Thought you might like to know. We finally did it...

Check It Out And Download Here

I gotta say this is one hell of an amazing program. It's the iTunes of Emulation, all kinds of games from different systems into one lil neat program. It sure beats having an emulation folder, then having each system's emulator per folder plus their roms with it. With this you can just open it up, go to a console & click on a game box. Love it! Hoping arcade games get included, that'll be a lot easier than S.D.L. Mame. (MacMame is the last arcade emu I ever used, it was easy, and not for the technically gifted only. lol )

Thundar wrote:

The experimental build (also available on web site) runs MAME already.

It's not perfect, but for the most part I been using it since the betas exclusively for arcade games.
QMC2 is an incredibly flexible and versatile program, but for quick nice click and play interface I don't care for it much.

I so nearly bitched about this the day before it finally arrived, so glad I held my tongue. Excellent work, chaps.

@Thundar: The 'iTunes of Emulation'? Surely comparing any piece of software to that bloated nightmare is an insult! The day Apple axes it, or employs someone with a shred of UX-savvy, will be a happy one.

Very nice -- congratulations on finally getting this out there

o.k., not iTunes of emulation...the orgasm of emulation...better?

Love the interface but have some minor/major issues I might as well report here.

Major:

Save games... my games don't see to save. So RPGs are out.

Found my games only up to the letter B in my ROMS folder... and only for one system. Trying to add more requires me to add one game at a time.

Minor:

Have to setup my joystick every time I quit.

Have an error message about my USB devices being removed every time I quit.

I just went into the snes game I saved & it asked me if I wanted to continue from the last time I was playing it, so it works in the SNES. I do find the snes games more blocky at full screen than if I was playing them on b s n e s

Not all system support save states yet.

Trying to import large libraries right now is a known issue. If you check the github commits there are several updates that appear to fix that issue.

It wasn't a save state, but rather a save game. Was playing Super Mario RPG for SNES. When I returned, no save game existed.

Does OpenEmu support the cheat.dat file for the Arcade portion of it?

Loving the n64 core on OpenEmu experimental..it can play games 64ce can't

This is a really nice UI, although I dislike the whole concept for some of the same reasons I don't use iTunes. (Except for syncing music to my devices)

I don't use iTunes for listening to music for two main reasons:
1. I want to manage and organize my music myself, I don't want the software keeping my library for me.
2. It doesn't support a variety of obscure game console formats, etc.

This program doesn't have problem #2, but it does have problem #1. If you want to just open a ROM and play it without adding it to your library, you can't. File->Launch Game pops up an open file dialog asking for the rom, but when you select it, instead of starting right away like Kega Fusion or other emulators would, instead it's added to your library and you have to double click on it there.

It would be nice if the library feature was optional. Occasionally I just want to download a romhack, try it out, and delete it when I'm done because it's one of those things I only want to play once. (Might be demo or beta version of a hack where a complete one will be coming later) This adds 3 extra steps to the process, because you have to "Launch" the game which just imports it, double click it to run it, then delete it from your library after you're done playing.

Overall, great job I will use this product some times.

(Edit: Regarding what I use instead of iTunes, I use Audacious Media Player built from source code since they don't offer OS X binary releases, or Vox, but Vox doesn't support as many file formats as Audacious and they've ignored all of my requests to provide a plug-in API)

I manage & organize music in my iTunes, you must want a weird type of organization cuz if I want to listen to an album, I just look for it alphabetically, & OMG, it's there...not that hard, & I'm no wizard neither. lol I DO, however. dislike the new format that has been in it. Awhile ago it was great, until they ruined my organizing with the new versions, but I managed to re-organize them...& hey...its free...so I don't complain much.
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Thundar wrote:


The problem he's having is that he has to add (read: duplicate) the files to the library manually before he can even play the games. The emulator should be allowing you to select the ROM/file from wherever it is and just open it, not force iTunes style organization on you, which you then have zero control over.

It's the same reason I lock my iTunes folders to prevent just such an occurence. I have my music stored in a specific place and my boot drive is on an SSD. I do not want my entire 80 GB library put onto my SSD. It's the same principle with the emulator(s).

Squishy Tia wrote:


iTunes handles libraries on external discs just fine, just tell iTunes in the preferences where your library is located. That's how I did it all the time before iTunes match.

MetalDragon wrote:


I think you're missing the point. iTunes may handle the library in any location, but it still forces its own orgnizational scheme on the user and still copies your music to that location instead of letting you just specify an already existing location where your music resides.

If a person already has their ROM folder where they want it and organized how they want it organized, the emulator should respect that within reason.

Squishy Tia wrote:

iTunes won't make a duplicate copy of a song into your library directory if you turn that feature off. It can continue to reference files at their original location. OpenEmu has the same problem, and has the same option to turn that feature off so you don't end up with 2 copies of your ROMs.

But yes, you understand my frustration correctly. With my music, I don't follow one consistent forced model like iTunes does. Sometimes I'll have individual folders for albums, sometimes I'll have folders for a specific genre or artist with subfolders inside. This makes things easy for me to find, because I put things where I want to look for them. Then when I want to use another program with the same files, I know where to find them.

For the most part these problems doesn't translate entirely over to OpenEmu's forced library system because I usually group by system anyway, but there are cases like one I mentioned above where I want to try a level hack and delete it when I'm done. Or I have some special folders that I always keep separate from the rest, like my smaller collection of favorites that I would copy from if I was copying them to an SD card to play on the Wii or something.

I haven't tried the new OpenEmu yet (just the early betas), but the file management was what made me drop it.

You see, I've got a meticulously-arranged archive of stuff, with custom icons on the files, associated box art, attract screens, in-game screens, posters, manuals etc. When I throw all that at OpenEmu, I had the experience of it only recognizing some of the files (I've got custom ROMs I've built myself), un-grouping variants, only being able to handle certain compression formats (for some systems, I have all the ROM variants in one 7z archive with the default being first in the index with the earliest name). This archive took me a good 10 years to build, and has survived through many emulator attempts, so I'm not about to abandon it for a single emulator When testing OpenEmu, I quickly discovered the "large library" error, and so tossed my test samples at it (for each emulator it can handle). Even then I had some difficulties with compression formats.

It'd be nice if OpenEmu itself would transparently recognize zip, 7z, lza/lzh, gzip and bzip (plus the iso compression formats) and for any format it doesn't recognize, run the command-line version of the unarchiver at it to see what can be found.

That's my two cents It's definitely showing lots of promise though.

Some of what you guys want is exactly the opposite of the goals of OpenEmu. You see, you are all very hardcore users of emulator projects... the average person isn't. They just want throw a ROM at it, see it appear in the app, know it plays and have the good feeling that when they open the app again... there it is to carry on where they left off.