Backdrops in mame2003-plus

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.

UDb23

@Riverstorm far too kind! :-)

btw probably not noticeable but lit up rank is made with a circular color gradient
to simulate real light effect.

Very interesting info about memory usage; thanks!!

UDb23

Think I'm going to apply same method to get high res art also in Skydiver.

Riverstorm

@UDb23 - Excellent game! :) I don't know if there's a bug in Sky Diver. When you have a moment can you test player 2 in Sky Diver? When I would press my jump button the parachute would immediately deploy for player 2. So he would jump and deploy the chute. Player 1 works ok. Also it seems the points awarded on the landing pad for player 2 aren't working quite right either.

UDb23

@Riverstorm didn't try player 2 yet. Will check tomorrow and let you know.

Clyde

@UDb23 Great work! I'll test it on my desktop PC that has 1920x1200 (16:10) resolution.

@Riverstorm

@Clyde - I'm a bit jealous you're able to setup 3 OS's over a lunch break.

Thanks, but I "only" set up one OS then, and another at home after dinner. 😌

It certainly helps that modern Linux distributions can be installed in 15-20 minutes for at least ten years now – including all updates if internet is available – depending on the machine and storage speed involved. It also helps to know what I'm doing, having installed many encrypted Linux systems manually over the years. Although most Linux installers can set up an encrypted system automatically, the ones I know can only do that for one system and wiping the whole disk in the process. Thus the manual partitioning I did before the installation, and some little adjustments afterwards. In case you're interested, this is my final partitioning scheme:

1st partition for /boot of the first OS (512 MB)
2nd partition for /boot of the second OS (512 MB)
3rd partition for /boot of the third OS (512 MB)
4th partition for /boot of a possible forth OS, because I can! (512 MB)
5th partition for the encrypted LVM, and in it …
four logical volumes for / of the different OS (50 GB each)
one logical volume for the shared data (The rest of the 960 GB, I can't remember the exact amount in the moment.)

After setting this up in advance, it's "only" selecting the right partition and volume for / and /boot in the installer, creating the /etc/crypttab manually after the installation, and running update-initramfs -uk all in a chroot shell on the installed system to write the changes into its booting processes.

I changed my prior plans to use a combined $HOME, because at least KDE Neon and Kubuntu may have colliding settings for their different KDE versions. I now have their $HOMEs on the root volumes, the rest of the data directories are mounted on the respective $HOMEs' subdirs (like ~/Documents, ~/Downloads, ~/Pictures etc.) automatically via fstab entries – the bind option of mount is your friend.

Ironically, this post took me twice as long as one of those installations. 😊

I mainly keep Windows almost exclusively for legacy gaming.

Same here (Win 7), but I barely boot it in these times of many native Linux games and Retropie. 😉 It's highly probable that it will be my last Windows and that it'll die when Win 7's support runs out.

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.

I also played around with OS/2 and BeOS many years ago, but I never used them productively.

quicksilver

Not sure how far you all played into "gorf" but I definitely have some performance issues running that game. Very noticeable once you get into the third stage and the ships are dive bombing. CPU usage goes up to around 90% but never goes much higher so I'm not sure whats causing the slowdown. I'll have to test with the artwork off. Could that cause a performance hit?