Overlays/Shaders not working in MAME, FBA and Reicast. Working everywhere else though!

batman

Hi guys,

I'm an old school gamer whose been whose been fascinated with Retropie for a few years but only finally decided to take the plunge in the past week. I've had a raspberry pi for a while now so not sure exactly why it's taken me so long. Perhaps it was because I know nothing about linux and wasn't sure if I could get even working to begin with. So firstly, thank you to all the hard working people who made it what it is. It's really an amazing piece of software for those of us who love playing retro games and have an outlet to play them.

I've spent the past week reading up as much as I can on configurations (and youtube videos) and have been able to troubleshoot most issues I was having trough the menus and without the use of command lines. These mainly revolved around controllers and getting certain emulators to work. However, I believe something has occurred with my main configuration file and now not cannot get overlays and shaders working across all my systems. They were previously working fine but this morning I managed to add some extra controllers (for some 2+ player co-op) and correctly installed the Xbox 360 driver (xboxdrv) . I'm using a mix of wired and wireless 360 controllers. I had to reconfigure some of my controllers again but then noticed my scanlines that I had previously set stopped working for some. I could see scanlines across all the games I tested in the systems i'm using but they now have stopped working for Reicast, FBA and MAME.

I've only changed any display settings through the configuration menus in the setting menus and not via command lines or by editing the main retroarch.cgf file. The only time I've manually changed configuration files was for FBA and Reicast by opening it as text file via FTP and only for the controller settings. I've noticed that if I keep changing the overlays or shaders, it will continue effecting the emulators that it has been working on but not the three mentioned above. I've tried changed resolution settings (before a game starts) and changing overlays/shaders individually for these systems (instead of choosing "Configure default options for all libretro") but it seems to make no difference. I'm hoping this is an easy fix and something I've overlooked. These are my current settings when I go to "Configure default options all libretro" menu:

Video Smoothing (unset)
Aspect Radio (21 core)
Render resoltions (Vide Output Resolution)
Video Shader Enable (unset)
Video Shader File (unset)
Overlay Enable (true)
Overlay file (opt/retropie emulators/retroarch/overlays/wii/scan)

If anybody could help me work this out, I would greatly appreciate. I also realise these setting above are probably not ideal but most of these were via trial and error and seeing what I thought looked best on my TV. I would be happy to hear what setting other people are using and If I can manage to resolve this issue, what resolution works best across the board.

dankcushions

overlays applied in this fashion only work for libretro/retroarch emulators. the easy way to tell if the emulator is a libretro emulator is to see if it's prefixed by "lr-". eg "lr-mame2003"

use the runcommand menu you've been using to look at the default emulator you're using. be careful with mame and fba, as different emulators need different romsets, so it would help if we knew what you were currently using to suggest what you should switch to in order to use the same romset.

some of the none-libretro emulators have their own built-in ways of using scanlines, which you could also investigate if you don't want to switch for whatever reason.

also, there is no libretro reicast emulator in retropie, although scanlines would probably look bad on that system as it's relatively high definition.

batman

Thank you for your help and response.

I've checked via the launch menu and you were right - FBA was set at PIFBA and MAME was set at Mame4all. I've now changed them to lr-fba and lr-imame4alland now can see the scanlines again....brilliant! As you've said, it's really not needed to have scanlines with Reicast.

Unfortunately, I've now run into another issue. I've noticed mame games have now considerably slowed down and appear stretched compared to when I had them on Mame4all. Regardless of which resolution or overlay/shader settings I chose. This was most notable on vertical games. Tried changing the resolution to the lowest settings and turning off all overlays/shaders but makes no difference. Also seeing a warning message on the bottom left of the screen: "Lowering on HDMI with explicit settings (CEA Mode 1)."

The mame romset I'm using 0.37b5, as suggested on the github page. I've taken a step further and followed the Youtube "Easy CRLMAMEpro Tutorial" by Herb Fargus to condense this set and remove the different rom versions (World/Bootleg etc). Not sure if I have done this correctly but ended up just over 1200 titles. Scrolling through all these games now is much more managable and it generally just looks better not to have the same game displayed multiple times. I haven't tested them all but most appear to be booting up.

It's a different story with my FBA roms though as it's an old set I had unsure on the version. It's only a few gigabytes in size and unlikely to be a complete set. I've also cleaned up these roms (with CRLMAMEpro) which shrunk the total number of roms from over 600 to just over 290. I have duplicates titles across MAME and FBA. Ideally, I would love to have one version of a game under the correct working emulator instead of both. Saving time scrolling to look
for it and and to free up more storage space for other games. If anybody knows if there is a way to do is....I'm all ears as managing roms in FBA and MAME has been the most time consuming in terms of sorting and adding roms. I gave up on adding any NEO GEO games in order not to complicate this further. Plus FBA already had most of the NEO GEO titles I really wanted to play anyway.

I'm now hoping to sort out the correct resolutions across all the emulators and keep them all in their correct aspect ratio. Particuarly with MAME and FBA. They are a mess and I can see my TV continually switching resolutions. In addition, to applying the best overlays/shaders for a standard 16:9 widescreen HD television. Are there any guides or documentations on these and which overlays/shaders and correct resolutions are others using to get the best visual experience out of these games?

dankcushions

i guess you have a raspberry pi 1? in which case, maybe we need a different approach because as you say, mame4all will be faster than lr-imame4all.

if you switch back to mame4all-pi (uses the same romset so all your clrmamepro work isn't wasted!), and then edit this file:
/opt/retropie/configs/mame-mame4all/mame.cfg
and then edit this line:

# display effect postprocessing: 0 none, 1 scanlines
display_effect=0

to

# display effect postprocessing: 0 none, 1 scanlines
display_effect=1

this should give you scanlines in this emulator.
(this is as per https://github.com/RetroPie/mame4all-pi readme)

for fba, i think it's likely to be a similar story - the standalone (pifba) will be faster on a pi1:
/opt/retropie/configs/fba/fba2x.cfg

[Graphics]
DisplaySmoothStretch=1
# Display Effect: 0 none, 1 scanlines
DisplayEffect=0

to

[Graphics]
DisplaySmoothStretch=1
# Display Effect: 0 none, 1 scanlines
DisplayEffect=1

It's a different story with my FBA roms though as it's an old set I had unsure on the version. It's only a few gigabytes in size and unlikely to be a complete set. I've also cleaned up these roms (with CRLMAMEpro) which shrunk the total number of roms from over 600 to just over 290. I have duplicates titles across MAME and FBA. Ideally, I would love to have one version of a game under the correct working emulator instead of both. Saving time scrolling to look
for it and and to free up more storage space for other games. If anybody knows if there is a way to do is....I'm all ears as managing roms in FBA and MAME has been the most time consuming in terms of sorting and adding roms. I gave up on adding any NEO GEO games in order not to complicate this further. Plus FBA already had most of the NEO GEO titles I really wanted to play anyway.

yeah, this stuff is difficult with these two emulators as there's a lot of cross over. if you look at https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Managing-ROMs you can see there are already some custom .dat files that contain subsets of the roms for each system (only neogeo, no clones), that can help somewhat. eg. you could use the '(no clones, no neogeo)' to build your mame4all set in clrmame pro, and that means you won't have any of the neogeo games duplicated in fba/mame, they will only be in fba.

batman

Thanks for continuing to follow up. I appreciate it.

I'm currently running a Pi 2 with this setup. However, I am intending to move this SD card to a Pi 3 if I ever see the end of this configuration!

The good news is that I've gone back to clean up both sets of roms using the dat file you suggested. That's saved me some time as I was going to run both rom folders in software that scans that detects duplicates filenames and would then have had to then delete them manually. It's also freed up approximately 1.2GB of storage so that's a bonus as I can now put some more games in other folders. A 32GB card now doesn't seem to be as sufficient as it did a few days ago!

With the issues i'm currently having, these games overall run better with mame4all and FBA. Particularly with games that have lots of moving sprites (such as shooters). With further testing, have also found that some games were not booting at all with IR-MAME and IR-FBA. The screen would just goes black and then revert back to the game selection screen. So it appears I might just have to stick with the non libertro versions of MAME and FBA after all.

I did manage to alter the config files and got the scanlines working. I hate to picky (or ungrateful) but they appear too dominant on my TV and distract from the game visually. Though I appreciate you going to the trouble of posting the location of file and the lines required to be changed as it was a breeze to understand.

With the scanlines aside, is there at least a way to fix the overscan? I've tried enabling and disabling overscan in the additional configuration menu (and then rebooting) but it makes no difference. A good portion of the top and bottom of the screen is chopped off (most prominent in mame and FBA). I've read on the old forum that somebody else was able to fix this by editing the the "boot/config.txt" file by increasing the following amounts but mine appear to be stuck at:

#overscan_left=16
#overscan_right=16
#overscan_top=16
#overscan_bottom=16

I cannot save my file upon edits and I've tried changing the file permission too but I receive a "cannot overwrite" error message every time. I realise the importance of this file so
don't want to force any changes as breaking this configuration the last thing I want.

dankcushions

no problem :)

I did manage to alter the config files and got the scanlines working. I hate to picky (or ungrateful) but they appear too dominant on my TV and distract from the game visually.

i had the exact same complaint :)

With the issues i'm currently having, these games overall run better with mame4all and FBA. Particularly with games that have lots of moving sprites (such as shooters).

hmm, i used a raspberry pi 2 and i had very few performance issues with mame/fba. in fact, for that system i would recommend the later mame/fba cores:
lr-mame2003 (romset 0.78)
lr-fba-next (latest fba romset v0.2.97.38)
mame2003 is good as 0.78 encompasses pretty much every arcade game i'd ever want to play at full speed, with fba-next only required for a handful of specific games (like capcom cps3 games - street fighter iii, etc) that mame2003 doesn't support. on my pi2 i could run most of the cave shooters full speed.

however, having spent all that time sorting out your romsets, you might be reluctant to do that again :) however it certainly would solve your scanlines issue as there are plenty of scanline overlays available and you can adjust the opacity, or use a lightweight shader (crt-pi), which is what i do.

With the scanlines aside, is there at least a way to fix the overscan? I've tried enabling and disabling overscan in the additional configuration menu (and then rebooting) but it makes no difference. A good portion of the top and bottom of the screen is chopped off (most prominent in mame and FBA). I've read on the old forum that somebody else was able to fix this by editing the the "boot/config.txt" file by increasing the following amounts but mine appear to be stuck at:
#overscan_left=16
#overscan_right=16
#overscan_top=16
#overscan_bottom=16
I cannot save my file upon edits and I've tried changing the file permission too but I receive a "cannot overwrite" error message every time. I realise the importance of this file so
don't want to force any changes as breaking this configuration the last thing I want.

to edit that file you might need to do it via the command line and via sudo. eg
sudo nano /boot/config.txt

not sure if you realise this, but to get the overscan changes to apply, you need to move the # from the start of each line as it comments them out so the system ignores them, and also add the line
overscan_scale=1
eg:

overscan_left=-10
overscan_right=-10
overscan_top=-24
overscan_bottom=-24
overscan_scale=1

(these are the settings i use but your TV is probably different!)

batman

I've gone through some more games and found that some are just refusing to boot with IR-MAME/IR-FBA......they load perfectly fine with MAME4ALL and PIFBA. Other games continue to slow down or don't boot not in their correct aspect ratios. Regardless of overlays/shadows being on on or off - as I've tested some games with both. Perhaps its just the romsets I'm using! If I can find the 0.78 romset (so far, no luck), then I'll try MAME2003. Even better if it will eliminate FBA all-together and just have arcade games just under the one emulator. I'm going to leave this for now and get back to it at a later.

It took some trial and error but eventually got the overscan issue fixed and now have it at a configuration I can live with. (eg. For MAME, the high score in 1944: The Loop Master is now fully visible). I did try the exact same settings that you've posted but found I had to use positive numbers (without the minus symbol in the beginning) instead of negative in order to shrink the overall screen image and so I could see everything. I imagine this is well known among advance users but worth noting for those of us starting out. I ended up using "putty" to remotely access the file and change the settings in the config file. This is what I ended up with:

overscan_left=30
overscan_right=30
overscan_top=25
overscan_bottom=25
overscan_scale=1

Thanks again for being so helpful and will start a new post for any other issues- as I realise the conversation has gone slightly off topic from the original problem I had. :)

Next on the agenda, is tidying up rom names on the console emulators (removing region information and unecessary characters) which should be relatively easy and then cover art (where I'll likely run into problems again).

dankcushions

regarding speed - you may want to compare your results with those on the compatibility lists on https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Managing-ROMs

if you're getting different results from others, maybe it's a different issue. you don't have a shader on? overlays shouldn't affect performance but shaders for sure can!