"Good" Front End

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Latest Version: Monday, June 19, 2006
Here is a set of icons that you might like to try with "Good" Front End.
Leave me feedback. Please make sure that "GoodFE" is in the subject. Thanks.
Please visit the Screenshot Archive for an excellent collection of screenshots already named with the Goodtool naming convention.

Description

Good Front End is my attempt to contribute to the emulation scene by providing a front end that achieves two things:

It can support a large customizable number of emulators, while at the same time being brain dead simple to use. You don't need to spend an hour learning how to configure this front end, it takes less than a minute to have an emulator up and running.
It was primarily designed to support the users of the Good Tool utilities, such as GoodSNES, who like to sort their roms in to directories. This front end provides a fast single click interface in order to navigate the directories and sub directories that the Good Tools or anyone else might establish.

History

June 19, 2006: This update was actually completed a couple of months ago, but laziness prevented me from updating the site. Stupid laziness. WARNING: If you used a previous version, please delete your GoodFE.cfg file before running the new version. The improvements include:

After you close an emulator that you launched with GoodFE, the focus returns to the file selection list so that you don't have to click on the list before you can select another game to launch. You can just type the name, or use the arrow keys to pick another game.
I think I sped up large directory loading by moving expensive calls to less often run logic and reduced the cost of directory checks. Your experience may vary.
Now you can set the font of the file list! Font, size, and color are customizable, (bold, underlined and italics are ignored) through the Set Font button in the Config window.
Double click on a console to launch the emulator without a game (thanks Squaresoft74). Alternatively you can right click on the console and choose Launch Emu from the menu.
Snapshots can no longer be displayed above the file list or to the left, but the pictures are properly centered now. Still dynamically resized and only 4:3 ratio supported.
Icon display in the setup window was fixed (wouldn't update properly)

March 23, 2005: My first major update to the front-end since the site went up. This revision adds a right click context menu to the system selection list. By right clicking on a system, you can choose to edit the system's setup in the front-end, move the system up or down within the selection list, or delete the system from your list entirely. Please do not try to delete a system if there is only one system present, as the front-end will probably crash.

Also, the search option has been improved a little bit. You can now choose between searching for roms that contain your search string, or filter out roms that contain your search string. So now you can "Search For" all the [!] roms, or perhaps "Filter Out" all of the [a*] roms.

March 9, 2005: The web site goes live, and the front-end is made available for downloading.

Target Users

This software was designed for the following type of user:

A fan of a variety of console, handheld, or computer emulation.
A person who has a large collection of roms.
In particular, a person who prefers to have their rom collection sorted in various directories.
A user who does not wish to spend a lot of time learning how to configure the frontend in order to use it.
Optionally, a person who also maintains a large collection of snapshots that are named indentically to their roms.

If you don't have a large collection of roms, or your roms are not sorted, you may still enjoy using this front end, but it may not be particularly suited to your needs. Either way, please give it a try and let me know what you think.

Screenshots

F.A.Q.s

How do I set it up and use it?

There is fairly easy to follow documentation in the zip file that you download from here. It takes very little time to learn how to set up at least one emulator before you're off and playing.

Can I use this front end for arcade emus?

I thought long and hard about that, but because I don't do anything other than grab the file names from each directory, I felt this front end would not be suitable for arcade emus, which typically use the 8.3 filename convention, and therefore do not have descriptive names for each game. There are plenty of great arcade front ends out there. I wanted to provide more support for non-arcade emulation.

Dude, this runs pretty slow when I click on a large directory...

I know. I have a fast computer, so I don't notice very large pauses. But if you have a directory that has thousands of roms, depending on the speed of your computer, it could take some time for the file list box to populate all the way. The only thing I can recommend is that if your computer is slow, break the directories up. Sorry... Windows MFC isn't known for speed.