Hey guys, I know it is way too early for implementation, but conversely, it may just be early enough to plant a seed of an idea for a future feature/request.
Until very recently (thanks to XBMC), I haven't been involved in the retrogaming arena for the last 9 or 10 years as I am slowly getting back up to speed on all the changes that have taken place since. I built my
cabinet in 1998, and refreshed it early 2000s and haven't changed anything since then. The Front-End on this thing is 3DArcade. Check it out if you haven't already (should still be on mameworld). It's old, hasn't been touched in a while, but is still awesome. Macromedia Director/Shockwave UI with customizable first-person arcade walk-through, mapped art (flyers, marquees, emuvideos) onto the 3D-rendered cabinets. Handles command line for launching any emulator. Maps music videos (or any video) to the video walls, Play your own music (and music playlists) through the 3D Jukeboxes inside the arcades while also having them continue to play while in-game, etc.
Anyways, with that, the really cool feature of 3DArcade that I
absolutely love being on my arcade cabinet is the screensaver feature. Yes, I said it... screensaver!!
I walk away from my cabinet (the thing actually stays on all the time) and 3DArcade will go into screensaver mode where after a certain amount of user-defined time, it will pick a random (I restricted it to only choose from MAME and pinballs) game to be launched for a user-defined amount of time and self-escapes out from the Emulator after a user-defined amount of time to get back into the front-end. I have the volume param set to TRUE as this thing sits in the basement and isn't too annoying (lowering the volume from the keyboard/remote is always an option). This feature is awesome and not something that is probably thought of, but I think would be amazing for this project. The great part is that the MAME ROMs for the arcades already have an ATTRACT MODE. Most console games do too, but the arcades are just great. The pinball attract modes are fun as well. This feature alone has made my cabinet sooooo worth it; letting the front-end randomly pick a ROM from the arcades & pins alone has introduced me to some fantastic games. It also entices you to play a game, especially when you hear it pick one of your favorites and it is displaying in attract mode. I end up walking over, hitting the COIN DROP button a couple times.... PLAYER 1 START!!!!!!!
Just thought a screensaver function of this would be a great alternative to a picture viewer slideshow thingamajig or DIM. Not sure if this is something for the main fork of XBMC or if it is something that can stem directly from this project, but I thought I'd introduce it here, as this project is in the early stages. Again, the screensaver feature is not something that is obvious, it is not something that anyone would necessarily think of as needed in the retrogaming emu world, it is not something anyone would usually request in a PC-based, normal EMU environment, but once it is running, activated, and randomly throwing-out arcade games, it's hard to envision not using it any more (especially when considering the alternative screensavers).
). Alternatively, you can download the zips here (/release folder). For 32-bit, compile your own (check out libretro-super) and replace the .so with your new binary.
