
Negatron by BabelSoft

- PURPOSE -

Negatron is yet another front-end for MAME, the well-known multi-system emulator.

The production of Negatron began on July 7th, 2015, because of the inability of any existing front-ends at the time to entirely unlock all the features MAME has to offer, especially since it has completely merged with its sister project MESS in v0.162, which features a dynamic system of contextual configuration of the emulated machines: the slot expansion system.

So Negatron has been engineered to assist users in managing the huge list of machines available in MAME as intuitively as possible, them being arcade machines, consoles or computers. It has been developed in order to be as much hassle-free as possible, checking for any changed or updated resources automatically.

Moreover, Negatron's second objective is to ease the creation of a complete information set dealing with those video games emulated by MAME, using drag and drop operations, and display it in a convenient way. This information set should archive a whole breadth of resources, helping in preserving what is known as the video game history.

- PREREQUISITES -

Negatron requires a Java runtime environment (JRE) to work: ensure that your computer has at least Java version 8 update 60, or newer. If you have any doubt, you can simply download the latest Java version at http://www.java.com and install it on your computer.

Negatron also requires MAME v0.162 or newer although older versions may work as well. You can get the latest version for your specific OS at http://www.mamedev.org.

Finally, while not mandatory, Negatron also needs VLC media player 2.2.0 or newer to be installed on your computer in order to play video previews. For this to work, VLC's bitness must match the bitness of the JRE you run with, i.e. if you run Negatron with Java 64-bit, you must install VLC 64-bit as well.
You can get the latest version for your specific OS at http://www.videolan.org. Be aware that the site lets you download the Windows 32-bit version by default.

The latest version of Negatron should always be available at http://www.babelsoft.net/products/negatron.htm.

- QUICK START -

Uncompress Negatron's zip archive file wherever you see fit, then:
* under Windows, launch Negatron.exe
* under Linux, launch Negatron.sh
* under MacOS X, launch Negatron.command

- SEE ALSO -

For any further information, please refer to the manual.

- LICENSE -

Copyright (C) 2015-2016 BabelSoft S.A.S.U.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.