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 and controls viewer, 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

• CPViewer

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