README - v0.44, 23-JUL-2014

Contents

  1. What is the M.A.M.E./M.E.S.S./U.M.E. Catalog / Launcher II?

  2. Build and installation instructions

  3. Command line arguments and configuration

  4. Game/machine list statistics, ROM status and the ROMAlyzer

  5. GUI style plugins and Qt style sheets

  6. Short cuts, GUI control keys and joystick support

  7. External tools and tool argument syntax

  8. Multi-platform support

  9. Contact

  10. Contributing

  11. License and copyright

  12. Legal notice

1. What is the M.A.M.E./M.E.S.S./U.M.E. Catalog / Launcher II?

M.A.M.E./M.E.S.S./U.M.E. Catalog / Launcher II -- also referred to as QMC2 -- is the successor of one of the first UNIX MAME GUI front ends 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 front end and CLI related MAME changes, which was a major deficiency of QMamecat. QMC2 now uses a template based emulator 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, QMC2 can be used for multiple emulators today. On UNIX and Mac OS X we currently support SDLMAME, SDLMESS & SDLUME, on Windows you have the choice between the original variants of MAME, MESS & UME.

QMC2's current major features include:

2. Build and installation instructions

Please see this section in QMC2 wiki and/or this FAQ for build and installation instructions.

3. Command line arguments and configuration

Usage:

$ qmc2[-emulator] [-config_path <path>] [-cc] [-h|-?|-help] [qt_arguments]

Arguments in detail:

Configuration path

When the -config_path option is specified on the command line, QMC2 will use this directory instead of the default 'dot-path' (see configuration notes below). Note that it's in your responsibility to copy/move the data to its desired place prior to starting QMC2 when this option is set, otherwise QMC2 will start over (which may be wanted behavior, though). Also, any settings that may have inherited the previous dot-path will have to be changed manually (probably by editing qmc2.ini, but take care).

Notes on the configuration of QMC2

UNIX and Mac OS X:

Windows:

All platforms:

4. Game/machine list statistics, ROM status and the ROMAlyzer

Game/machine list statistics are shown in the lower-left corner of the main widget, below the game/machine list. The letters - and their colors - have the following meanings:

Letter Color Icon Meaning / Description
L black --

Number of Listed games/machines

This is the overall number of games/machines the emulator supports.

C* green

Number of Correct games/machines

All dumps exist emulator-wise; they also exist in your local collection, and their header checksums are the expected ones. The game/machine will most likely work fine (provided its driver is mature enough).

M* yellow-green

Number of Mostly correct games/machines

One or more dumps are missing or bad (emulator-wise), but your collection has all (correct) dumps that are available. The game/machine may not work (as expected), but most of the time it will run fine (provided its driver is mature enough).

I* red

Number of Incorrect games/machines

One or more dumps in your collection are bad (there may also be missing or bad dumps emulator-wise). The game/machine may not work, and most of the time it won't.

N* grey

Number of games/machines which were Not found

One or more required dumps are missing in your collection (there may also be missing or bad dumps emulator-wise). The game/machine will not work.

U blue

Number of games/machines with an Unknown ROM status

The ROM state of the respective game/machine hasn't been checked yet (or something went wrong during the check, or the check was prematurely interrupted).

S chocolate --

Number of game/machine-matches for the current Search-pattern (if any)

T sandybrown --

Number of sets currently Tagged

*: These numbers are only available when the ROM state has been checked.

If any statistical number is yet undetermined, a question mark (?) is shown instead.

Individual ROM states are displayed in the game/machine list itself, indicated by colored sphere icons in front of each game/machine entry (see table above). When using the classic image set, BIOS ROMs will contain a white B in their ROM status icons. Device ROMs contain a white D and cannot run standalone. Other (= non-default) image sets may indicate BIOS and device 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: ~/.qmc2/<emulator>.rsc on UNIX, ~/Library/Application Support/qmc2/<emulator>.rsc on Mac OS X, or %USERPROFILE%\.qmc2\<emulator>.rsc on Windows). If QMC2 finds cached ROM state information in this file, it will read the states for each game/machine from the cache when the game/machine list is reloaded.

Unless the option AutoTriggerROMCheck 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/MESS updates). If the number of totally supported games/machines (by the emulator) is different than the number of cached ROM states, QMC2 will log a warning to the front end log (and optionally trigger an automatic ROM check, if AutoTriggerROMCheck has been set).

QMC2 also supports individual ROM checks, so changes to only some games/machines of your collection do not force you to fully re-check every ROM. For MAME/MESS updates there's probably no way around it, though (unless you know which games/machines have changed or have been added).

ROM states can be used to filter and/or sort the detailed game/machine list (a.k.a. the master list). Please note that as a matter of principle the ROM state filter can't be applied to the hierarchical parent/clone view of the game/machine list, because the display of clones depends on the display of their parents. The optional views 'by version' and 'by category' (which are only available when the use of catver.ini and/or MESS category.ini has been enabled) are also not filtered.

BTW, the words game, machine or system are used as synonyms throughout QMC2. The MAME and UME variants prefer to operate on games, whereas the MESS variants operate on machines (or systems).

ROMAlyzer

Since v0.2.b1, there is also a so called ROMAlyzer which allows to deeply scan individual (or multiple) games/machines for their exact ROM state. This work was inspired by Carsten Engel's romalyzer.pl Perl script (see scripts/romalyzer.pl in the source distribution) - he also offered very helpful comments on ROM identification and how to handle CHDs. Thanks!

ROMAlyzer features, tips and restrictions:

5. GUI style plugins and Qt style sheets

GUI styles can be switched on-the-fly by explicitly selecting available style plugins from the respective combo-box in the setup dialog (see Front end -> GUI). If you installed additional style plugins to Qt, these will be available here as well.

The Default GUI style is the desktop's default style.

KDE styles are supported 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 behavior of QMC2 is to use the default palette. You can disable this via the StandardColorPalette setting to use the customized color palette instead - if applicable (see Front end -> GUI in the configuration dialog).

Note that some add-on GUI styles may look ugly or be even buggy (older versions of the Oxygen style, for example, were known to raise an X11 bug when the ROMAlyzer was opened initially). Don't ask for support if you know that this is the cause of your troubles! Please contact the style's developer(s) instead.

Qt style sheets

Qt style sheets can be used in conjunction with any GUI style to gain more theme'ing power.

Since v0.2.b10, QMC2 supports dynamic loading of style sheets from within the GUI. It loads the style sheet before the GUI style is set up, so the GUI style may overload parts of the theme with its settings. This means that not every combination might look as expected, others may fit better.

Compatible style sheets can be found here: http://qmc2.arcadehits.net/wordpress/style-sheets/.

To install a style sheet, simply unpack the archive somewhere in your file system. Then select the style sheet (.qss file) from within QMC2 to activate it. See Tools -> Options -> GUI -> Style sheet.

Note that due to a pending Qt bug we have to change the current working directory of the running application to the style sheet's path to make sure that relative URLs (in the .qss file) are handled correctly. If you don't like that, use the -stylesheet command line parameter instead! Update: since version 0.2.b16 we support the specification of the working directory that's used when the emulator is launched in play- or demo-mode; we strongly recommend to set this option as it cleanly works around this issue.

Read more about Qt style sheets here: http://qt-project.org/doc/4.8/stylesheet.html

6. Short cuts, GUI control keys and joystick support

Several functions (or actions in Qt technical jargon :) can be accessed via short cut key-sequences. The following table lists all of them:

Default short cut Function
Ctrl+P Play the currently selected game/machine (start emulation)
Ctrl+Shift+P Linux/Unix and Windows only: Play the currently selected game/machine (start emulation) in embedded mode
Ctrl+R Reload the entire game/machine list
Ctrl+J Copy the currently selected game/machine to the list of favorites
Ctrl+X Stop any active processing, otherwise exit QMC2
Ctrl+O Linux/Unix and Windows only: Open the options/preferences dialog
Ctrl+I Housekeeping: clear image cache
Ctrl+M Housekeeping: clear MAWS / ProjectMESS cache (in-memory and/or on-disk)
Ctrl+N Housekeeping: clear icon cache
Ctrl+T Housekeeping: recreate template configuration map (needed if the XML options template changes at run-time)
Ctrl+, Mac OS X only: Open the options/preferences dialog
Ctrl+Shift+C Housekeeping: check the loaded template configuration map against the currently selected emulator's configuration options and their defaults
Ctrl+H QMC2 documentation browser
Ctrl+B About QMC2: version, license, system info etc.
Ctrl+Q About Qt: version, license etc.
Ctrl+S Check current game's/machine's ROM state individually and update its state in the ROM state cache
Ctrl+D Analyse (deep-scan) current ROM with the ROMAlyzer
Ctrl+Z Open ROMAlyzer to deeply analyse the ROMs of one or more games/machines
Ctrl+E Export current ROM status to file
Ctrl+1 Check ROM states for all games/machines and recreate the ROM state cache from scratch
Ctrl+2 MAME/UME targets only: Check sample sets for games that need samples
Ctrl+3 Check images and icons files for existence / accessability / usability and obsoleteness
Ctrl+Alt+C Toggle ROM state filtering for status Correct
Ctrl+Alt+M Toggle ROM state filtering for status Mostly correct
Ctrl+Alt+I Toggle ROM state filtering for status Incorrect
Ctrl+Alt+N Toggle ROM state filtering for status Not found
Ctrl+Alt+U Toggle ROM state filtering for status Unknown
Ctrl+Alt+1 Launch QMC2 for (SDL)MAME
Ctrl+Alt+2 Launch QMC2 for (SDL)MESS
Ctrl+Alt+3 Launch QMC2 for (SDL)UME
Ctrl+Shift+A Setup arcade mode
Alt+PgUp Increase game's/machine's rank
Alt+PgDown Decrease game's/machine's rank
F5 View game/machine list with full detail
F6 View parent/clone hierarchy
F7 View games by category (only available when the use of catver.ini / category.ini has been enabled)
F8 MAME/UME targets only: view games by version they were added to the emulator (only available when the use of catver.ini has been enabled)
F9 Run external (and generic) ROM tool on the currently selected game/machine
F10 Check software-states (only available when the software-list detail is active)
F11 Toggle between full screen and windowed mode
F12 Launch QMC2 Arcade
Ctrl+Shift+T Tag current set
Ctrl+Shift+U Untag current set
Ctrl+Shift+G Toggle tag mark of current set
Shift+Down Toggle tag mark of current set and move the cursor one item down
Shift+Up Toggle tag mark of current set and move the cursor one item up
Ctrl+Shift+L Tag all sets
Ctrl+Shift+N Untag all sets
Ctrl+Shift+I Invert all tags
Ctrl+Shift+S Check the ROM states of all tagged sets
Ctrl+Shift+D Analyze (run ROMAlyzer on) all tagged sets
Ctrl+Shift+J Add all tagged sets to the favorites list
Ctrl+Shift+X Tag all visible sets (according to the current ROM state filter)
Ctrl+Shift+Y Untag all visible sets (according to the current ROM state filter)
Ctrl+Shift+Z Invert all tags of visible sets (according to the current ROM state filter)
Ctrl+Shift+F9 Run the ROM tool on all tagged sets
When Phonon features are enabled, the following short cuts will also be available:
Ctrl+Alt+P Audio player: play/resume current track
Ctrl+Alt+# Audio player: pause current track
Ctrl+Alt+S Audio player: stop current track
Ctrl+Alt+Left Audio player: jump to start of previous track
Ctrl+Alt+Right Audio player: jump to start of next track
Ctrl+Alt+F Audio player: fast forward within current track (jump to next track if end is reached)
Ctrl+Alt+B Audio player: fast backward within current track (jump to previous track if start is reached)
Ctrl+Alt+PgUp Audio player: raise volume
Ctrl+Alt+PgDown Audio player: lower volume
Ctrl+Y Clear YouTube (on-disk) image cache
Note: WIP means work in progress -- that is, those short cuts will only be available for QMC2 builds configured with 'WIP=1'. Short cuts marked as reserved (if any) aren't really available yet, but planned to be used in a later version.

Remapping short cuts and GUI control keys

Since v0.1.b11, QMC2 also supports remapping of all these short cuts 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 :).

Joystick control

For users of (regular) analog or digital joysticks, there is direct support for joystick GUI control through SDL (Simple Directmedia Layer) since v0.2.b3. Simply enable joystick support on the respective configuration page, map any of the above functions or GUI control keys to joystick functions and you can start using a stick to control QMC2 right away.

Internally, joystick functions are mapped to active keyboard short cuts and/or GUI control keys. The corresponding key presses are emulated in software as soon as a mapped joystick function is recognized. This means that using a joystick to control the GUI will cause some additional events, but it doesn't hurt.

Key events for joystick mappings will always be sent to the widget which currently has focus, but only if the widget is one of QMC2. All other cases will be ignored, which means that it does not influence the emulator (or vice versa), although QMC2 still recognizes the joystick movements, button presses etc... it will just not react on them while the emulator (or any other application) has focus.

However, there are two exceptions to this rule:

7. External tools and tool argument syntax

External tools are used for specific operations which aren't natively built into QMC2.

For instance, to remove obsolete or corrupt image files from ZIP or 7z archives, QMC2 uses an external program (zip or 7za) and passes the files to be removed on the argument list when the tool is started.

A third and more generic tool - the so called ROM tool - can be used to call any program or script which does some external processing based on the game's/machine's ID and/or its long name (description). It's completely up to you what this tool might do... ideally, it should have some ROM management / ROM related functionality, though :).

Tools can have a single function or they can have multiple functions. For each function, an argument list has to be specified which defines the correct syntax for the command. Macros (like $MACRONAME$) can be used as placeholders and will be filled with real data before execution.

The following macros exist:

Macro Will be replaced with... Valid tools
$ARCHIVE$ ... the currently processed ZIP or 7z archive's file name (fully qualified) Zip tool, 7-zip tool
$FILELIST$ ... the currently processed list of files ("file1 file2 ..." - fully qualified) Zip tool, 7-zip tool
$ID$ ... the ID of the currently selected game/machine ROM tool
$DESCRIPTION$ ... the long name (or description) of the currently selected game/machine ROM tool

Everything else will be passed as literal text at the position where it's specified (see Front end -> Network / Tools in the setup dialog).

When external tools are started by QMC2, a simple tool-executor dialog will pop up to display the command and its output.

8. Multi-platform support

As the front end code has been designed with portability in mind, QMC2 should work on any UNIX or UNIX-like platform, on Mac OS X and meanwhile also on Windows, provided Qt 4 and (SDL)MAME/MESS (or whatever emulator may be used) 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_10.3.cfg in case of an openSUSE 10.3 installation). 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 expected 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.).

Since v0.2.b7, QMC2 is also supported on Mac OS X -- thanks to Vas Crabb who ported it in the first place and maintains the port now.

Since v0.2.b8, QMC2 is also supported on Windows using the original MAME/MESS variants.

9. Contact

Project homepage:

Development site:

QMC2 development mailing list:

Bug tracking system:

Individual team members:

10. Contributing

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.

11. License and copyright

QMC2 - M.A.M.E./M.E.S.S./U.M.E. Catalog / Launcher II
Copyright © 2006 - 2014 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., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

See copying.html for the GNU General Public License.

Third party software used in this project:

zlib 1.2.8
Copyright © 1995 - 2013 Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler. All rights reserved.
http://zlib.net/

minizip 1.1
Copyright © 1998 - 2010 Gilles Vollant. All rights reserved.
http://www.winimage.com/zLibDll/minizip.html
info@winimage.com

runonce --- single-instance program launching wrapper for X11
Copyright © 2001 Jamie Zawinski. All rights reserved.
jwz@jwz.org

The Ghostbusters Logo
Copyright © 1984 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All rights reserved.

HTML editor from Qt Labs / graphics-dojo
Copyright © 2011 The Qt Project. All rights reserved.
http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-labs/graphics-dojo

PDF.js -- JavaScript / HTML5 PDF rendering library
Copyright © 2012 - 2014 Mozilla Foundation. All rights reserved.
https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js

txt2man 1.5 -- text to man page converter script
Copyright © 2001, 2002, 2003 Marc Vertes. All rights reserved.
http://mvertes.free.fr/txt2man/txt2man

LZMA SDK 9.22 -- LZMA (7-zip) data compression/decompression library
Copyright © 1999 - 2012 Igor Pavlov. All rights reserved.
http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html

Subset of the QtFtp add-on for Qt 5
Copyright © 2012 - 2013 Digia Plc. All rights reserved.
http://qt.gitorious.org/qt/qtftp/source/src/qftp

12. Legal notice

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 an emulator and / or this front end. The goal of emulators and its surrounding projects 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 to the public for non-commercial use. For instance, free MAME compatible ROMs are available at http://mamedev.org/roms.