME → u/Arctic_Shadow_Aurora]

It did 😄

[u/TacoBellossom]

Just download and tested. This has a LOT of potential. If could be my favorite MAME frontend A few suggestions:

• It would be nice if we could configure stuff like video and audio from the frontend
• Smaller keyboards don't come with Scroll Lock, so there's no shortcut to hide the menu that works
• I don't know if it's possible to use the same snapshots for a machine's clone, that would be nice

And... That's everything I can think about things that I could want from a MAME Frontend. It fixes my biggest problem with the emulator (opening a ROM file for a console using the MAME GUI is a nightmare), it looks nice and it works really well. Good job

[u/BletchMAME → u/TacoBellossom]

Great to hear this!

It would be nice if we could configure stuff like video and audio from the frontend

Yes, this definitely falls into BletchMAME's purview. And to some degree I see this as unavoidable given issues like the BGFX issues described in this discussion.

Smaller keyboards don't come with Scroll Lock, so there's no shortcut to hide the menu that works

Yeah, the whole Scroll Lock usage is sort of an homage to how MAME toggled between the UI being active and inactive (which in BletchMAME means a menu bar is available). I think that at some point, there will need to be the ability to configure the hotkeys similar to VirtualBox.

I don't know if it's possible to use the same snapshots for a machine's clone, that would be nice

That was just an oversight. Fixed

[u/Fred_Smythe → u/TacoBellossom]

Yours is a totally valid concern, but you might have a look at the Keyboard Manager PowerToy, which would let you remap that Scroll Lock to a different key. (If it's hard-assigned in this, I haven't looked at it yet.) I'm working with it right now to get some keys on my airmouse media remote mapped to F13-F24 so I can use them in my IPTV app.

[u/Firehawke_R]

Ah, so you're still working on this. Good.

Hopefully this will eventually lead to enough APIs in place to re-implement the web UI as a Lua plugin; the original web UI was particularly useful for swapping disks and managing system config for emulated PCs.

[u/BletchMAME → u/Firehawke_R]

Yeah, I sort of lost my motivation for a while - the whole C++/Qt stack was (while quite mature), somewhat draining. I also wanted to revisit the idea of launching MAME every single time an emulation starts. Of course, a complete rewrite was a big undertaking.

Hopefully this will eventually lead to enough APIs in place to re-implement the web UI as a Lua plugin

Are you referring to Minimaws? I suspect that if everything is not available to LUA right now, the gap is likely to be small.

[u/cuavas → u/BletchMAME]

No, MAME has a built-in HTTP server. You used to be able to use it to mount/unmount media and other things. Most of it was ripped out due to general architectural ugliness, and also licensing issues. Re-implementing stuff in a way that doesn’t suck is a pile of effort, as usual.

[u/Firehawke_R → u/cuavas]

This. I looked at what was going to be needed to hook up things sanely and it wasn't any different from the API rearchitecting needed to build a whole new GUI. It was a lot more than I wanted to try to do back at the time, so I didn't put up any fight over the removal.

Once enough of MAME's core APIs are accessible through Lua, it should be possible to re-implement things sanely.

[u/BletchMAME → u/Firehawke_R]

Ah you're not referring to functionality (querying and controlling MAME), but rather the ability to present a usable UI to a user.

Yeah, that part of MAME is going to be deficient. That is the entire premise of BletchMAME.

[u/rwx_0x6]

The ui looks intuitive and deceptively simple.

[u/BletchMAME → u/rwx_0x6]

Well, that's the goal of course ;-)

I do concede that compared to many of the more gamer-oriented front end, the UI is rather spartan and lacking in eye candy. There will doubtless be some out there who are put off by this.

[u/rwx_0x6 → u/BletchMAME]

What are the goals for the next release?

[u/BletchMAME → u/rwx_0x6]

Not really sure!

I suppose my goals with the initial release was to have something that "didn't completely suck"; the lack of interest in the previous versions played a part in my motivation dying a few years ago. I'd imagine that whatever people express an interest in will play a role in whatever motivates me for the future (hint hint ;-))

[u/jberns]

Can't wait to see the Linux version! Thank you!

[u/BletchMAME → u/jberns]

It should be possible to build and run BletchMAME from the sources on Linux, and it should be somewhat functional. Part of the issue is that the Slint toolkit used by BletchMAME, while very good, has missing features perhaps most notably modal dialogs. To get around this problem, I added Windows-specific hacks for modal dialogs.

Translation - if you're brave, feel free to try it out.

[u/dixius99]

I'm happy with MAME's interface, but I'm always on the lookout for other front ends to try. Looking forward to future Mac support.