Flash MAME Front End... a Flash-based front end for MAME
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This site is dedicated to development and distribution of my Flash-based front end for MAME.


I've long been an admirer of MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator and the work that the project does to keep classic arcade gaming alive. As someone who grew up on Asteroids, Space Invader, and Pacman, I really appreciate the nostalgia of having access to these old games.

Although I greatly enjoyed playing MAME games on my PC, I decided that the "full experience" required a cabinet. It's a lot more satisfying to run the games with a real joystick and arcade buttons than playing with the keyboard for controls. Let's face it, it's pretty hard to jink around the Pacman maze using the arrow keys on a standard keyboard. So I built the cabinet.

Once I had built my cabinet, I went in search of the "perfect" front end. I wanted something that would use the control panel for navigating and selecting games, that showed a screen shot of the game and the control panel layout, and that didn't require anything odd in the way of software to run. Unfortunately, although a couple of existing front ends came close, there wasn't anything that I was willing to put on my cabinet.

When I determined to create my own front end, I chose Macromedia's Flash as a development tool. It is something I own and know how to use fairly well, so it seemed like a good choice. Thus, this project was born.

 

If you're interested in a front end that works well in a Windows MAME cabinet, you're in the right place. If you don't know about MAME or font ends, see the FAQ.

 

 
 News
Dynamic version available!
I've completed work on the first dynamic version of the front end. At this point, it loads the game names, screen shot file names, and bat file names from an external XML file
More >>
Flash MAME FE is up
I've decided to post the full front end here. The file is ~2MB, so it may take a while if you have a slow connection, but you can see the front end in action
More >>
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©2005 Dan Hall — bluez34me(a)hotmail.com