Supermodel Forum

Bart,
I know there's a quite a few characters working on UIs and launchers for Supermodel but the focus is primarily on Windows and I have yet to see any take into account other integrations.
Do you have any long term strategy to revise Supermodel into a cross platform app (akin to retroarch - not a plugin) or are your relying on the communities to take the initiative to integrate it elsewhere (like a plugin)?

What prompts this? I got a Sinden lightgun recently and I've been toying with Lost World with it.. its great fun but the fact that I essentially have to launch 3 different apps to get it to work casts a shadow over the whole experience.

sgtbilco wrote:Bart,
I know there's a quite a few characters working on UIs and launchers for Supermodel but the focus is primarily on Windows and I have yet to see any take into account other integrations.
Do you have any long term strategy to revise Supermodel into a cross platform app (akin to retroarch - not a plugin) or are your relying on the communities to take the initiative to integrate it elsewhere (like a plugin)?

Supermodel is cross-platform: it runs on Linux and macOS (albeit with the legacy renderer only). I've seen it ported to Switch as well, although it was never released to my knowledge. I'm sure someday it will be ported to more platforms. I'd like there to be a GUI and always intended to write a Windows native GUI. Alternatively, we may want a cross-platform in-app GUI. Unfortunately, I don't have much time to make major contributions like this anymore but maybe someday!

What prompts this? I got a Sinden lightgun recently and I've been toying with Lost World with it.. its great fun but the fact that I essentially have to launch 3 different apps to get it to work casts a shadow over the whole experience.

I don't understand the front end situation because I've never used them. Which 3 apps are you using? When I want to play a Model 3 game, I run Supermodel. When I want to play a Neo Geo game, I run MAME. And when I want to play a Saturn game, I run Mednafen. I can't it imagine it being anymore streamlined than opening a command prompt and typing "supermodel roms\lostwsga.zip".

The simplicity of Supermodel is what makes it so easy to maintain on Windows and Linux, and what would make it relatively straightforward to port elsewhere. From my perspective, integrations would be more effort to support and risk Supermodel losing its identity and control over its future direction. Supermodel is open source and if someone wants to submit a PR, we can look at it, but only if it doesn't turn into a massive structural change for the project.

From a code and maintainability point of view it's much better not having a gui. It really simplifies things. But from a user point of view it's bad.

There are some great front ends tho like the one by nuexzz. I'd be happy if that was the official front end. We should link to it on the front page. Also maybe mirror the source on hithub.

sgtbilco wrote:What prompts this? I got a Sinden lightgun recently and I've been toying with Lost World with it.. its great fun but the fact that I essentially have to launch 3 different apps to get it to work casts a shadow over the whole experience.

I'm also curious with the 3 apps. What are they?

I have Supermodel integrated to my LaunchBox and all I really do is run LaunchBox and that's it.

k_rollo wrote:

sgtbilco wrote:What prompts this? I got a Sinden lightgun recently and I've been toying with Lost World with it.. its great fun but the fact that I essentially have to launch 3 different apps to get it to work casts a shadow over the whole experience.

I'm also curious with the 3 apps. What are they?

I should have stated, I'm referring to my specific use case with the Sinden. So it has its own controller app which 'activates' the device at the OS level, then there's an additional community mod for Supermodel's shaders and openGL lib called Supermodel Bezels which adds a necessary frame around the render window so the Sinden has a bounding box to work within, then there's Supermodel itself... that's a lot of disparate parts to get closer to a proper true emulation of the original experience.

Now granted, I fully realize Sinden support is WELL outside of scope of Supermodel but still you can see how the lack of flexibility with the emulator makes for a very muddled setup and the ubiquity of other emulation solutions like retroArch do raise the question of why there isn't more of an effort towards interoperability.

Long story short.. I'm envisioning a future whereby I go into my living room, turn on my smart TV, and run the Supermodel app, plug in ANY kind of controller really.. and start to play some Model3 games.
Far be it from me to denigrate the work that's been done thus far but this project has been going for 10 years now and its out of the box workflow is still batch scripts and console commands..

Bart wrote:

sgtbilco wrote:Alternatively, we may want a cross-platform in-app GUI. Unfortunately, I don't have much time to make major contributions like this anymore but maybe someday!

Absolutely, I think this is the best way forward. Assuming you navigate away from integrating with retroarch or some other comparable ecosystem, the next best thing would be for Supermodel to be a fully standalone cross-platform app with a full user experience. With the advent of Android apps now supported with Windows 11, this may be an opportunity to go in that direction as that would satisfy both Windows and Android support at the same time. A native Windows app doesn't have to cease to exist but you could instead focus on one codebase for both platforms.

@Bart - Did you build Supermodel against SDL or SDL2? I believe SDL2 can be compiled for Android.

sgtbilco wrote:

k_rollo wrote:

sgtbilco wrote:What prompts this? I got a Sinden lightgun recently and I've been toying with Lost World with it.. its great fun but the fact that I essentially have to launch 3 different apps to get it to work casts a shadow over the whole experience.

I'm also curious with the 3 apps. What are they?

I should have stated, I'm referring to my specific use case with the Sinden. So it has its own controller app which 'activates' the device at the OS level, then there's an additional community mod for Supermodel's shaders and openGL lib called Supermodel Bezels which adds a necessary frame around the render window so the Sinden has a bounding box to work within, then there's Supermodel itself... that's a lot of disparate parts to get closer to a proper true emulation of the original experience.

Now granted, I fully realize Sinden support is WELL outside of scope of Supermodel but still you can see how the lack of flexibility with the emulator makes for a very muddled setup and the ubiquity of other emulation solutions like retroArch do raise the question of why there isn't more of an effort towards interoperability.

Long story short.. I'm envisioning a future whereby I go into my living room, turn on my smart TV, and run the Supermodel app, plug in ANY kind of controller really.. and start to play some Model3 games.
Far be it from me to denigrate the work that's been done thus far but this project has been going for 10 years now and its out of the box workflow is still batch scripts and console commands..

Bart wrote:

sgtbilco wrote:Alternatively, we may want a cross-platform in-app GUI. Unfortunately, I don't have much time to make major contributions like this anymore but maybe someday!

Absolutely, I think this is the best way forward. Assuming you navigate away from integrating with retroarch or some other comparable ecosystem, the next best thing would be for Supermodel to be a fully standalone cross-platform app with a full user experience. With the advent of Android apps now supported with Windows 11, this may be an opportunity to go in that direction as that would satisfy both Windows and Android support at the same time. A native Windows app doesn't have to cease to exist but you could instead focus on one codebase for both platforms.

@Bart - Did you build Supermodel against SDL or SDL2? I believe SDL2 can be compiled for Android.

So what would be the minimum requirements to run smooth supermodel3 on Android? I ask because in a desktop pc I have to add a video card... so my smartphone replaced my pc?

Out of curiosity, can't these apps be launched with a batch file, a PowerShell script, or a bash script (if you use MSYS2)? Supermodel can obviously be launched from a batch file directly into full screen mode. How do the other two apps work? I assume they take command line args or a config file to figure out what to do.

The Android for Windows idea is intriguing. I think what we call the SDL app (a command-line driven experience which runs on all three supported OSes) will always remain the default and preferred distribution. I'm not too familiar with Android development but if it's anything like iOS or UWP, it means the apps are containerized in some way and walled off from the filesystem. How would ROM selection, input configuration, NVRAM and save state management work? If there are Android developers who want to take this on, I'd love to discuss and figure something out.

Generally, I would recommend against becoming a core for RetroArch. MAME devs hated their guts and they've already drove other emulator devs to quit their projects or go closed-source. Anyway, that's a whole different can of worms and for Supermodel to be wary of getting near RetroArch if they ever decide to. Remaining standalone is a much edrama-free existence.

@sgtbilco:
Thanks for elaborating your Sinden setup. Pretty sure I'd try and whip up something via LaunchBox using the "Additonal Apps" feature which allows calling executables and batch scripts iirc. This is where you can leverage frontends to streamline your processes which should be an elegant approach. Sadly, I don't have a Sinden to fiddle with this but leaving this here if it sparks an alternative solution for you.