As of MAME/MESS 0.150, Micko introduced a web interface for MAME and MESS that allows for some remote control of emulator functions. It’s the sort of thing that tends to be polarizing; either you Get It(tm) immediately and think of a dozen uses for it, or you find it pointless. Personally, I think it’s pretty damn cool, and that’s why I’m sending in patches to improve this new webserver. It’s not very functional in the baseline 0.150 release due to Micko running out of time, but by the time 0.151 comes out there should be some significant improvements in place.

There’s still a long way to go before it has all the features people will want, and I’m not very comfortable with the MAME source code yet, but there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that can be quickly implemented.

So far I’ve introduced three patches:

Fixed a problem with websockets using hardcoded localhost address in the HTML.
Cleaned up the HTML to not mangle the logo on devices like phones and tablets.
Implemented savestates
Additionally, I’ve completed some work overhauling the UI — I’m much MUCH happier with the new look for savestate and reset functionality. This hasn’t been submitted yet as I plan to wait until I have something a little more notable.

Here’s a bit of a teaser for the new savestate menu I’ve implemented:



That’s a slide-out panel. Mouse users can click cancel to get out without loading or saving, but tablet and phone users can gran the panel and slide it off the screen to do the same thing. I think it looks a bit cleaner than the previous design I had. I’d briefly considered adjusting the sliders to use the same slide-out system, but the loss of precision by having smaller sliders is not really a good idea.

One of the most requested features is media selection for tapes, disks, and so forth through a file browser. The time I’ve had to dig through the existing MAME UI suggests that I’d either have to rewrite the existing UI or write a second web-specific UI to sit in the codebase side-by-side with the existing OSD UI. The former is not something I’m comfortable with even considering as of now, and the latter looks like a long-term project. I’m going to spend some time plotting this out and working on the low-hanging fruit to keep forward progress moving since I said I’d like to see the 0.151 web UI to be considerably improved over 0.150.

News Source: Here