More on Emula
Today I want to tell you something more about Emula, the universal emulator frontend I’m working on.
There are many good and eye-catching emulators frontend available but none of them are easy enough from my point of view, they all require some fine tuning by the end user and for people with large rom collections this could become a huge work.
My approach is somewhat different because I aim to release a product with very few user intervention especially during the initial setup because Emula will be able to identify roms without errors.
One thing I hate is scanning the rom collections and answer to the multiple choices when the frontend finds one or more possible results, this require the user to stay watching your monitor for hours, sometimes you can set the frontend to let guess the best result, but as far as I’ve seen this could lead to many errors and a messed up rom collection that will need hours of editing.
After several tries I’ve found that there is only a safe method that can match the rom with an exact title: the use of the crc and the rom file size. I’ve decided to use this method with Emula and the results are amazing just because:
- You don’t need to stay watching your monitor while the scanning process is running
- You don’t have errors because a rom identified by it’s crc+file-size is unique, thus the matching title will be only one.
- You don’t need to scan for a system at a time, instead you can run the scanning process to find and recognize all supported roms for all supported systems in one go.
Emula have some nice features like an handy game-art browser and the automatic compressed roms management, if the emulator that is needed to run your roms does not accept compressed roms Emula will manage the archives for you.
All supported emulators will be automatically downloaded when needed, installed and configured without user interaction.
Finally Emula will be also capable to recognize demos and homebrew roms for all people like me who love the demo scene.
The Emula core is ready and the interface is completed at 80%.
Stay tuned because a first beta will be out soon! In the next report I will be able to show you a sneak peek of the Emula interface.
Emula will be available for almost any OS on Earth, including the mighty Raspberry Pi2!
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