Old KGLoad Discussion
 

I am working on a game launcher for the Amiga, it's currently running in PAL 640x256 and is coming along quite nicely...

It currently looks like THIS!

AGA Version:
http://e.imagehost.org/0572/015.png

OCS Version:
http://e.imagehost.org/0415/014.png

Looks cool !

Where do you fetch the right side informations from ? Textfile in each folder ?
What format is the screenshot in ?
What is the resolution of the screen here ?
Do you plan a filter search box ?

Looks at bit like this AGS frontend they've used for the WinUAE Kaillera packs.

http://www.powerpic.de/images/1196105724234.jpg

Ooh lot's of questions!

A central database file with all the info stored in it.
It's in plain text because it's manually editible, it's fast to read in and it's easy to parse the information.

It's in iff format at the moment, 256 colours, 320x128 (* 2 = 256)

I may look in to gif somewhere down the line but png and jpg are going to be too slow to display on the fly.

It's a hires screen - 640x256 (*2 = 512), it's the highest usable resolution you can get really.

My main aim is for the menu to be run solely from a joystick, I will add keyboard support, cd32 pad support etc. etc. once I'm happy with the features I really want to implement first.

It certainly does. AGS is written in AmigaE as well and I currently use it as the frontend for my A1200 (it boots straight in to it).

AGS is the best joystick frontend out there, but I began to get a bit annoyed with it's lack of features.

My main gripe being that the screenshots are too big, meaning you have a really, really thin game list, which means you can't display long gamenames without truncating them.

Plus I really wanted to make it a lot more flexible... (more on that another time)

@kg

You're still looking for someone to do the graphics?
Is there a fixed palette?
How many colours can I use?
What type of overscan?
You want both hires and laced versions?

Yeah I'm still looking for someone to do some graphics.

There is indeed a fixed (indexed) palette of 256 colours which I've already decided on.

It's standard hires, I'm not really looking for any type of laced version as I like my eyesight :)

Could you upload it (palette) to the Zone in PPaint compatible format if possible?

Done!

I think it should be ok.

EDIT: I've reuploaded it, if you've already downloaded it, then delete it!

Grabbed and works. As for the areas you want to be filled with graphics is it Ok if I just halve the the pic you posted and use that as a template?

Yeah that was the plan, although feel free to move them about a bit if you need more room, I've not 100% decided exactly where everything wants to go but that's a good general guideline.

I wanted some logo down the bottom right or something, with the name of the menu (which I've yet to decide)

Do you swap palette coper list between the front-end zone and the screenshot area or should the iff color palette be compatible with your front-end palette ?

BTW: I didn't knew about AmigaE. Sounds cool to mix OO language and asm. I tried to fetch information about AmigaE but a lot of tutorials links from google search were dead. I found this
http://us2.aminet.net/dev/e/E_V31a_ps_doc.readme
which I plan to read. If you know some good online resources still alive about AmigaE, I'm all ears !

AmigaE is pretty simple to use if you've ever used C before, but unfortunately there are very few decent resources online (if any now).

Your best bet is to download the latest build of it as it has quite a few docs and a load of example code with it.

As for the palette, no I don't change the copper list, each iff screenshot needs to be of the same palette as the frontend.

I selected my palette by taking over 200 screenshots of varied amiga games, making them in to one large collage and then reducing the colours down to 256 selectively. I think the results are pretty good to be honest.

Damn this is great news KG, i will try the launcher ASAP :) !!

what? where? I want it! :bowdown

Yea, where is it? Isn't on the Zone :confused. Btw. What Is THE ZONE?? :D

I don't know what KG is doing exactly, but the Arcade Game Selector is here. Tried it with the Kaillera Packs with WHDLoad games, works fine for me.

http://www.paradroid.net/ags/

http://www.amigaclassics.de/kaillera/ger_beginning.htm

These remind of those CD32 cds 200, 300, 444 and 800 menus... will it be possible to start From a own partition so that you can reboot into a Gameselector menu. Anyways look damn cool. It would be so cool if i just had another bootable partition and went right into a menu like this for pure gaming ....

Looks good KG.
I tried to do something similar to this using multiview... I had a shell script to search for all the slaves and list them into a huge multiview document as buttons... that bit worked really well...
The problem is the size of the list! In multiview once you've got a couple of thousand lines even in 4 colour mode it slows to a crawl, and on a real amiga the list took about half a minute to open. :sad
Also, multiview doesn't scroll that well. It ended up being really clunky. It did work though.

Good luck with this!

As you've noticed, it's not in the zone because I've not released it yet :)

It's very much like AGS but better laid out (IMO), and a hell of a lot more configurable (once I've finished).

It'll also come with a dir scanner to scan a dir of whdload games and automatically populate the games list with those that are available.

You can also easily add anything you like to the gamelist manually.

But all in good time....

Any details, setable tooltypes/different WHDLoad version or something?

Yep, the most important function for the best convenience. A fully working scanner is must. :great