Mame Logo Variations

dankcushions

@dankcushions Hi there:

Well for instance Advanced MAME 106 will not play Altered Beast but some of the other MAME builds do.

advmame is neither mame4all nor mame2003 :)

meleu

My other 2 cents: I think this discussion is more related to ES theme development than RetroPie development itself...

battlecat

@dankcushions the concept remains the same.

battlecat

@meleu

Thanks meleu. I was unsure where Retropie drew the line at what was part of it verses what was EmulationStation.

I will find a forum there and make the suggestion.

--bc

meleu

@battlecat said in Mame Variations:

I will find a forum there and make the suggestion.

I didn't mean it! :-)
This is the right forum (I guess), but this kind of request is better addressed to theme makers, such as @mattrixk , @edmaul69 , @Rookervik and others.
Or better yet, you follow the instructions in the link I have posted and DIY. This is the spirit behind the Raspberry Pi. ;-)

battlecat

@meleu Hi Meleu:

I appreciate the link. I will look into that.

The reason I posted here was because this is the area for this type of brainstorming. After all it is called:

Ideas and Development
Share your ideas and suggestions for RetroPie. You can also use this area for development discussion.

But if it isn't considered part of the RetroPie or isn't something that may be suggest then I do need to post it somewhere else.

There does seem to be a lot of resistance to this idea that each MAME build have a different graphical menu representation.

What do you think? Is this really the wrong area of the forum to post ideas and suggestions to development?

Thanks,
BC

backstander

@battlecat I think you're in the right place! I think the problem is that we didn't quite understand what you wanted :)

I think it would probably be a good idea to have differentiating logos for the various MAME emulators but this is probably more for the Theme makers and EmulationStation /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg file.

suprjami

@battlecat said in Mame Variations:

I was trying to suggest that it would be nice to have emulation station provide different MAME screen menu icons so that it would be easier to differentiate between the MAME builds.

We already decided not to do this. Sorry.

meleu

@battlecat I wanted to say pretty much what @backstander said. :-)

And I'm surprised by @suprjami response. Who are "we"? All the ES theme makers?

What I love in RetroPie is its flexibility to let the user make choices and customizations.

suprjami

@meleu As I said above, I discussed it with @BuZz on IRC sometime in the past.

If you wish to bring it up again then feel free, however be aware that it has been discussed and decided against. Unless there is a very convincing benefit for more than just the few of us in this thread, and a benefit which outweighs all the work to update existing themes and make people aware of the theming changes and introduce more theming work for future themers, it's probably unlikely to happen.

If one wishes to use two MAME versions, such as a libretro core and advmame, the arcade directory can already provide visual separation for one.

Like dank says, I also don't see the value in running any combination of mame4all/mame2003/mame2010/mame2014/mame all on the one system.

edmaul69

@meleu i have made seperate ones for my theme. :)

meleu

@suprjami Maybe you guys discussed about the default theme (Carbon), but your decision doesn't prohibit it to be done in other themes. :-)

As I said above, @UDb23 made some cool logos for the various mame versions. I think these logos fit well in the Carbon (and Simple) theme. I'm just trying to convince @battlecat to edit his es_systems.cfg and adapt the emulationstation to fit his taste.

I'm also trying to clarify that this kind of request is better addressed to ES theme makers than RetroPie developers. All the systems logos have a similar visual identity, therefore the theme makers who care about mame versions should consider this when making the logos.

I'm also trying to clarify that this forum is the right place for this kind of request, it just needs to be better described.

@battlecat would you mind to change this topic title to something like "different logos for the various mame versions"? ;-)

suprjami

@meleu said in Mame Variations:

I'm also trying to clarify that this kind of request is better addressed to ES theme makers than RetroPie developers. All the systems logos have a similar visual identity, therefore the theme makers who cares about mame versions should consider this when making the logos.

Ah, I think we are talking about slightly different things.

IIUC, you are meaning different themes for the existing directory stucture. Like one logo for roms/mame-mame4all and a different logo for roms/mame-libretro and a different logo for roms/mame-advmame. I agree that's a theming request and would be easy to do :) I would not be surprised if the default theme ends up like this one day in the future.

I was talking about making separate directories for each emulator. For example: roms/mame2003 and roms/mame2010 and roms/mame2014 and roms/advmame094 and roms/advmame14 and then theming each of those. This is what we decided not to do.

I brought it up at the time as I was testing lr-mame2010 to see how different games ran. My main motivation was that aspect ratio was broken in lr-mame2003 at the time but this has been fixed by @dankcushions so I haven't needed to touch the later versions since.

battlecat

Okay. All that discussion for something which I didn't think was all that big of a deal or that interesting.

Maybe I need to do screen-casts rather than try to type it in a forum next time. Maybe that would make my question easier to understand. I do that when I am working with programmers at a few gaming companies.

I figured that if there was a pre-configured folder for ROMs that there aught to be a separate Menu Icons for each system. I saw that MAME was being treated as one system even through there are multiple folders for different MAME builds.

I do appreciate all the constructive discussion.
--BC

Floob

@battlecat
In answer to your question about the default carbon theme, as meleu says, you can replace the images with custom version:
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/2975/svg-format-for-emulationstation/9

Or you can simply use (or create) a different theme that uses separate graphics for those systems.

battlecat

@Floob By "doing my own thing" it does not really solve that issue for anyone else who may think wow we need to be able to tell the MAMEs apart.

meleu

EUREKA!!!
I think I've found a solution to make us stop saying the same thing over and over again!! :-D

Hey @battlecat the Carbon ES theme is the default in RetroPie. The Carbon theme creator has a forum thread named Carbon Theme Suggestions. This is the perfect place to make your request!

backstander

Great job @meleu !!! :-)

caver01

In the mean time, (maybe someone suggested this and I missed it) you can just drop a dummy zip file into the respective ROM folders: 00-MAME4All.zip, 00-libretro.zip, and 00-advmame.zip for example. Of course, these won't launch anything if you select them, but they sort to the top alphabetically and at least your menus have a "header" to help you know which is which.

UDb23

@battlecat These are the logos currently available in the custom logo pack:
undefined