Utilities

Control Panel Design Software

• Visio

• CPSketcher

Label Layout Software

• Controls.dat Project

Controls.dat is a project started by Kevin Jonas (SirPoonga) with the help of Howard Casto. This project was started to accurately document the controls and button labels of the arcade control panels from the games in M.A.M.E.. The goal of this project is to compensate for the inaccuracies M.A.M.E. outputs in its documentation.

• Johnny 5

Johnny5 is a label layout program, controls viewer, and artwork generator, written by Howard_Casto of the BYOAC community. You take your own background image and add where you want your labels to go, such as Up, Fire, etc. Johnny then takes information from controls.dat to populate the labels and creates an image from it. Optionally, Johnny can display the created image. Johnny also includes a GUI.

There's a page full of information about the Johnny 5 controls viewer at

http://www.mameworld.net/tigerheli/johnny

• CPMaker

CPMaker is a label layout program, control panel layout program, controls viewer, and artwork generator, written by Buddabing. The CPMaker GUI, which was just released in February 2006, allows the user to easily create his or her own control panel out of artwork pieces.

Buddabing's home page is at http://cpmaker.mameprojects.com. There is a documentation page for the CPMaker GUI, its underlying graphics engine, and a tutorial.

The CPMaker suite of applications is written in C and is open-source.

• CPViewer

CPViewer is a label layout program and controls viewer, created by John Crouse (aka jcrouse).

The CPViewer home page is at http://www.cpviewer.emuchrist.org/

jcrouse says this about what CPViewer is:

"CPViewer is an add-on for Mame. More specifically for the front-end you use to launch your Mame games. It uses a file called controls.ini to lookup the controls for a particular game. It then displays them on the screen so you know what buttons and movements perform what actions in the game that is currently highlighted in your front-end. Did you ever sit do to play a little and decide to try a new game. Then ask yourself, "What buttons do what?" Well if the game has been documented in the controls.ini file, this won't happen again. Simply press a hotkey (one of your control panel buttons) and a graphic of your control panel will be displayed with all of the character movements or button assignments displayed so you know what buttons perform what actions. It's that simple."

Utilities

• ListGen

This utility, written by Buddabing, uses a free SQL engine (SQLite) to create an internal table from MAME's -listxml output that can be used to generate MAMEWah game lists. It also can be used to generate batch files for Buddabing's MAME Movie Maker. ListGen is a fast, open source way to filter game lists.

ListGen can be downloaded from http://cpmaker.mameprojects.com/files/LISTGEN.ZIP

• mng2avi

The mng2avi is a utility written by Buddabing which converts MNG video files into AVI video files. It does this by first breaking down the MNG file into a series of pngs, then running a VirtualDub script to create the AVI file. Optionally, mng2avi can be used to create demo loop movies directly from MAME's MNG output.

mng2avi can be downloaded from http://cpmaker.mameprojects.com/files/MNG2AVI.ZIP