AdvanceMAME Bezels

Meneer Jansen

I'm re-installing Retropie because my old SD card crashed. Copied all its contents to a new SD card but the damage was too great. I'd rather poke myself repeatedly in the eye than to redo all the settings... WHAT A PAIN! Retropie is a big mess if you ask me.

Anyway to get my bezels (read: artwork) back I had to set in "advmame-0.94.rc":

display_artwork_backdrop yes
display_artwork_bezel yes
display_artwork_crop no
display_artwork_overlay yes
display_aspectx 16
display_aspecty 9

Caveat: where does your advmame-0.94.rc file reside? It's in two (!!!!!) places:

/opt/retropie/configs/mame-advmame/
/home/pi/.advance/

That last dir is "hidden" in Linux (because it starts w/ a point). I changed the one in the home dir. Good luck. :-)

SunnyMo

is there any way to make bezel suits 1920 * 1080 fullscreen without blurry? i use advmame3.8 and made a 1080p MAME bezel png file and .art file, but after starting the game, i found the bezel is blurred just like it is downscaled first and then resale to fit the screen, it's totally blurry. i used the same png file in lr-mame2003, it works well. thanks. @UDb23

UDb23

@sunnymo Unfortunately advmame 3.8 has issues with displaing bezels correctly on the Pi.

SunnyMo

@udb23 thanks for the reply. what a pity, advmame 3 is the best emulator i can find to play Ninja Baseball Batman at better speed on pi3b+, hope advmame can be improved for this problem in the future.

Meneer Jansen

@udb23 said in AdvanceMAME Bezels:

@sunnymo Unfortunately advmame 3.8 has issues with displaing bezels correctly on the Pi.

If I'm not mistaken then the newer versions of Mame use a different format for the artwork. So AdvMame 3.8 might not have issues, it might need differently formatted artwork.

mediamogul

@meneer-jansen said in AdvanceMAME Bezels:

it might need differently formatted artwork.

I believe it's just an issue with timing. Currently, the artwork is being scaled to the native resolution of the video, which is then upscaled for display. If it were scaled to the adjusted display resolution, it should look great.

UDb23

Already wrote to the author about this issue on Advancemame's forums in the past; got a reply but basically nothing actually happened so far in terms of fixing this issue.

More recently another user wrote about the bezel issue on that forum; again no feedback.
As already proposed (but didn't happen yet) all those retropie users interested in bezels with advmame should ask to fix it on the advmame forum. If multiple people are asking probably the author will fix.

UDb23

I just posted again on that thread. Please do the same.

SunnyMo

@udb23 thanks for the effort of reporting, i'll do it too. bezels do make a better feeling on model TV to play retro games.

Meneer Jansen

Would it be possible for y'all to use an older version of AdvMame?

caver01

@udb23 said in AdvanceMAME Bezels:

More recently another user wrote about the bezel issue on that forum; again no feedback.

Ha ha ha. That other user was me ;-) I'd really love to have this working. Not sure what else we can do except add more voices.

UDb23

@caver01 Yes, more voices probably is the only chance.

UDb23

Andrea, the developer, just replied on the forum:
"Hi guys,
OK. Working on it.

Ciao,
Andrea"

mediamogul

@udb23

Woohoo! Score one for the squeaky wheels.

mediamogul

I just tested AdvanceMAME 3.9 that contains a new feature to scale the screen larger in order to better accommodate artwork display. The good news is that it looks great. Unfortunately, the bad news is that the Pi3B seems unable to handle the scaling without considerable slowdown. I plan to kick the tires a little more, but after testing with 'Space Invaders' already, which normally isn't all that demanding, I don't expect things to improve with the more advanced titles. It'd be great to get more reactions from others here as well.

I haven't had that much time to play/test/post here recently, so if it happens that 3.9 gets released to RetroPie soon and reports of slowdown start to occur, keep in mind that the feature can be turned off by adding display_artwork_magnify 1 to /opt/retropie/configs/mame-advmame/advmame.rc. Without a setting specified, the default behavior is auto and specific scaling factors can also be added with 2, 3 and 4. Full details can be found here.

UDb23

@mediamogul
Thanks for the update!

the bad news is that the Pi3B seems unable to handle the scaling without considerable slowdown

..that means practically artwork still unusable...
Will try it out as soon as available in Retropie.

Riverstorm

@mediamogul @UDb23 - I look forward to testing that on release. I would definitely be more interested in Pi performance, mainly.

brimys

@caver01 , first off, wanted to say THANKS for your other posts regarding getting spinners working, as I have just successfully gotten my spinner working, and played Discs of Tron on my new (and first) arcade cab!

RE: advmame and overlays, etc., I am trying to add the DOT overlay/backdrop art. I am running latest version of Retropie (from two weeks ago), and ONLY have AdvMame1.4 running (at the moment), with a full 0.106 romset. I downloaded the OLD style art from Mr. Do (file is dotron.zip), and dropped it into [home/pi/RetroPie/roms/mame-advmame/artwork], and enabled everything (I think) in the .rc file:

dir_artwork /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/mame-advmame/artwork
display_artwork_backdrop yes
display_artwork_bezel yes
display_artwork_crop yes
display_artwork_overlay yes

When I do this, and re-boot Emulationstation... it adds ARCADE to my ES carousel, saying the game is "artwork." It's like it thinks the "dotron.zip" file is a GAME rom, not an ART rom. When I launch Discs of Tron, no background. When I reconnect and delete the art zip then reboot, ARCADE is gone from the carousel.

Any thoughts? Would love to add the backgrounds/overlays/bezels. Am I putting the art zip in the wrong place? Thanks for all the help everyone!

mitu

@brimys Emulationstation will scan the ROM folder and add any file with the proper extension to the game list, treating it like a game. In your case, it's the .zip exttension that is also used by all Mame ROMs.
If you don't want the beze .zip to appear in the list, then create a separate folder for bezels (and not part of the ROM folder) and put your bezel .zip files into that folder. For instance, you can use /opt/retropie/configs/mame-advmame/artwork.

brimys

@mitu , thank you, I will try that tonight. Then, I would also want to redirect the folder chain in the .rc file to the new location, I am guessing.

Any thoughts as to why the artwork didn't show up in-game? I've seen some other posts noting a second config file in a .home location? This is new to me, so thanks for any help!