Galdelico wrote:
I had a look around and found out FinalBurn Alpha is in a transitioning phase, at the moment, NeoRageX seems abandoned and super old and MAME looks... Well, intimidating I would say, at least with this latest 0.211 release, which I tried out of mere curiosity.
I'm going to follow this as well. MAME really is SUPER intimidating....like it's absolutely horrible to get setup. Just knowing where to map the buttons needed to play a game so you can play the majority of games with the same button layout + be able to enter coins and have a start button + a shortcut button combo to exit out and save and load games etc. is a nightmare (which FYI I started a topic on this on no less than 4 forums/groups and not a SINGLE person chimed in with any help...so I'm assuming nobody else knows how to do this either lol).
RetroArch is another I tried quasi-recently...same problem with mapping keys, figuring out which emulators to use and setup, to get the actual game menu to populate properly....absolutely horrible.
I started off my emulation journey (including MAME) with RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi 3 computer actually. While still extremely difficult to get setup 100% as I wanted it (as of version 4.2 when I stopped trying it's STILL buggy as hell), the initial setup actually pales in comparison to the complexity of the above – in a nutshell it's: burn the image to an SD card and boot it up, put in a USB stick then take it out a couple minutes later where it'll put directories for each system on the card, put ROMS in those individual folders on your PC then put the stick back into the RP3 to let it copy everything over automatically, then reboot – done... And that was still somehow 1000% easier than the above two options.
HyperSpin, which looks absolutely amazing, I gave up while on 'official' setup video #4 out of 10 or so.....like 16 FULL HOURS later (it requires SO much research at every stage to figure out what they were saying and finding the files and lists and such)...just too complicated. Supposedly if you pay the $50 or whatever membership/premium fee there's a pre-setup package you can download...but since I didn't know if I would even actually like it in the end I wasn't going to pay $50 to find-out.
So [/end rant]

but I still haven't found an 'easy' way to do any of this, especially when you just want supposedly-simple/basic stuff like a little screenshot of each game for easy browsing. I'll probably get back to it at some point but I'm currently running GroovyMAME with MAME 0.200 for use on a CRT monitor (still haven't figured out how to make that run on the 4K flatscreen that's also hooked up to the same computer which would be closer to what you want to do). That probably took me several dozen hours to initially get setup (no exaggeration), but I will say with what I learned I can get a full (but super basic still) setup done in probably under an hour now (as long as I follow my notes, and those notes still make sense to me). Still using the stock and crappy MAME built-in text-only front end (game loader) FYI since I could never get another more graphically-pleasing front-end to work properly and scrub my roms, and grab artwork. ...and for the record, it's not like I'm a computer dummy. I've been using home computers since an IBM PS/2 in 1987 and used to build/program websites (with HTML/CSS, etc.) for a living back in the day so I actually consider myself a techie...and this is still super daunting to me. I feel your pain.