pyretro VS mame

About this, I have a old frontend for mame in python2 (and old pygame):

https://gitlab.com/tres-14159/pyretro

More or less in 2011 we made a arcade cabinet for a public social center and I was looking for a frontend for mame for public spaces (not home or private spaces), unsupervised. I did not find one. Well I thought "I am going make a new mame frontend" and yes, I made it (but now it need a lot of work for update to python3 an pygame3).

PyRetro has the next features:

- the users can not the config of frontend by the joystick or buttons. For example, in others frontends a naughty boys (or adult person) can delete games of the list or change something.

- you can manage the frontend (and other things of GNU/Linux) by webpanel. For example, there is a bad boy (or adult person) greedy playing and he does not let another person play to the arcade. You can force exit the game and return to frontend or restart all cabinet.

- it has as screensaver mode when nobody plays it.

Yes, there are many challenges in reverse engineering these classic games. This is a good example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=objL2hGAEgU

Living in L.A. in the 90's, I remember Pack Mann in Pasadena had this one.

http://www.arcaderestoration.com/games/3330/Gals+Panic+II.as...

The ROM dump's been done but people seem to be stuck on the RLE encoding. It's hard to say what kind of wizardry is needed in this case.

https://github.com/mamedev/mame/issues/5816

There's a good start at it in the tree ( https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/yamaha/... ) but it's missing the sound generation which is kind of the important part :-)

> As requested by users, you can finally use delta CHD files for clone systems and software items. This allows for major disk space savings in some cases when you have multiple versions of a system or software item.

FWIW, this is commit https://github.com/mamedev/mame/commit/d1172bf710f2a7b1777ed...

The GitHub Actions workflow bgfxshaders.yml will rebuild the shaders and then zip them up as an artefact. If you push your shader changes to GitHub and let the workflow run, you can grab the rebuilt shades from there.

Note that the process of getting the MSYS64/MinGW build environment set up is simple enough that we have automated CI builds for it on GitHub Actions without needing any custom actions of our own.