What’s old is new again. I revived my old VB.NET front-end, rewrote it in C#, and named it MAME Iron.

Why MAME Iron you ask? It’s a MAME Front-end (Fe) and Fe is the symbol for Iron on the Periodic Table of Elements, of course!

Since I decided to ditch my 25" tube TV for a 22" LCD, I have a lot more pixels to work with. I also don’t have to use Comic Sans in Cyan anymore (the only font/color that would show up on that old, low-res display).

I haven’t done anything to make it more visually appealing (yet), but I did a lot of work to make it more simple, and polished up the user experience.

All navigation is controlled with the Player 1 joystick and buttons. WP_20141108_001 Up/Down on the joystick navigates up/down the game list 1 by one. Left and Right switches between the main game list, and the favorites list. The green button on top (for Player 1) adds/removes games to/from the favorites list. The red button at the very top-left of the control panel launches/exits games.

I currently have two buttons assigned to jump +/- 100 games at a time, but that’s just temporary. I plan on writing a bit of code so when you hold the joystick up or down for a period of time, the game selection will “accelerate” and automatically go from moving 1 game at a time to 2, 5, 20, 100 at a time. (Something like that)

I also threw in a sweet easter egg, using, of course, the Konami code :)