Romcenter

First of all, my congrats for the excellent work in the visual part of RC. With all the new icons is seems a lot better.

Here are some (mostly visual) comments on RC3.00a5, generated after testing it under Win2K.

- The height of the header of the files list should be at least 3 pixels larger because the icons for Roms, Bios, Samples, Disks are getting outside of the header.

- When switching between Datafile sub-branches (All, Originals, etc) the width of the columns of the files list is not preserved. Every time is either auto-resized or restored to a default width. This is not always good because one of the headers (i.e. expected name) is always truncated.

- IMHO instead of using %USERPROFILE%\My Documents\romcenter to store RC's settings files, %APPDATA%\romcenter should be used. It seems more appropriate.

- In a rom path, there are bios zips and rom zips. It would be nice if there were two additional filters (like show/hide correct files) to show/hide roms and show/hide bios files. It would also be nice if they worked in parallel with the existing four. Right now, even if all filters are set to hide everything, bioses are still shown. After all bioses are not playable so one may wish to have them hidden.

- When clicking on a checkbox or option button in Preferences/Fix, a focus ring appears around it. Some of the checkboxes/option buttons are too near others (or "under" another), which results in missing parts of the focus ring (usually the top or the bottom parts). This happens with the following controls:

> Romsets\Rom Merge Mode\Split
> Romsets\Rom Merge Mode\Un-merged
> Romsets\Bios Merge Mode\Split
> Romsets\Bios Merge Mode\Un-merged
> Fix\Remove useless roms
> Corrupted files\Move To
> Sets case\lowercase
> Roms case\lowercase

- There is a useful item in the File menu, "Open path in explorer". I happen to use another filemanager instead of explorer. It would be nice if there was a global setting (not database or rompath dependent) to define the filemanager and its command-line.

Keep it up Eric.

Wanderer wrote:- IMHO instead of using %USERPROFILE%\My Documents\romcenter to store RC's settings files, %APPDATA%\romcenter should be used. It seems more appropriate.

After some thought, having the settings under either those locations does not seem very convenient. I have RC along with MAME roms on a portable HDD which i use in several PCs. I don't find it very convenient to have a romcenter folder created on every PC i go, with the default settings. It would be better if the location of the configuration files could be defined by the user.

Perhaps RC should search first for an INI file under RC's folder and if not found, then create the %APPDATA%\romcenter folder.

Perhaps it would be even better if under RC's folder there was a "settingslocation.ini" containing only one line, like: SETTINGSLOCATION=%APPDATA%\romcenter (the location of the actual settings file). It would also be nice if this setting could support locations containing ".", ".." and environment variables.

Also, "TempPath=" INI setting should have %TEMP% as a default value and it would be nice if all other settings recognized environment variables.