QMC2 0.35

QMC2 project is a Qt 4 based UNIX MAME frontend supporting both XMAME and SDLMAME.

M.A.M.E. Catalog / Launcher II - also referred to as QMC2 - is the successor of one of the first XMAME GUI frontends available on this planet called QMamecat (derived from MAMECAT, which was text-only).

QMamecat was based upon Qt 2; its development was frozen in 2003. QMC2 has been rebuilt from scratch as a Qt 4 project. Parts of the design and code were inspired by its predecessor, but it's not just a remake. We tried to make the new design as flexible as possible to minimize dependencies from frontend- and CLI-related MAME changes, which was a major deficiency of QMamecat. QMC2 now uses a template based MAME configuration scheme, which can easily be enhanced with additional command line options (defined in an XML template file).

As a result of this flexible design, we are able to support multiple MAME targets - currently XMAME and SDLMAME!


Product's homepage

Here are some key features of "QMC2":

· Extremely fast preview- & flyer- image support, optionally smoothly scaled (PNG images, buffered in a resizable LRU-cache)
· Support for game icons (also PNG images), fast (pre-)caching mechanism
· Icons, preview- & flyer-images can either be stored as individual files in respective directories or they can be combined and compressed in ZIP archives
· Easily extensible template-based MAME configuration scheme (defined through an external XML file)
· Cool editor for configuration of global and game-specific MAME command line options, with search function
· Support for all emulation-related extra information available through MAME (displayed in a tree)
· Fast search function with wild-card pattern matching
· Selectable sort criteria and order for gamelist (game description, ROM state, year and manufacturer)
· Straightforward process management to control emulator processes
· Clear and full logging (separate frontend- and MAME-logs)
· Cached ROM state verification, indicated as colored spheres in front of each game description
· Verification of sample sets
· Game image checks (icons, previews & flyers)
· Online display of current gamelist, ROM status and search result statistics
· Two gamelist views: full game detail and parent/clone hierarchy
· GUI will always remain interactive, so you may configure or play MAME (etc.) even if heavy background-processing is active
· Time-consuming background tasks can be stopped on demand at (nearly) any time
· Optional auto-save/restore of window layout and game selection
· Multi-platform support
· Fully multi-language capable - translations exist for english (native) and german
· Game favorites management and play-history
· Online HTML-documentation and browser
· Support for XMAME and SDLMAME (default)
· Built-in support for GUI styles (KDE 4 / Qt 4 style plugins are supported)
· Automatic caching of analysed game data to speed up gamelist processing
· MAME configuration import/export from/to mame.ini/gamename.ini (SDLMAME) or xmamerc/gamenamerc (XMAME)

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· fix: general bug fixes
· imp: improved functionality
· new: newly added functionality
· wip: (incomplete) work in progress
· doc: documentation changes
· inf: informational only