I recently got back into retro gaming and began a search for a front end for MAME. I came across mGalaxy and it looked like what I needed: nice looking, but not cluttered. A clean and simple interface.
Now that I've been using it for a couple weeks, I can say it's truly a wonderful app and I now use it for all my emulators. I appreciate the "supporter's edition" paradigm of giving away the full product for free, but having the option for users to make a donation and get a nice bonus. I was happy to support with my purchase Purple Geo and it looks fantastic (now I just need to build a cabinet to match...).
I also want to thank the dev for your active development and responsiveness to your community. I noticed the NES image was messed up and I already found your post with the replacement file. And having gone through the forum, I see how far mGalaxy has come and the many changes the community has asked for which you've added.
My own setup consists of 9 of the more common systems, each with between 10-30 games. I don't have thousands of roms, so I don't use any of the advanced search and filtering features. I just re-mapped the right and left arrows to prev/next emu, so now the arrow keys can take me to any game on any system.
Configuration was a little challenging, but came together in the end. I'd been away from the scene for a while, and I did have to replace a few of my older emulators. Zsnes gave me issues, and Nestopia loaded "under" mGalaxy (I could hear sounds, but still saw only mGalaxy's window). I ended up going with Snes9x and FCEUX. I read the forum post on AutoIt scripts and created them for Snes9x and Project 64. All others worked out of the box, though I did need to pre-configure a couple to run full screen at rom launch.
I didn't really like the results of Runway's "Create Database" feature, but being able to hand edit the .xml files enabled me to craft things exactly as I wanted them. Thankyou, dev, for making configuration so accessible via xml files!
mGalaxy is not without a few bugs, but after configuration, my experience has been very positive. While I look forward to seeing where things go, I have to say, it's got pretty much everything it needs already!
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