I recently thought I should get started again on my arcade frontend. I was pretty happy because I had some new ideas I thought would work, but it turns out all of them were dead ends.

The first idea I had was actually using a web browser as a pseudo file browser for all my roms. I figured that through the use of "helper applications" I could map file types to certain apps and then just use href's to link to files on my local machine to load up games.

Of course, being a fan of Mozilla I tried it on there first. No go. Mozilla actually tries to "download" files you already have on your hard drive and use the new copy. This would be no good because I would be creating tons of new files every time I played a game. Beyond that, when downloading, Mozilla screws with the type/creator codes on my Mac and won't launch it in the right helper. A quick trip to Bugzilla proved this is something they're going to take forever to fix (it's been in the bug DB for a year and a half now).

So I thought I'd test the same thing with IE. Sweet, it works like it should. And I also found out that IE/Mac will parse an XML document with XSL. Even better...or so I thought. The XSL implimentation is very lacking, and kills the browser all together on OS X. Not good. Funny enough, Mozilla has excellect XSL support and is everything I need...but there's that damn file download problem.

Fine I say, I'll just worry about my control panel next. So I started looking into keyboard encoders, the best by far being the I-PAC, which has a great Mac utility for setting keys. Only problem is it doesn't support the Command key. Ok, and how am I supposed to quit a program or close a window without that? Ugh.

All these little tiny things preventing me from building everything I want. I suppose this project is going to take a lot longer than I anticipated.