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[benn600]

I have a few games that I really enjoy.  What I would like to know is if anyone else has integrated some sort of ten foot interface for games?  MC has the ability to launch third party programs from theater view and I was thinking that with some care, I could set it up to launch such programs and I would just have to make sure my USB controllers are plugged in.  So what has everyone else created?  Any pointers before I start with this?

What I was thinking is MC theater view would have a category called either "Games" or "Applications" -- if I start adding apps.  Under Games, you could pick a game and MC would launch it.  Everything would default to the appropriate mode: full screen, ready to go mode!  Then, my remotes I use can be infinitely configured to act differently in different apps.  If a game is running, pushing a button would (maybe) save the game and then close the program and start MC theater view again.  This would create a seamless user experience.  I never want to rely on the mouse and keyboard for any of this and I think this technique may work.

[parkym]

I have done exactly what you are proposing to do.

I have set up a games folder which has a list of games that are actually .bat files. The bat file launches the emulator specifying the game and any other settings for the game to run correctly. I have currently set-up games that use MAME and STELLA (Atari 2600).

This only works if I connect to the USB games controller in otherwise I have to use the keyboard to exit the emulator. The emulators do not recoginse the games controller if it is put in after the emulator has started.

For MAME I have customised the extra buttons to exit the game (MAME is also set-up to save the current status), insert coin and player 1 start.
For Stella I have customised the extra buttons to select game and reset game. It is only a basic set-up but it works for now. I am sure there is more I can do to with this.

It did take some time to set-up each emulator to work as I wanted but it was worth the effort. Adding additional games is easy, as I just copy one of the other game's bat file and then change the filename to the game name and the rom name in the bat file. The one problem I did came across was when the emulator change the screen resolution. After exiting the game the thearter view was messed up because it did not revert back to the original screen resolution. This was easily fixed by making sure the emulators used the same resolution as thearter view was using.

It makes playing the old retro games on my big TV easy. Starting the game is the same as starting a movie and it is all available from the one interface. All I have to do is make sure I have the games controller plugged in before I start the game.

[JimH]

Pretty neat.  Any pictures you could share?

[benn600]

I skimmed your response for now and am very intrigued.  That looks like exactly what I am interested in.

[ThoBar]

Yep, the recent changes to the Theater View front end have really added some flexibility to the product. Games, recipes, wine reviews and all sorts of other things, are now available via a consistent frontend. Love it.

[benn600]

Great, I read your entire post parkym.  That is exactly what I would like to do.  How do you actually setup theater view to list your games?  It almost appears that they can only be added to the home page....OR

do you setup auto import and then have MC add .bat files???  Brilliant!  Then I could create an Applications folder and put any apps there and they would show up for every user auto importing the folder.  That would be amazing!

[parkym]

Sorry for not replying sooner but not been on the forum for a while..

Great, I read your entire post parkym.  That is exactly what I would like to do.  How do you actually setup theater view to list your games?  It almost appears that they can only be added to the home page....OR

MC mainly has 3 categories and I decided to use the Video category as the place to have the games in. I then wanted to add a new media sub type called 'Video Game' but I was not able to do this, so after looking at the forum for any ideas I decided to go down the route of creating user field which I called 'Video Sub Type' and in this included the all the types from Media Sub Type plus the extra one for Video game. I only use this user field for videos.

To make this work, like it does with Media Sub Type, I had to make changes to all my video media files to use the new field (fortunately MC does this quickly for you using the move/copy fields option in library tools). Also had to change the scheme to use this field instead of the media field.

The bat file will only run if the media type is Data but Data is not part of the video scheme so all I had to do to get the files included was to filter included files in the scheme to state the media type is video or data.

To get the files in to MC in not so simple as I was not able to auto import the files (I have not figured how to do this yet, any ideas would be greatfully received), I had to drag and drop them in. Once they are in I could then edit the fields as much as needed, mainly being that the Video Sub type was Video Game and the Media Type is Video.

Go into thearter view and voila you have a list of games in the video section under the sub type and selecting to play runs the bat file. It also works for lnk files as well.

Now the problem is that the games all use the horrible command icon that is associated with BAT file and found that MAME could take a snap shot of the screen straight into the clipboard and wanted to use the snap shot of the game as the cover art.

To add the cover art I had to change the media type to video, this provides the cover art options and then use the option to paste from clipboard. As the file can not incorporate the image then MC stores this in your cover art folder. Change the media type back to data and the cover art is still there.

Hope this helps.

[Alex B]

The recent MC13 builds can add cover art also to document files. It think it is easiest to first save the cover art file to a folder and link it from there. The filename can be anything, but it might be good to use [the name of the game].jpg or similar.

An easy way to link cover art is to drag the image from Explorer to the expanded Tag > Image window (click the thumbnail placeholder on top left to expand it.)

I have no experience of adding games to Theater View, but here's a thread in which I explained how games can be added to Standard View: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=47409.0

[darichman]

Can MC send command line instructions to executables? Many emulators can open rom files directly (provided appropriate file associations have been set)... some require a one-liner cmd instruction, however.

I use Game-Ex at the moment as my HTPC/Game interface for NES, SNES, Atari, Sega Mega Drive/Master System, N64 and a few playstation games. It works as a WMC extension. I haven't set up MAME yet. It confuses me but was planning to try and do an interface with MC for a while. I prefer MC's navigational and organisational approach.

[benn600]

All great info.  I learned a lot and will tackle this next chance I get.  I have some ideas to try as I go through the process and I will report back if I find any improvements.  I, too, want MC to be the overwhelming interface for browsing the games.  Of course it would be great to have a pic of the actual game!  I insist on auto import whenever possible so I hope to find a way for it to function properly in this case.

[datdude]

how do you get mame files to run directly through MC?  right now they are all in .zip format and I have to use emuloader to play them.

i cant even right click the file and open them with the mame.exe.  when i do i see the mame program flash up for a few seconds but then it just closes everytime.

thanks

[datdude]

ok i see that you used bat files but how did you create those for 7000 games?

[parkym]

I haven't because currently I only have about dozen games that I like playing and so I have only created the bat files for the games I want to play. If I find another game I want to play a lot then I will create a bat for that one.

It would be great to get MC to import files and the game be ready to launch into the emulator. At most would only have to specify the emulator to run as some emulators use the same extention.

[datdude]

ah hah!