Automatically rotate games to vertical display based on rom folder?

batman

I'm sure there are a few ways around and apologises if there is already any easy fix for this (I haven't closely followed development for a while) but thought it would be great to be able to automatically rotate horizontal games to display in their correct format if they were placed in a particular folder.

I can see that this has been addressed several times on the forum and there are modifications you can do the config file to complete this but thought it would be much easier to have something built in. Particuarly for somebody building an image from scratch.

Perhaps this could be achieved by a built in command that would activate to rotate the screen based if the rom has been placed in specific folder location? As an example...any arcade roms placed under "arcade_horizontal" would automatically rotate 90 degrees clockwise regardless of the rom in the folder. Leaving to the user to decide which games rotate and which don't. Even if this folder could be subfolder for MAME or FBA so current themes are no affected.

I realise this might impact specific XML gamelist files so an alternative might be to have this as completely separate folder under the roms directory?

I would love to find a way to implement this myself but am not an expert on this matter by any means and still struggle to do any custom configurations myself.

dankcushions

i'm not entirely clear on what problem you're having. vertical games should already rotated to be displayed vertically by the emulator cores themselves. there should be no reason to have to manually rotate anything.

maybe you can give me a specific example (emulator + rom + photo)?

batman

@dankcushions Good to see you still here! You were a massive help when I was putting together my first setup over a year ago.

All the vertical games (Pacman, Donkey kong, 1943) are displaying in the correct orientation when they boot and haven't had to any type of configuration. I was seeking the opposite and forcing particular games to rotate and so they could be played full screen on a horizonal monitor.

Essentially only selecting certain games to load vertically. Therefore you could rotate your monitor on command and would be dependent on title. As show in clip below (at 3:53 mark).

dankcushions

@batman i have just the setting for you :)

https://retropie.org.uk/docs/lr-mame2003/#tate-mode - you don't have to use any per-game configs using this, just change those two settings, and you're done!

it requires you to be using the mame2003 emulator, but maybe you already are?

batman

@dankcushions Cheers - I've haven't looked at the docs page for a while and never realised it was called "tate mode".

Was really hoping I could stick to lr-fbalpha but this is certainly a better solution then I anticipated. I'll try this out on the weekend.

I'm sure I saw a dat file somewhere to firstly sort these games and then to try and find a sensible solution to categorise these games within the menu so they are distinguishable and all in the one place.

Still would love to see integrated as part of the standard Retropie image.

A Former User

@batman Did you ever figure out a global tate config for FBA? I found a way to manually rotate per game but thats a bit of work.

ganondork

I found one! A friend asked me for a seperare Tate-Card to switch to when using his Tate-Display. Simply use the Arcade-Sytem instead of seperate Mame and FBA-Systems. Enter a game with Mame2003-core, activate rotation and save the system configuration file (not game or core override!). Done. The rotation setting will also apply to all FBA-games.