[Gambas-user] New open-source app (mamemenu) with a question

[Kevin Fishburne]

I've been working on an arcade cabinet over the last few weeks and it's 
almost done. I started work tonight on the front end because existing 
ones aren't suitable for a real-world cabinet. This is the first 
open-source project I've released and you can find it here (we'll say 
it's GPLv2 for now, maybe BSD later):

http://eightvirtues.com/misc/MAMEMENU/

Here is the first of five parts (with a sixth to follow) showing my 
progress building it:

https://youtu.be/yiy8T7ihZOk

It was a bit tricky because it uses SDL and OpenGL but must still work 
with MAME which also uses those libraries. I grab the first/primary 
joystick using:

Public PadDevice As Process
PadDevice = Exec ["cat", "/dev/input/js0"] For Read As "Gamepad"

which allows both MAME and the GAMBAS app to accept joystick commands 
simultaneously (keyboard events are hoarded by MAME since SDL handles 
them). These lines:

Public MenuButton1 As Byte = 8        ' Buttons to be held 
simultaneously to quit game and return to main menu.
Public MenuButton2 As Byte = 9        ' Buttons to be held 
simultaneously to quit game and return to main menu.

assign which gamepad buttons cause MAMEMENU to kill the MAME process and 
return to MAMEMENU. When a gamepad button is pressed its number is 
printed, so when running this on your system/gamepad use that as a 
reference for changing those lines to use whatever two buttons you'd 
like to terminate MAME when held simultaneously. I've included my 
mame.ini file which you can modify to fit your needs, although the 
screen options are tuned to work with MAMEMENU which is designed to run 
full-screen on an arcade cabinet.

MAMEMENU is in its infancy (just started on it tonight), so it's 
functionally rough, but is pretty solid outside of a single issue. When 
I kill the MAME process in GAMBAS it doesn't "shut down gracefully", and 
the OS (Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon) thinks the resolution MAME was using 
when killed is the resolution that should be used when MAMEMENU/GAMBAS 
exits, despite me manually telling GAMBAS to use the initial desktop 
resolution upon exiting. The solution I think is to shut down MAME 
"gracefully", but I don't know how to do that.

Is there a way to gracefully kill a process, such as by sending it a 
command to exit instead of using Process.Kill?

Also let me know if you need help getting it up and running. All the 
needed files have been supplied but there's no documentation. Thanks!

-- 
Kevin Fishburne
Eight Virtues
www: http://sales.eightvirtues.com
e-mail: sales at ...1887...
phone: (770) 853-6271