# Frontends.



## chyyran (Nov 26, 2012)

I have a couple of No-Intro sets, as well as some random ISOs (Wii, Gamecube, PS2, PSX) that I'd like to have displayed, nicely in a frontend, like Hyperspin. However, I looked at Hyperspin, and not only does it lack scraping capabilities, you need to pay to get things like covers in a reasonable amount of time, and it doesn't support Wii, Gamecube, PS2 and PSX (Dolphin, PCSX2, PCSX).

Are there any other decent , free emulator frontends?










But hey, worse comes to worse, I'll just have another programming challenge to do.


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## Nah3DS (Nov 28, 2012)

You could try XBMC with Advance Launcher or GameEX


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## chyyran (Nov 29, 2012)

Yeah, I tried XBMC with Adv. Launcher already, I didn't like it at all, the UI just doesn't fit.

As well, GameEX costs $17. If I wanted to pay that much money, I could just buy HyperSpin Gold, not to mention the UI is pretty ugly.


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## gumgod (Nov 29, 2012)

Cabrio is similar to Hyperspin if you're running Linux. It's possibly a little buggier too, but it is open source.

edit: looks like it actually does have a Windows version, it's just not the most recent version.  But there are notes on compiling it.  Although by the time you get it set you you probably could have set up Hyperspin.


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## chyyran (Dec 5, 2012)

gumgod said:


> Cabrio is similar to Hyperspin if you're running Linux. It's possibly a little buggier too, but it is open source.
> 
> edit: looks like it actually does have a Windows version, it's just not the most recent version. But there are notes on compiling it. Although by the time you get it set you you probably could have set up Hyperspin.


 
It's ugly, and doesn't have scraping features. Also, doesn't look like it supports PCSX2 and Dolphin either

Looks like I'm coding my own. Time to dive into Swing and PLAF.


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## spinal_cord (Dec 5, 2012)

Not sure if my little offering would be any use to you, but here is a link anyway....

http://socoder.net/?blogs=27502


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## Nah3DS (Dec 6, 2012)

Punyman said:


> Yeah, I tried XBMC with Adv. Launcher already, I didn't like it at all, the UI just doesn't fit


try differents skins


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## chyyran (Dec 6, 2012)

NahuelDS said:


> try differents skinsView attachment 1157


I can't do a skin just for a single plugin. I like my Aeon Nox set up for my TV shows, but not so much for my ROMs, but I'll look into it more.




spinal_cord said:


> Not sure if my little offering would be any use to you, but here is a link anyway....
> 
> http://socoder.net/?blogs=27502


 
This looks good, but the font looks a bit too small for my TV, looking for a 10-foot interface.


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## FAST6191 (Dec 15, 2012)

Perhaps not quite what you want (it seems to lack support for later consoles if nothing else) but I have been toying around with http://code.google.com/p/rom-jacket/ in a VM for a little while and it might be worth looking at as part of what you want here.


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## Nah3DS (Dec 30, 2012)

now I'm looking for a frontend that supports 7z Merged Roms
GameEx claims to have that feature but you have to pay for it
Rom Collection Browser "supports" that feature, but I couldn't make it work. Also, the interface is too convoluted

do anyone knows if there is one that could do that job?


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## FAST6191 (Dec 30, 2012)

7z merged roms is an interesting concept to ponder- though I can not deny that it can reduce sizes to something resembling that of a singly compressed ROM depending upon the games in question it may not be the best route. If you are considering compressing more than 1.1 and region dupes together or indeed the whole the lot I highly advise you do not as the way 7zip works tends to mean you will be facing a long "seek" time before the decompression can happen.

Short version- by all means store a collection in merged form but for active use on modern systems it is better to go for single compressed images and maybe prune your collection to those you really do want to play.


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## Nah3DS (Dec 30, 2012)

What about setting the compression level to "store", that would't reduce the seeking times?
I use merged sets only for organization purposes, saving space is not a issue anymore when it comes to smaller roms like GB, GBC and NES.


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