gRustibus

an xmame frontend for Gnome

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the
Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an
utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life
forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches
are a pretty neat idea ...
		-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

News

10 June 2001 - Updated the stylesheet for the webpages, the old colorscheme was giving me a headache. Removed all gifs (politics). I know the page looks crap in netscape 4.x, but I can't be bothered. It's all valid xhtml/css, so it's netscapes fault :)
31 May 2001 - Carlos Palminha <carlos.palminha@inov.pt> was kind enough to make a new rpm package that works on RedHat 7.x.
30 May 2001 - It seems there are problems with the rpm package (at least on RedHat 7.x systems). Untill I get new ones built (I do not have any RedHat boxes available), I suggest rpm users download the .tar.gz file and build a rpm from that by running rpm -ta grustibus-0.43.tar.gz
29 May 2001 - gRustibus 0.43 released. Get it from the download section
19 May 2001 - mame.dk has come alive again. Whoohoo!
18 May 2001 - The next release of gRustibus is rigth around the corner. I am having problems getting hold of some guys who said they wanted to do translations. If you are one of these guys (or if you just want to do a translation before the release), please contact me.
14 March 2001 - mame.dk is dead. RIP :-(
10 January 2001 - Opened up a CVS repository. You can do a anonymous CVS checkout like this:
- cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.gRustibus.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/grustibus login
- Just press enter at the password prompt
- cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.gRustibus.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/grustibus co grustibus
Contact me if you want write access to the repository.
03 August 2000 - gRustibus 0.42 released. Get it from the download section. You will need to rebuild your gamelist for this version. The format has changed.
20 July 2000 - Started putting snapshots of the development tree on the ftp.
30 June 2000 - gRustibus 0.41 released. Get it from the download section.
05 June 2000 - Vincent Lee reported that gRustibus compiles and runs on Solaris 2.6.
27 May 2000 - Whoa. 1000 downloads so far. And thats just from this page. I'm amazed..
04 May 2000 - Tested with xmame 0.37b1.2. It is still working :)
14 April 2000 - Discovered that gdk_pixbuf-0.7.0 was out - with massive API changes. I pictured a long night rewriting gRustibus (such is life on the bleeding edge), but (knock on wood) I installed the new lib, and gRustibus compiled without as much as a warning.
12 April 2000 - The web pages went up.
09 April 2000 - First public release (0.40)

The name

gRustibus' name is a tribute to an arcade hall called Rustibus in the town where I grew up. This place introduced me and many of my friends to the arcade game culture, not to mention its world-class milkshakes :) When you first start gRustibus some of the biggest hits from this place are marked as favourites. The 'g' prefix is just your usual GNOME / GTK+ / GNU / gwhatever prefix.

Features

The goal in creating gRustibus is to make a M.A.M.E frontend with all the features I have seen and enjoyed in other frontends, and maybe some others. It is loosely modelled after Arcade@Home for win32. Some feature highlights:

Shows screenshot, flyer, cabinet photo and history of selected game.
Game settings are customizable through the gui.
Each game can have its own config or use the global one.
Posibillity to show only parts of the list of games according to your preferences. For example you can set it to show just the ones that is installed and working, just your favourites or you all games lacking screenshots.
Can be controlled using the keyboard.
Completion of the searchstring. To select a game you just have to type the first few letters in its name (or whichever column the list is sorted by). This feature also has a history function, so you can use backspace to go backwards in your search (its a bit difficult to explain, try it - you'll see).
You can set your own font and colour codes for the game list. You may want to set your favourites to stand out by making them red for instance.
All aspects of how the window is looking can be automagically saved on exit. This includes the selected game and the width of each column.
You can make reports in text or html format showing the status of your mame collection.
You can download files (roms, screenshots etc) from the internet.

Requirements

To compile and run gRustibus you need a few libs and programs. Since this is a GNOME program, you'll need GNOME (at least the libs). It was developed on a debian potato box running October GNOME. Older versions of GNOME may or may not work, I don't know. If your GNOME is older than 1.2, you'll need to get the gdk_pixbuf library seperatly (tested with versions 0.6.0 - 0.10.0) as well. For compiling you will need the headerfiles (dev packages) as well.

Last, but not least, you'll need xmame version >=0.36b15.2. The latest release as of this writing is 0.37b4, and this is known to work.

So far gRustubus is known to compile and run on the following systems:

GNU/Linux (tested on Debian potato/woody/sid and Redhat 6.x, both i386)
Solaris 2.6. reported by Vincent Lee <gis84506@cis.nctu.edu.tw>

If you get it to compile and run on other architectures (in theory it should work wherever GNOME and xmame works), please drop me a line, so that I can add your architecture to the list.

Known bugs in latest release

Gerhard Gruber <gerhard.gruber@hq.lion.cc> reported crashes on startup when running gRustibus on a 8 bit display. I have not been able to reproduce this yet.
It leaks 152 bytes on startup. I cannot figure out why.

Please tell me if you find any bugs other than the ones listed here.

Things to do

There are a number of features I want to implement that are not yet done. Some of these are:

Fix all the bugs listed above.
Write documentation.
Get it translated to more languages.
Check for first run. Make a helper or something.
Selecting and starting game using joystick.
Support multiple screenshots and flyers.
Dowload updated cheat and history file.
Let the user choose wich pages she wants shown in the notebook.
Support zip'ed screenshot collections.
Check which options the installed xmame supports before attempting to use them.

If you use gRustibus and you miss some feature, tell me, or even better - implement the feature and send a patch.

Join the team

All sorts of feedback is appreciated. You can send bug reports, wish lists, patches, translations, flames, praise etc. to me.

License

gRustibus is released under the Gnu General Public License. You can read the full license agreement here.