Feature suggestions for use with MAME

[keilmillerjr]

First and foremost, thank you for all the hard work that has went into Ice so for. Integrating non-steam games in an automated fashion is a perfect idea!

I'm making a mame arcade machine for home use. Using steam as a front end would be perfect! It looks good, utilizes keystrokes to navigate, and integrates steam and non steam games!

Here is some suggestions that I think would allow Ice to integrate with steam, and would be much appreciated by the arcade community. Forgive me if a feature is already in the works or integrated.

• Multiple rom directories for one emulator (I have cave roms separate from roms)
• Read rom titles (mame roms and associated extra files are titled in an abbreviated code)
• Read roms from a generated list (so we can include only certain games within that directory)
• Allow for multiple lists or reading for catver.ini (with so many roms, we need categories)
• Generate steam pictures from mame marquees

Thank you for listening to my suggestions!

[keilmillerjr]

Any comments on this? Ice could parse and pull the names from mame.xml and use catver.ini.

Side note: I'm looking into creating a steam image database for mame. Trying to figure out how to keep track of the title/name/parent with mame versions. Hmm...

[nlvw]

Enabling Ice to build its list from a dat file instead of the roms in the directory could solve this problem. this way we can tailor our roms list using something like clrmamepro

[Jabnin]

I'm surprised this isn't a feature yet. MAME is a pretty big deal, and I haven't found anyone who knows how to use steam as a frontend for it. Somebody here http://steamcommunity.com/groups/IceRM/discussions/0/558749191423214809/ says they were able to do it, but I was unable to recreate that.

[drewbroadley]

Hi all,

I decided to invest my afternoon into this and got it working from the Steam Forum link.

Biggest issue was around what directories to set the variables in the python script too (latest script here: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=XFWnf5W4)

Key considerations:

• mame.ini for Mame64.exe has correct romdir setting, so test mame64 itself is working and finding roms
• ICE rom directory should be different to your MAME rom directory, so it can create some folders for itself
• Run ICE after you've updated the console.txt and emulator.txt files, this will create relevant folders for below points
• python script: set rompath to the same directory as romdir in mame.ini
• python script: set linkpath to the directory "Arcade" created inside ICE's Rom directory
• python script: mamepath and mameexe are self explainatory

This is not an ideal script, but can confirm it does work.

[Anonymous2]

would be nice to have it patched the right way into Ice, Mame is a big deal.

[imkrut]

@scottrice any chance of implementing this fix directly into ICE?

[klepp0906]

bump..