Welcome!

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For those of you that've never encountered such a program before, here's a brief outline of what it does:

• It saves settings for rom sets, so you don't have to type them in every time you start up Mame.
• It presents the settings in a graphical format, so you don't have to remember all the command line options.
• It works as a menu for your roms, making it easier to navigate through them.

Nb. Calliope is optimized for 24 bit or 32 bit colour depths, and 800x600 or greater. You can run Calliope at lower colour depths, but it won't look nearly as nice. This is because of the Alpha blending stuff. 65k colours isn't enough! :)

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The only rules you have to follow are:

• Do not distribute rom images with Calliope.
• Do not sell Calliope
• If you like Calliope, send me a postcard, a letter, an email, or some other form of greeting!

If you cannot comply with the above, please delete this software now.

With regards to the source code, Calliope's license is follows the same idea as Mame's:

"The source code cannot be used in a commercial product without a written authorization of the authors. Use in non commercial products is allowed and indeed encouraged; however if you use portions of the source code in your program, you must make the full source code freely available as well."
(From Mame's Readme.txt)

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• Favorite romsets!
• Default settings for rom sets
• Added some extra command line parameters that i missed last time
• Fixed some bugs

Mame support

• Works with Mame dos, and Mame32
• Can automatically recreate it's rom and database files from Mame.
• Supports multiple copies of Mame.
• Supports almost all command line options

Rom support

• Searches for new roms sets really fast! This is done every time on startup.
• Calliope can ask Mame to verify rom sets, and reports back to the user.
• Calliope can sort roms by the following categories: All, Available, Originals, Clones, Neo-Geo, Played, and by driver!
• Saves settings for each game.
• Calliope can display Mame's rom history, plus any additional notes in gamelist.txt
• Calliope can also counts the amount of time played on each game.
  

GUI

• Nice looking GUI :)
• Displays screenshots in pcx, png, bmp and jpeg formats.
• PCX support was written in VB code!
• Coolbuttons and transparent checkboxes!
• The settings window has a screen preview window which shows rotations, inversions, recentering, and scanlines!
• The settings window displays info on each option!
• Scrolling credits on the About window
• Owner drawn list on the main window with smooth scrolling!
• Generates drop shadows and darker areas at runtime!

OS support

• Works under WinNT as well as Win9X

Code

• Checks for roms very quickly, using API.
• Owner drawn listbox is done all through API, mostly TextOut(), and double buffered. 
• VB coded DC, OpenDialog, BrowseForFolder, Database, CfgWriter classes
• VB coded PCX file reading
• Really really optimized code.. Eg. Using ReadFile() API to read large text files instead of Input(), because Input()'s 3x slower.. 
• Fast concating and array resizing via buffering
• Alpha blending of screenshots!
• Alpha blending of lots of things actually :)

That doesn't mean it sucks! :)