Backdrops in mame2003-plus

UDb23

@Riverstorm said in Backdrops in mame2003-plus:

additional 20TB

20 TB !! That's a lot of space for backup.

Clyde

@Riverstorm said in Backdrops in mame2003-plus:

@Clyde - I agree on backups. I just picked up an additional 20TB this past weekend. In addition to having a home backup I keep two off-site backups at work. ;)

Sounds like a good concept. I "only" have three sets of two 4 TB drives each which I rotate between home and an external place. If properly encrypted, they can be put just everywhere or with anyone without much concern.

grant2258

use bi linear filtering or a shader else make the artwork at the core res no other way round it for raster. Vectors will work as expected with the new code.

Riverstorm

@UDb23 - I couldn't quite tell if it's slow. I was trying to focus on the movement speed of the "bullet" and not how fast you press the fire button since it erases and fires a new bullet with each press.

If your reflexes are good you could fire as soon as the ship starts to explode so I was trying to line up my screen with the video of bullet movement speed but I'm not 100% sure. Maybe @Clyde has a keen eye and may catch a difference.

It does run at 60 FPS and seemed to run smooth so lag doesn't seem to be an issue.

I wasn't planning on buying 20TB but Best Buy (a local electronics store) had a clearance on Western Digital 10TB external drives for $169 a piece so I grabbed two. I was hoping for 12TB but they won't be in that price range for a while.

I shuck them and then you can use an electronic insulator tape like Kapton to cover the 3V pin so they are usable in a regular PC vs. the external shell.

The bulk of my backups are movies followed by music but I do encrypt "important" documents. ;) I used to store my drives at my brothers place but since I am at work 5 or 6 days a week I thought it was a better option as I can get in at work 24/7.

Still no weather relief and not any time soon from the forecast. It's not frigid (or maybe we are just getting really acclimated to the temps) but well below freezing for the next several days. We just got pegged again last night with several inches of snow. We are forecast for snow again on Thursday, Saturday and Monday.

After shoveling out this morning it's so high on either side of the driveway you can't see down the street when backing out in your car. It's a wall of snow down both sides of the driveway. I am surly ready for anything above freezing or just spring weather soon. :)

quicksilver

@Riverstorm said in Backdrops in mame2003-plus:

After shoveling out this morning it's so high on either side of the driveway you can't see down the street when backing out in your car. It's a wall of snow down both sides of the driveway. I am surly ready for anything above freezing or just spring weather soon. :)

I have experienced that much snow one time where I live (they called it snowmaggedon) was basically three or four storms back to back. Was the worst thing ever.

We just got 4 inches this morning so nothing close to what you are dealing with. Good luck with all the shoveling! :)

UDb23

@Riverstorm That's a fantastic price for 10TB.
I have multiple older disks I put into external enclosures + a 4TB NAS I use for backups; should get rid of some of these and get a bigger one too. I do make backups with reasonable frequency but still not keeping them at different locations; it makes sense as you already do and should think too of maybe keeping a backup in the office.

Needing to shovel all that snow, on top of the freezing weather, is surely no fun.
When do usually temps recover in your area ? March?

Totally different topic: last weekend I grabbed a used Lenovo m93p tiny on ebay; I think it's as small as it can get: i5 4th gen, 8GB RAM and 500 GB HD (I will replace with a spare SSD I have). The idea is to use it as HTPC in the living room and, of course, for retro gaming.
It has no room to fit a gpu so graphics are limited to embedded Intel HD 4600; according to some benchmark I saw it is not that bad and even runs Dolphin (dreamcast) quite nicely.
I will not "abandon" my Pi anyway of course!
It seems Batocera linux can be run from a USB stick and provides good performance for emulation; any experience/suggestions ? But that would probably required be a separate thread.

Back to topic: high res Gorf overlay implementation with lamps underneath should work and be ready tomorrow.

Riverstorm

@UDb23 @quicksilver - I'll have to remember that, snowmaggedon, that's great! I am usually really patient with winter but this year the season has felt long. I don't mind the cold but I wish it would stop snowing every other day so the roads could at least dry out. It's great when skiing or tubing but for day to day it's not the best.

I use rubber waterproof floor mats in the winter and they are a swimming pool right now that your pant legs get to dip in frequently. Nothing is getting a chance to dry out between snows. Keeping vehicles wet with the salt and chemicals on the roads is a sure recipe for corrosion. The pot holes are just as destructive to your suspension. Winter is great but it can be hard on things for sure.

Our average temps are probably 25 to 40F (-4 to 7C) in March, more on the upper side of that range. They are usually decent enough to melt any snow in a day or two. We should recover in the next 2 or 3 weeks I would say but the snow cover is so thick the transition into spring might take a bit longer. Here's to hoping for warmer days.

The drives were a great price. The guy at the store said they didn't sell out on Black Friday and had enough to run a sale at Christmas again which didn't sell out either so now they just put them on clearance at a price cheaper than Black Friday.

Mini PC's are great. We are mainly a HP shop but we are starting to "demo" some Dell PC's now as our reseller is getting a bit complacent with business from what I understand from our purchasing gal. I think our PC's are a bit bigger than the Lenovo m93p by a few inches but they are still pretty compact.

One PC I would love to get a hold of is an Intel NUC but they are just to expensive to be used solely as a gaming PC compared to a Pi which runs so many consoles and games for a fraction of the price. People are always dumping PCs so I'll have to keep an eye out and maybe catch a mini for a decent price also.

I have to say I haven't try Linux on a USB drive. I think there's several versions that will work? If you do start a thread you'll have to ping me as I think that would be interesting. I see you can also hack the Amazon Fire TV Stick which I always thought would be interesting too. USB sized portable gaming sounds pretty neat. :)

I always look forward to your overlays and do receive a lot of positive feedback. You were able to work some magic to get Gorf going with some HD clarity?

Riverstorm

@UDb23 - Just a quick thought. Would it be possible to fill the "negative space" on either side of the Gorf panels as transparent, black or place one black pixel at 0,0 / 0,1 / 1,0 and 1,1. Then position the overlay to start at 0,0 and end at 1,1?

Maybe make it one piece or would the LED's have performance issues.

Clyde

@Riverstorm @UDb23 I'm a fan of mini PCs as well, having bought the i3 version of the MSI Cubi 3 Silent last year. At first I thought about using it as a faster emulation machine in my DIY arcade cabinet, maybe in combination to a file server in succession of my rather slow old Synology NAS. But it finally ended up as my everyday desktop PC with way less power consumption than my old full size PC. However, one of my own plans for it still remains – I keep a mirror of my arcade's Retropie installation on it in a dedicated user account for testing purposes and retro gaming on my video projector. 😊

Coming from the age of 8-bit home computers, I'm amazed what computing power we can have in the size of a lunch box nowadays.

@Riverstorm Most Linux distributions should run happily from a USB drive, as long as the computer's BIOS/EFI can boot from USB without problems. And since a standard Linux installation isn't as hardware-bound as Windows (to my very limited knowledge about all versions after Win 7), you should be able to plug in the drive in other computers and boot the system on them.

Apropos, I bought an internal Kingston 960GB ssd for 111€ yesterday, just to install 2-3 Linux variants on my Laptop next to each other – namely Kubuntu, KDE Neon, and Ubuntu MATE – using the same $HOME volume with my user data, "because I can" and to find the one that suits my needs and preferences the best. 😉 The installation and testing will be done via USB before I'll finally put the drive into the Laptop to keep my current system operational until the new ones are ready.

Riverstorm

@Clyde said in Backdrops in mame2003-plus:

"because I can"

I love those three little words, 'cause I can. Arcade and 8-bit gaming on a video projector, priceless! ;) I spend most of my time in Windows 10 these past few years. I think we are on v1908 as they come out roughly every every 6 months now. I do keep an old Windows 7 and Windows XP "hard drive swappable" setup on hand of each OS for legacy gaming. I don't mind Windows but heaven forbid they have to move things around from version to version and you never know where to find the "utility" you need. The server OS's are worse. I only have enough Linux knowledge to get by as a standard user. =/

UDb23

FYI: a new developer is going to try implementing a new artwork system.

Clyde

@Riverstorm Two thirds done, I managed to install KDE Neon in today's lunch break – it only took 15 minutes thanks to USB 3, plus some manual reworking of the /etc/crypttab because of the special 3-OS-in-1-encrypted-LVM setup – and Ubuntu MATE followed at home after dinner. Now only Kubuntu remains before I'll put the ssd into the Laptop – 'cause I can. 😄

Being a standard user is absolutely okay. Even after 12 years with Linux I would only call myself an advanced user at best, as I only learn new things about my system when the need arises.

@UDb23 Thanks for the tip. How does one add to the bounty?

UDb23

@Clyde said in Backdrops in mame2003-plus:

Thanks for the tip. How does one add to the bounty?

here.

Clyde

@UDb23 Done, thanks again!

UDb23

After some additional testing a full 1080p overlay with working lamps for Gorf is now available:

(artifacts only due to jpg compression; full res on screen).

You need to install both specific overlay (trasparent ranking background) AND specific backdrop (lamps only ; gorf.zip)

All required files here.

quicksilver

@UDb23 Thank you for this! I think I have figured out where all the files go except the lamps only back drop (gorf.zip). Where does that file go?

UDb23

@quicksilver copy the zip to \bios\mame2003-plus\artwork on your Pi.

Riverstorm

@UDb23 - Thanks for all the work on this overlay. I will be testing this tonight. I saw in the overlay thread someone posted a Battletoads overlay so I created the files and have been playing that a bit. It runs smooth with a shader and is a nice overlay but the quality is not quite as good as yours.

Are you stretching the BD to get the overlay HD? Would it have worked to make the overlay full HD and make the "dark" sides black or transparent so it's 1920x1080?

I thought of making the corners a single pixel if transparency doesn't hold coords. I'm not sure how to say that part. Basically can you have a column that's transparent and then the left side bar, game, right side bar and finally transparent column again. Does that make sense?

@Clyde - I'm a bit jealous you're able to setup 3 OS's over a lunch break. I mainly keep Windows almost exclusively for legacy gaming. I still have some old DOS games. I do remember the "birth" of DOS and well over 20 years ago I remember working at UPS using OS/2 Warp and an IBM System/36.

UDb23

@Riverstorm said in Backdrops in mame2003-plus:

Are you stretching the BD to get the overlay HD? Would it have worked to make the overlay full HD and make the "dark" sides black or transparent so it's 1920x1080?

Basically I created a BD with full black left side image and a right side image with just the rank boxes background (ON and OFF versions with their corresponding rank masks that are activated by the rom driver).
Coordinates same as previous to stretch the sidebars to correct ratio for 1080p.
The BD still is rendered low res but as it is just the rank background it is not noticeable.

Then a dedicated RA 1080p overlay with transparent ranking boxes is placed on top.

I thought of making the corners a single pixel if transparency doesn't hold coords. I'm not sure how to say that part. Basically can you have a column that's transparent and then the left side bar, game, right side bar and finally transparent column again. Does that make sense?

Full transparent only images for BD do hold the place but have bigger size in terms of KB vs full black; that's why I opted for the latter.
During tests I also found out that if you only apply a right side image as BD, the whole rendered area (game area+right side ) will be centered on screen: this means game area no longer centered. Therefore I still needed to add a full black left side.
It could be done with just one image with transparent game area but then you need to create masks of the same size to get the lamps light on. That would require more memory and more processing I believe.

Riverstorm

@UDb23 - Triumph! Simply triumph! :) Great job getting around the low res limitations. I look forward to see if that programmer is able to implement HD artwork that works on lower power systems.

Here's some old text davej (The programmer behind the crt-pi shader) on memory access when using overlays and shaders. He said the relative access figures were just away of indicating how much extra work the Pi needs to do when using shaders and/or overlays. If a read or a write of a pixel is one memory access, reading or writing the whole of a large image will take more of them than for a small image.

Some notes on memory usage.

The examples shown are for a 4:3 game displayed on a 1920x1080 screen. The game screen is upscaled to 1440x1080 to keep the aspect ratio the same. Game screens vary in resolution so I've used a rough average.

a) GPU upscales image: GPU reads game image, upscales it and sends it to the display. It can upscale (with linear or nearest filtering) to any supported resolution without extra memory accesses. Relative memory accesses = 1.

b) With overlay: GPU reads game image, combines it with overlay (which it also has to read) and sends it to the display. Needs memory from a) plus size of overlay (overlay is 30 times as big as image from game). Relative memory accesses = 31.

c) Using shader: GPU upscales game image using shader and writes it out to memory. GPU reads upscaled image and sends it to display. Needs memory from a) plus 2 * upscaled image size (upscaled image is 23 times as big as image from game). Relative memory accesses = 47.

d) Shader with overlay: As c) but also has to read the overlay whilst sending image to display. Relative memory accesses = 78.

For a 720 screen, the overlay and shader upscaled images are about half the size.

All Pis have relatively slow memory and the CPU and GPU can end up fighting over access to it. My recommendation is to overclock your memory as fast as it will go whilst still remaining stable.

If you're using shaders overclocking the GPU can help relieve pressure on memory - it doesn't use less but the access pattern changes a bit making it conflict less with the CPU. Note: crt-pi in it's default configuration was designed to work on Pi1+2s with the default GPU clock of 250MHz, by overclocking I mean reative to that. By default Pi Zeros are clocked at 300MHz and Pi3s at 400MHz. If you get overheating problems with Pi3s running shaders you could try underclocking the GPU down from 400MHz - but it might cause problems for shaders other than crt-pi.