How do I add scanlines to MAME in retropie 4.2?

jell

@casadero Another idea is to check your video driver. From what I understand, if it is set to "dispmanx", overlays/shaders will not work. It should be set to "gl". Best of luck, your project sounds like fun!

caver01

@casadero Also, you might consider upping your render resolution. If you are running your 19" display at 640x480, that doesn't give you many pixels to simulate scanlines. I run a 19" LCD on my setup and I run that at native resolution (1280x1024) for everything, and the scanline shader looks fantastic (on libretro core emulators). I use lr-mame2003 as my default, with some games (mostly vector) running in AdvanceMAME. Of course, AdvanceMAME is stand-alone and none of the libretro shader settings apply. So, aside from vector games, if I want scanlines in AdvanceMAME, I set them up using the TAB menu and adjust the RGB effect in the Video Settings.

Casadero

@caver01 : thank you for your hint; unfortunately, changing the resolution did not help

Casadero

@jell : thank you for your hint; unfortunately, Setting the Video Driver to "gl" did not help

caver01

@casadero where did you put your ROMs? What exact folder? Depending on what MAME emulator you are using, you may not be using retroarch, so all of these shader settings might not apply.

It's very hard to help if we don't know exactly what you are doing.

My advice: Use the native resolution of your 19"LCD and use lr-mame2003 to launch ROMs. The CRT-PI shader looks fantastic.

Casadero

@buzz : at first, I put some ROMs in the "MAME" Folder. After the reboot, there was now the MAME logo added to the RETROPIE logo. Then I put the same ROMs to the ARCADE Folder. Again, after rebooting there was a third and new logo "ARCADE" to choose from. There seems to be no difference which one I choose to start the games and, unfortunately, in both versions the games come without scanlines.

Any other ideas from the community?

Casadero

@caver01 : correction to my recent post: I put the ROMs to the MAME-MAME4ALL folder and, later, to the ARCADE folder. there is no folder like "lr-mame2003" folder on my USB stick, but a "mame-libreto". I still do not know the difference between all these MAME Emulators, but I will start some research about that issue the coming weekend.

simonster

When you start a game, a screen should appear saying press a button to configure. If you press the 'A' button on your controller at that point, a menu will appear and the first item will say the name of the current emulator.

Casadero

@casadero a big step into the right direction: I put the ROMs to the "mame-libreto" folder as well; now I got, of course, one logo more to choose from. here the games finally have scanlines, yeah! but: the scanlines go vertical instead of horizontal, which makes the games look pretty strange... any idea where to change settings?

caver01

@casadero What game are you playing? Is it a vertical game? If so, the lines should go vertical. Think about that. When you use an actual CRT, scanlines run the long way, horizontal on monitors in landscape orientation. If you play a game like Pac Man which is vertically oriented, the monitor is simply tipped onto its side. Scanlines would now run vertically.

caver01

@casadero said in How do I add scanlines to MAME in retropie 4.2?:

@caver01 : correction to my recent post: I put the ROMs to the MAME-MAME4ALL folder and, later, to the ARCADE folder. there is no folder like "lr-mame2003" folder on my USB stick, but a "mame-libreto". I still do not know the difference between all these MAME Emulators, but I will start some research about that issue the coming weekend.

Please read this.

Emulators come in two basic flavors in RetroPie--standalone or libretro core. The standalone are just that--they run independently of other frameworks. They are configured independently. They might have their own way of generating display effects (advancemame for instance has some RGB effects that can be turned on). The libretro cores are all emulators that run inside of the RetroArch framework. These can share common settings for controls, video, etc. The CRT-PI shader is for RetroArch, so it won't apply to the standalone emulators, whether they are MAME or something else.

Given the two kinds of emulators, there are several different versions of MAME. Some are standalone, some libretro cores. Each requires their own ROM versions. Generally speaking, you should only use ROMs that come from a set with a version matching that version of MAME. If the location of your ROMs allows you to choose more than one emulator, you do that using the RUNCOMMAND function (which you should also click and read).