Request: Software Box Art Window

[AmigaBoingBall]

I do wanna see a window displaying box art for amiga games & software - front and back similar to iTunes album art. It would displayed as a PNG,
stored into Winuae folder in accordance to the ADF file stored on your machine.

It would also list developer, publisher, year, etc. while playing a game full screen you have the option of displaying the box art as well next to LED lights. While windowed mode - it will be displayed as a separate popup
similar to Amiga Forever 2008.

It would be connected to the internet and would download from Exotica, Lemon Amiga, and various Amiga sites.

Toni
Just a wishlist or possibly a joint project with Cloanto in the far far future
maybe WinUAE 9.0?.

[killergorilla]

Use Gamebase Amiga or something similar.

What you are after is a frontend.

I sincerely hope WinUAE never becomes part of a "joint project" with Cloanto.

[antonvaltaz]

Originally Posted by killergorilla

I sincerely hope WinUAE never becomes part of a "joint project" with Cloanto.

Speaking as a noob who's probably missed something... what's wrong with Cloanto?

[killergorilla]

I shall simply quote an article I just found online:

What happened with the Amiga emulation community is a chilling tale. For years Amiga enthusiasts worked to make the Amiga’s public domain and commercial software library available online. The community freely shared their resources and bandwidth; there was almost an evangelical imperative to share the Amiga and its games with anyone who might want them. Plenty of people contributed their time and money to building and enriching this community. Copyright infringement was rampant, but no one involved was making any special effort to “cash in” on the building interest in the abandoned computer and its software.

Enter Cloanto, a company that saw the public’s interest in the Amiga as a lucrative opportunity for private gain. In what some might deem a sinister manuever, Cloanto secured an exclusive license to the Amiga operating system ROMs and sent cease and desist orders to anyone daring to host these critical ROMs on the internet. Cloanto was offering them for sale along with its commercial, proprietary emulation program. Cloanto made no special effort to curtail the infringement of Amiga software for which it did not own the rights, even though it is likely that anyone who bought their ROMs was engaged in such activity.

Source: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/...mes?page=0%2C1

[antonvaltaz]

Originally Posted by killergorilla

Source: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/...mes?page=0%2C1

(Note to mods: I realise I'm veering pretty off-topic here so please move this bit of the thread if appropriate).

KG - thanks for linking to that article, it was a really interesting read.

It seems a little unfair to Cloanto though (unless my memory is wrong). I was an active Amiga user until late 1998, when there was still some (albeit rapidly fading) hope of a viable commercial future for the Amiga.

Cloanto brought out the first Amiga Forever pack in 1997; at that time the controversy was not that they had licenced the ROMs and were protecting the copyright - I don't remember anyone contesting that - rather, they were opposed by some in the community for even daring to support the idea of running an emulated Amiga on a x86 Windows box.

So it seems a little unfair for the author of that article to imply that they jumped on an already thriving emulation scene and tried to throttle it for selfish purposes - rather it seems to me that they were a major part in kicking that emulation scene off?

[killergorilla]

Yeah it's an interesting take on the whole thing.

It's a 15 year old machine, let people emulate it as they wish.

Don't charge them for it.

But anyway, drifting dangerously off-topic.

I don't think Toni is interested in doing anything like a frontend at all.

There are a good few frontend solutions out there now, Gamebase, JAmiga, Lemonade, plus some other snazzy ones I also can't remember the name of.

I don't think incorporating them into WinUAE would be a good idea.