Making my own bartop arcade machine based on PiMAME/PiPLAY, I had lot of problems configuring AdvMENU. I use my own USB interfaced joystick based on V-USB project (http://www.raphnet.net/electronique/usb_game12/index_en.php). It works like a charm, but the question is that I can't configure my customed mapping of AdvMENU, after spending alot of time editing advmenu.rc.

So I decided to program my own front-end, a minimal one but functional, based on SDL, that launches directly from the command line as expected. It works well in the laptop and in the Raspberry, is it possible to filter for ROM type and category. At this moment just emulates mame4all. There is a romlist.txt file, no explanation required, and a preferences.txt file that saves the preferences. The MAME lauching, and the return to the front-end is in my experience quicker than with AdvMENU.

To change key mapping, list of categories, size of fonts, geometry and everything configurable is necessary to change and compile the source code directly. It's not difficult to read, I think, about 700 lines (though at this moment because my lack of time comments and variable names are still in Catalan).

Download source code: http://wiki.joanillo.org/index.php/Fitxer:Joanillo_arcade_frontend.zip
Demonstration video: http://youtu.be/A03xoSMrxPM
Blog post: http://www.joanillo.org/?p=873&lang=en

Joan Quintana (joanillo)