Emulator Menus


Ian J

Advanced Member
Joined
Aug 27, 2010
Messages
1,880
Having owned a Pandora for about a week now I am still getting to grips with all of the different options for accessing emulator settings.


It appears that every emulator uses it's own choice for opening up/navigating their menu's.


Is there any way that a standard could be agreed?
 
A standard menu emulator controls idea was discussed before. Actually at the time 2 forum members said they were working on such a thing.Who knows if they still are though.Picklelauncher is used for snes9x and other stuff though. :)
 
Ah, this old chestnut sadly it looks like the answer to your question 'Is there any way that a standard could be agreed?' appears to be no.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Maybe that thread should be resurrected here.
 
I think you're dreaming, we've all been stewing on this problem for years and are no closer to any consistency. Ultimately I'd rather there was a small learning curve for the user, than need to force our most excellent and precious developers to waste their time arriving at a standard.


If there were to be such a standard, I'd point everyone in the direction of Robert Broglia and say: THAT!


His emulators (on iOS/Android) have a brilliant and simple UI, which is consistent across MD.emu, NES.emu, NGP.emu, SNES 9x EX...etc.
 
I better carry on dreaming then. You gotta have a dream, if you don't have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I better carry on dreaming then. You gotta have a dream, if you don't have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?

True, that. Unfortunately this one seems to be an uphill battle against insurmountable odds... short of someone with the know-how simply throwing together a front-end for all the emulators, I don't see it happening.


You get used to the Pandora after a while, anyway!
 
I'm not saying the menus have to be universal, just the navigation. For example the Pandora button always brings up the menu, the X Button is accept etc.


At the moment some use CTRL & Escape for menu, others the Y button etc.
 
Same as for desktop .. every Application in Windows (say) has a different UI; not just emus or games, but business applications. Heck, look at Microsoft, mxing it up with the ribbon which quite a few peopel absolutely hate, or the major changes going on in Linux land (Unity, KDE4, Gnome 3 ..) -- it is not limited to justy our little platform. You can't really lock developers down, they'll do whatever is easy, or whatever they think is best for their niche, or just whatever works :)


There have been many discussions about trying to standardize it, but even qaside form getting devs to rework old code, to advertising the effort to new devs, there is the big problem that not all emus are alike; straight old consoles liek the Atari 2600 have limited options, but some consoles had options (more RAM..) or addons like the genesis 32x with or jaguar with the toilet seat add-on; plus some amchines liek Atari ST or Amiga have floppies, carts, RAM or interface changes (joysticks, mouse, hard drives..) and differernt chipsets based o machine model; Sometimes its hard to come up with a satandard UI.. some machi8ens have full keyboards, some just a single analog joystick (Vectrex).


Its not as easy as you think :)


Another effort is ongoign right now, in just having devs write whatever UIs they want, but maybe using standardized nomenclature and help artwork -- to help make it clear what buttons do what. But even that is a hard battle. Heck, we've been going over this for 15 or more years, on every new mobile device; people wanted standard UIs for Palm and Pocket PC, for emus on their GBA and DS, on their PSP, on their gp2x and so on :)


jeff
 
I'm not saying the menus have to be universal, just the navigation. For example the Pandora button always brings up the menu, the X Button is accept etc.


At the moment some use CTRL & Escape for menu, others the Y button etc.

There is one precedent problem too -- historically, Eastern (Japanese) would use one button arrangement ("right side" button to active menu) while Western (North America, the UK, etc) would use the 'bottom' button to do similar thing; so even Nintendo DS etc, has a change when you change locale. Since we're international, we run right into _that_ day one .. there is _no_ existing styandard by which to agree upon. A new standard needs making.


But I do agree, be nice if we could nail some things down. (Some disparity was caused by having pushes one way while peopel wanted to go another, plus use cases).


One thign to consider is.. existing app specific standard; ie: 3 desktop apps might have each their own very well known standard for operation (such as MAME's 3/4 or 5/6 to deposit coins, and 1/2 or 1/2/3/4 to start player X) .. that is a well established thing (along with the left/right waggle to pass info screens.) So its unusual, but well known on the desktop.. so for ports of MAME, do you use the established and well known desktop standard, or conform to the mobile standard you build? Either way you confuse 50% of your audience -- if you switch to the mobile stanard, then existing iusers from the old standard get screwed up; if you don't, than new users get screwed up.


This is the crux :)


jeff
 
Maybe allowing the keys to be re-defined is the way to go.
 
A new standard needs making.
Which one of the standards is the standard? <eg>


I agree with the fact that it's impossilbe to unite different ui's or key-settings for future releases. Every developer and user knows that his "standard" is the only best one, the one he is used to and everybody else should use. That isn't a good way into unity but maybe its possible to find a good way into the freedom of choice?


How about a general key-setup interface language translation standard graphical user interface?


If we can't get all apps united for one standard layout we could try to find a way for a translating app which could read as much as possible apps controller key-setup, modify and re-write it into the app or the config files of the app.


Isn't it possible for ascii style config files? Isn't it possible for open source binary config files?


What are the standard function names of the keys? du (d=digital), dd, dl, dr, action, cancel, start, select, if you read this you would know what those keys do. What about the additional keys, x, y, shoulder buttons? Which actions do they stand for?


A translation app could need the user to say one time "i want action on this controller key position" and translate the action function into any installed gaming app.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Back
Top