Overview

MameVfxRemoteView offers a web interface to the Ensoniq VFX family of keybards as emulated by MAME, running as plain HTTP. It is implemented using the CivetWeb embeddable web server.

It can connect to either the websocket that's exposed by MAME's master branch at the time of writing, or the remote view support that was previously implemented in #14131, though that has been removed, for now.

By default, MameVfxRemoteView serves its contents on all local interfaces on port 9090: You can access the view as http://localhost:9090/.

You can optionally build MameVfxRemoteView with OpenSSL support by specifying USE_SSL as TRUE in CMakeLists.txt on line 5. In that case, the build process uses openssl to create a new key and a self-signed certificate, and the view can also be accessed at https://localhost:8443/.

MameVfxRemoteView connects to a locally running instance of MAME either through its http server's websocket on port 8080, or with the bespoke protocol on port 15112, the default value for MAME's comm_localport option at the time of writing.

You can explicitly specify the host and port on which to listen using CivetWeb's standard -listening_ports command line flag:

$ MameVfxRemoteView -listening_ports localhost:9090

will listen only on the loopback interface 127.0.0.1 port 9090. You can specify multiple ports, and SSL ports are identified by adding a suffix s. So

$ MameVfxRemoteView -listening_ports 9090,9443s

will listen on port 9090 for HTTP and 9443 for HTTPS traffic.

You can also specify the host and port where MAME should be listening for a connection, with a websocket connection:

$ MameVfxRemoteView -websocket some.machine:9000/esqpanel/socket

will attempt to connect to MAME running the http server on some.machine port 9000, connecting to the websocket at /esqpanel/socket;

$ MameVfxRemoteView -direct some.machine:9000

will connect to MAME with the proposed direct connection on some.machine port 9000.

You can also specify both options, and MameVfxRemoteView will connecct to whichever one it can.

If you're running MAME and MameVfxRemoteView both on the same machine, their defaults should match, and MameVfxRemoteView should automatically connect to MAME, whichever connection it uses. This gives us a simplest case: Running

$ mame sd132 -http

(for MAME's master branch) or

$ mame sd132

(for the proposed direct connection) in one terminal starts MAME emulating the Ensoniq SD-1/32, listening for a connection on the default port (8080 for http, 15112 for the direct connection); and running

$ MameVfxRemoteView

in another terminal on the same machine starts MameVfxRemoteView, connecting to MAME as started above, serving the view on http://localhost:9090/.

As long as a web browser is connected to MameVfxRemoteView, it will keep the connection to MAME alive. If connection to MAME is lost, MameVfxRemoteView will attempt to reconnect, once every second, until it succeeds or is stopped.

When running MAME, you can of course tell MAME which interface address and port number to listen on, using MAME's -comm_localhost and -comm_localport command line flags:

$ mame sd132 -comm_localhost 127.0.0.1 -comm_localport 9000

will start MAME, listening only on the loopback interface 127.0.0.1 (and thus not be accessible from any other machine) on port 9000 instead of MAME's default port 15112. You would then need to run MameVfxRemoteView to match the above:

$ MameVfxRemoteView -direct localhost:9000

MameVfxRemoteView currently builds on Linux with cmake using clang++ 20. It requires support for #embed to embed the HTML and JavaScript source files into the binary.

build_view

The project also includes the build_view directory, which contains a Python program that generates the view itself, either as JavaScript code for use in MameVfxRemoteView or as individual MAME layout files for the vfx, vfxsd and sd1 / sd132 keyboards, for inclusion in MAME itself. See build_view/README.md for more details.