Searching the Wheel

[thecount23]

It would be nice to type the game and have the wheel move to where you are typing. For example, if I wanted to play burgertime, I would start to type burg and the wheel would move through the game list to match what I typed.

[cathaldub]

99% of people use frontends for use in a cabinet and dont have a keyboard at hand.
The developer is working on a faster way to navigate the wheel, I'm sure a search will find the thread with the preview of how its going to work, but it will be with a yoystick afaik

[Queensryche]

Well I guess I’m part of that 1% too… I have a micro wireless keyboard in my cabinet that I use to jump to games quickly in Mame32 all the time. I think it would be a nice feature in HS.

[Dazz]

This is something that I requested sometime ago... I have a test build that has a premature search feature that lets you choose a letter and it jumps to that letter. Bill was going to elaborate on this feature more, but got tied up in development for HyperPin. I'm sure he'll get back to HS development once his pin cab is completed.

I'm dying for a new build of HyperSpin....

[dpar]

What about just having the ability to jump through the first quarter of the wheel and half or something? So it divides the letters into quarters or half and jumps to that? That would only require two buttons at most and you really wouldn't need any more than that to speed things up dramatically.

[kronic24601]

What I'd like to see is a button (you could set the button) that you hold down and each "down" or "up" would shift a whole letter (going straight to the next or previous letter respectively). A bonus would be to find a way to quicken the skip, so it doesn't have to "scroll" to the next section. (I'd be ok with a blink out and back in if it was faster).

Otherwise ... what other FE's do is have a button that loads an Alpha Screen, you can select your letter via joystick and "filter" those options "N" would show all N results, while "Ninja" will show only items with ninja (and so on) ... something we are all familiar with of course, but could be implemented without too much difficulty.

[dpar]

The option to jump to next letter is already built in.

[Gatt9]

I'm not sure I agree with the statement that the majority of FE users are cabinet users, as having a cabinet for consoles is counter-intuitive, as most console games are meant to be played for extended periods of time.

Regardless, perhaps one partial solution is to implement collapsible game names.

For example, some games like Pacman and Street Fighter have a significant number of children. Perhaps, rather than display all of a game's children at the Rom level, it would be best to display only the parent and then expand to the children on selection. Much the same way the wheel works for emulators, expanding to show the Roms.

Hyperspin is an incredible piece of software, it's only drawback navigation(Which seems to be an issue that plagues all FE's). IMO, in addition to the ability to search by letter, finding a way to collapse children beneath their parent would generate a reasonably effective menu system.

IMO listing all of the children of parent Rom's is the single biggest space-eater in the menu system, and finding a way to collapse this would reduce the list by a fairly large factor. Collapsing Puck-man would prune 22 entries in the list, Collapsing the Street Fighters would prune another ~40 entries. Just those two alone would cut roughly 60 entries that need searched. I wouldn't be surprised if collapsing children into their parents yielded a %50-%60 reduction in entries that need to be searched through.

Paired with genre filtering and letter searching, and suddenly you end up with lists that can be searched in reasonable time IMO.

[SophT]

Hyperspin is an incredible piece of software, it's only drawback navigation(Which seems to be an issue that plagues all FE's).


The thing is that HS is designed to be run on cabs. Whether or not that's the case is a moot point. Heck arcade games weren't 'designed' to be emulated on PCs - but they are. The problem is that people are trying to use HS for something other than it's designed purpose: which is to fit the niche of people who want an FE on their cab that can be controlled w/o a keyboard and a mouse.

Some see the lack of search w/o a keyboard as limiting- which is true, if that were the goal. Others would say that the 'weakness' of other FEs is that it's not possible to navigate w/o a mouse and keyboard. It's just perspective.

There will always be people asking for 'x' or 'y' feature, but the simple fact is that there will always be a 'more functional' way of doing it if only 'a' or 'b' were required. i.e. searching with a keyboard.



Regardless, perhaps one partial solution is to implement collapsible game names.


This is an interesting idea. Although, not everyone always wants to play the parent, so having to click MAME -> Parent -> Child is just more clicks than MAME -> Game

Although list management is an issue, but that's why I sport 3 different options:

1) Themes only
2) Filtered list
3) Full List



I'm not sure I agree with the statement that the majority of FE users are cabinet users, as having a cabinet for consoles is counter-intuitive, as most console games are meant to be played for extended periods of time.


I'm not sure if 'most' console games are intented to be played for extended periods of time. maybe 'most' modern console games - but then there's nothing requiring you to have a full set. The option is just there for the few games that are fun on a cab. And let's not forget the following:

Playchoice-10
MegaPlay
MegaTech
NAOMI
Chihiro
vs. system
Nintendo Super System
Triforce
Model 1
Model 2
Model 3
NAOMI 2
System 11
System 12

all either ports to or ports from console hardware, but not necessarily emulated by mame.