Today we proudly announce the release of QMC2 0.2.b9!

This version now includes some (hopefully useful) web-based features using the QtWebKit module. The most important one is the new MAWS lookup feature implemented as a new game detail tab containing an integrated web browser.

The QtWebKit module was introduced in Qt 4.4, but is only really working since Qt 4.5 (4.5.1 recommended), so unfortunately this also means that Qt 4.4 is no longer supported — please upgrade to Qt 4.5!

Note that on Windows — even with Qt 4.5.1 (latest stable release as of this writing) — QtWebKit still has some glitches like for example missing backgrounds when rendering web pages. Basically, though, it works. On UNIX/Linux, there should be no (major) issues left. We have no report yet as to how it works on Mac OS X.

Configuration-wise, all MAME variants are synced with version 0.132. Template updates for MESS 0.132 will follow here if required, but as MAME didn’t introduce any new options since 0.131, this is not to be expected.

In summary, the most important changes since 0.2.b8 include:

* Integrated (mini) web browser based on QtWebKit (with just a subset of typical browser features), including HTTP proxy support and a simple download manager
* MAME variants only: new MAWS lookup feature as an additional game detail tab, including on-disk and in-memory caching of MAWS pages (this is using the global browser functionality intensively, but adds some optimizations to speed things up)
* Free reordering & (de)activation of all available game/machine details
* Qt 4.5.0+ required now (Qt 4.5.1 recommended)
* On Windows, the executables (qmc2-emulator.exe) now include the respective application icon to make it look nicer in the Explo(r|d)er
* General layout face lift for all UIs (especially smaller layout content margins, and some fixed minor UI bugs)
* The option dialog now uses scrollable content to make it better suited for small resolution displays
* A few (more or less important) bug fixes

See change-log for more information.

Have fun,

The QMC2 dev-team

Changes:
* fix: corrected some main widget layout restoration troubles related to maximized windowed mode vs. full screen mode -- thanks to Armin Schmidhuber for finding the issues
* fix: fixed a series of bugs related to automatic keyboard focussing in main widget functions
* fix: corrected a set of issues related to automatic item (de)selection when switching game/machine list tabs
* fix: Windows: checks for obsolete image & sample files didn´t work correctly when absolute paths were used
* imp: updated redistributed Qt translations to Qt 4.5.1
* imp: (SDL)MESS templates updated to 0.131 (new option crsshairpath)
* imp: SDLMAME template updated to 0.131u4 (no new options)
* imp: exchanged MESS icon with one derived from the new offical logo
* imp: made options dialog more flexible to be used on small resolution displays by enclosing all sub-widgets in QScrollArea´s
* imp: general layouting facelift (smaller layout content margins)
* imp: added and cleaned up some (static) main widget short cuts which are accessible through Alt + "character"
* imp: build: Windows: add icon to binary target exe (qmc2-emulator.exe)
* new: all UI files regenerated with Qt 4.5´s designer -- Qt 4.5.0+ promoted as the new required version -- Qt 4.4 is no longer supported!
* new: added new make option AUDIT_WILDCARD to enable/disable the use of wildcards (´*´) on full audit calls if required (default: disabled)
* new: free reordering & (de)activation of all available game/machine details
* new: all MAME variants now include an MAWS lookup feature as an additional game detail page (in-memory and disk-caching included)
* new: integrated (mini) web browser based on QtWebKit with just a subset of typical browser features (used by the MAWS lookup and documentation browser)
* new: all (HTTP) network access can be routed directly or via a proxy
* new: added new make option BROWSER_EXTRAS to enable/disable the use of browser extra features such as Qt´s Web Inspector (default: disabled) -- warning: these extra features may be buggy!
* new: added new make option WC_COMPRESSION to enable/disable on-disk web-cache compression (default: enabled on UNIX and Mac, disabled on Windows for now)
* new: using the new mini web browser to display online documentation (includes support for external links)
* new: save/restore layout of documentation browser (not its visibility), made it an independent widget
* new: download manager for use with web content, integrated into the main widget (still needs a bunch of improvements, but basically does its job -- also, there are still some QtWebKit issues we´ve tried to work around as far as possible...)
* doc: changed all occurrances of external URLs to real href´s (only http://... URLs supported)