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gRustibus
an xmame frontend for Gnome
I worked in a health food store once. A guy came in and asked me,
"If I melt dry ice, can I take a bath without getting wet?"
-- Steven Wright
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.