M.A.M.E. Catalog / Launcher II - also referred to as QMC2 - is the successor of one of the first XMAME GUI frontends available on this planet called QMamecat (derived from MAMECAT, which was text-only).
QMamecat was based upon Qt 2; its development was frozen in 2003. QMC2 has been rebuilt from scratch as a Qt 4 project. Parts of the design and code were inspired by its predecessor, but it's not just a remake. We tried to make the new design as flexible as possible to minimize dependencies from frontend- and CLI-related MAME changes, which was a major deficiency of QMamecat. QMC2 now uses a template based MAME configuration scheme, which can easily be enhanced with additional command line options (defined in an XML template file).
As a result of this flexible design, we are able to support multiple MAME targets - currently XMAME and SDLMAME!
QMC2's current major features include:
Software requirements:
Software requirement | Where to get |
Qt 4.2.0+ | http://www.trolltech.com/ |
GNU make 3.8+ | http://www.fsf.org/ |
zlib 1.2.3+ | http://www.zlib.net/ |
SDLMAME 0.109+ XMAME 0.104+ |
http://rbelmont.mameworld.info/?page_id=163 http://x.mame.net/ |
Uncompress and untar the source distribution archive:
$ bzip2 -d qmc2-<version>.tar.bz2
$ tar xvf qmc2-<version>.tar
Make sure that the environment is setup correctly:
$ cd qmc2
$ export QTDIR=/your/qt4/installation/directory
At this point, you may have to create (or adjust) an OS-dependent configuration file, if your platform should not be in the list of tested operating environments; see section 8. for more details.
Now you are ready to run the build process:
$ make
If you have an SMP system, you should better run make in jobserver mode, this is completely safe and much faster. For example:
$ make -j3
(replace "3" with "#CPUs + 1")
QMC2 supports both XMAME and SDLMAME, but not at the same time (at run-time, that is). You have to choose which MAME target you're going to use. SDLMAME is the default MAME target. For XMAME, please use the following make command:
$ make [-jX] MAME=XMAME
As soon as QMC2 has been compiled and linked completely, it's ready for use. There is no need to explicitly install QMC2 as it has been designed to work fully self-contained. Even the data-directory can be kept locally, which works well.
It's still advisable to install QMC2 system-wide (you have to do this as root). The user's configuration and his data will be kept locally (in $HOME/.qmc2/):
$ su
Password:
# make install [MAME=XMAME]
# exit
See
$ make help
for more information.
Usage:
$ qmc2 [qt4_arguments]
QMC2 does not provide any arguments except those inherited from Qt 4.
Here's the list of all optional Qt 4 arguments quoted from http://doc.trolltech.com/4.2/qapplication.html#QApplication
The X11 version of Qt also supports some traditional X11 command line options (please note that some of these arguments are useless as they will be overwritten with QMC2's configuration settings):
Notes on the configuration of QMC2:
Gamelist statistics are shown in the lower-left corner of the main widget, below the gamelist. The letters - and their colors - have the following meanings:
Letter | Icon / Color | Meaning | ||
L |
|
Number of Listed games | ||
C |
|
Number of Correct games (only available if ROM status has been checked) | ||
M |
|
Number of Mostly correct games (only available if ROM status has been checked) | ||
I |
|
Number of Incorrect games (only available if ROM status has been checked) | ||
N |
|
Number of games which were Not found (only available if ROM status has been checked) | ||
U |
|
Number of games with an Unknown ROM status | ||
S |
|
Number of game-matches for the current Search-pattern (if any) |
If any statistical number is yet undetermined, a question mark (?) is shown instead.
Individual ROM states are displayed in the gamelist itself, indicated by colored sphere icons in front of each game entry (see table above). When using the classic image set, BIOS ROMs will contain a white B in their ROM status icons and obviously cannot be run. Other (= non-default) image sets may indicate BIOS ROMs differently.
Depending on your hardware, ROM status determination may be a very time-consuming task, so it's not started automatically. You have to explicitly trigger a ROM check (see Tools menu) at least once. To speed up this process for future runs, ROM states are cached in an external ROM state cache file (default: $HOME/.qmc2/qmc2.rsc). If QMC2 finds cached ROM state information in this file, it will read the states for each game from the cache when the gamelist is reloaded.
Unless the option AutoTriggerROMCheck (available since v0.1.b11) hasn't been activated, it is in your responsibility to trigger a re-check of the ROM states when anything changes (ROM images or MAME updates). If the number of totally supported games is different than the number of cached ROM states, QMC2 will log a warning to the frontend log (and optionally trigger an automatic ROM check, if AutoTriggerROMCheck has been set).
Since v0.1.b10 QMC2 also supports individual ROM checks, so changes to only some games of your collection do not force you to fully re-check every ROM. For MAME updates there is no way around it, though (unless you know which games may have changed or have been added).
ROM states can also be used to filter and/or sort the gamelist. Please note that as a matter of principle the ROM state filter cannot be applied to the hierarchical parent/clone view of the gamelist, because the display of clones depends on the display of their parents.
BTW, the words game and ROM are used as synonyms within QMC2.
GUI styles can either be selected on the command line (-style, see section 3.) if the GUI style setting is setup as Default, or by explicitly selecting a style plugin from the respective combo-box in the setup dialog (see Frontend -> GUI).
If the GUI style is setup as Default and not overwritten on the command line, the system's default style will be used.
KDE styles are supported, but only if they were made for KDE 4 (Qt 4)!
Since v0.1.b11, support for style-specific custom color palettes (which can be setup with qtconfig) has been added. The default behaviour of QMC2 is to use the default palette, though (same as before). You can disable this via the StandardColorPalette setting to enable the use of customized color palettes (see Frontend -> GUI in the configuration dialog).
Several functions (or actions in Qt technical jargon :) can be accessed via shortcut key-sequences. The following table lists all of them:
Shortcut | Function |
CTRL+P | Play the currently selected game (start emulation) |
CTRL+F | Copy the currently selected game to the list of favorites |
CTRL+R | Reload the entire gamelist |
CTRL+X | Stop any active processing, otherwise exit QMC2 |
CTRL+O | Open the options dialog |
CTRL+T | Housekeeping: recreate template configuration map (needed if the XML options template changes at run-time) |
CTRL+I | Housekeeping: clear image cache |
CTRL+N | Housekeeping: clear icon cache |
CTRL+H | QMC2 documentation browser |
CTRL+A | About QMC2: version, license etc. |
CTRL+Q | About Qt: version, license etc. |
CTRL+S | Check current game's ROM state individually and update its state in the ROM state cache |
CTRL+D | Reserved (deep-scan / analyse current ROM with ROMAlyzer) |
CTRL+Z | Reserved (open ROMAlyzer frontend dialog to deep-scan and clean up your ROM collection) |
CTRL+1 | Check ROM states for all games in your collection and recreate the ROM state cache from scratch |
CTRL+2 | Check sample set for games that need samples |
CTRL+3 | Check preview images for existance & accessability |
CTRL+4 | Check flyer images for existance & accessability |
CTRL+5 | Check icon images for existance & accessability |
F5 | View gamelist with full detail |
F6 | View parent/clone hierarchy |
Since v0.1.b11, QMC2 also supports remapping of all these shortcuts and some special keys (cursor keys, tab, +/-, ...) needed for GUI control by key-strokes. It should be very handy for users of MAME cabinets with sticks that map their controls to key-strokes (X-Arcade controls for example). We hope it's useful for others as well :).
This information is mainly for developers.
Creating a unified diff:
$ diff -urN qmc2-<old> qmc2-<new> > qmc2-<old>-<new>.patch
Don't forget to do a "make clean", or even better "make dist", before creating a patch!
Patching the older version:
$ cd qmc2-<old>
$ patch -p1 < qmc2-<old>-<new>.patch
Note that GNU diff/patch is required!
As the frontend-code has been designed with full POSIX-portability in mind, QMC2 should work on any UNIX or UNIX-like platform, provided Qt 4 and SDLMAME (or XMAME) are supported on this platform as well.
However, you may have to create or adopt the corresponding OS-specific configuration file, which is arch/`uname`.cfg. If it does not exist nor fit your local situation, the build will most likely fail:
$ make ARCH=test
ls: arch/test.cfg: No such file or directory
Qmake version: 1.07a (Qt 3.3.7)
Qmake is free software from Trolltech AS.
Error: Wrong QMake version. QMake version 2 (Qt 4) required!
Note that by using the ARCH-variable on the make command line, you could easily specify a local configuration, even if a system configuration file already exists for your platform. Take the one that comes nearest to your system configuration and change it to your needs.
Since v0.1.b10, there's an alternative method which will help to solve distribution-specific build problems. Let's say you wanted to use the Qt 4 packages provided by your distribution and you know that the version is sufficient. So, instead of just considering Linux as the OS name (or architecture), also consider the local differences of this type of setup:
$ make DISTCFG=1
If make is called this way, the QMC2 build process will try to figure out what the exact name and release of your OS / distribution is. It will load the OS-specific configuration just as before (i.e. arch/Linux.cfg), but it will overwrite the OS configuration settings with the distribution-specific configuration settings (i.e. arch/Linux/openSUSE_10.2_(i586).cfg). This means that only differences to the global OS configuration need to be placed in this file.
Of course, this mechanism requires that a specific configuration file for your OS / distribution exists. If not, the build will fail. Create the required file (see output from make or run make os-detect to figure out the correct name of the configuration file) and try again!
In case of any trouble, feel free to contact us (see section 9.). Please attach the output of make os-detect in this case!
Also, please send us your configuration file if you try QMC2 on other platforms / distributions than the ones included in the arch/ or arch/<os-name>/ directories. Regardless if you are successful or not, any help is greatly appreciated (see section 10.).
We are especially interested to hear how it works on Mac OS X; it's expected to run, but no one reported back yet. Preliminary tests show that it would even be possible to port it to Win32 (using Qt 4 for Windows and the MinGW compiler), but we are most likely not going to officially support this any time soon.
Project homepage:
Development site:
QMC2 development mailing list:
Help and contributions are greatly appreciated. Following are the most important areas where we need your support:
If you think you can help us in one or more of these areas, please contact us!
We are using SourceForge.net as our open-source development platform. If you intend to become a QMC2 developer, note that you're required to use SVN (Subversion).
See credits.html for a list of contributers.
QMC2 - M.A.M.E. Catalog / Launcher II
Copyright © 2006 - 2007 R. Reucher, Germany, All Rights Reserved
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the license, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
Third party software used in this project:
Minizip 1.01e
Copyright © 1998-2005 Gilles Vollant, http://www.winimage.com/zLibDll/minizip.html, info@winimage.com
See copying.html for the GNU General Public License.
Please note that you are required to have permission to use or to be the legal owner of any ROM images you are going to run through M.A.M.E. and / or this frontend. The goal of M.A.M.E. and its surrounding projects (like QMC2) is educational and academic (of course, it's also fun :).
We do NOT and will NEVER encourage or support any type of illegal use!
However, a hand full of ROM images has been released for free for non-commercial use. See the MAME-compatible ROM images at http://www.mamedev.org/roms/ for more information.