Vertical MAME games appear upside down.

ramsom11

Hey all,

New Retropie setup here running on a Pi 4 inside a 3-Sided cocktail cabinet (player 1 and player 2 play on opposite sides for vertical games and both players sit next to each other on the 3rd side for horizontal games)

Horizontal games run fine, everything looks good. However facing a bit of a problem with vertical games. I have enabled TATE mode in retroarch which flips the vertical games on their side like it should, however it flips it to the wrong side (facing player 2's side instead of player 1's side). None of the retroarch menus have an option for rotation like the internet suggests.

I did discover an option for rotation in the retroarch.cfg file, set it to flip 180° which fixed my problem for vertical games, but now my horizontal games are upside down! Not sure what to do from here, I could swap the control panels between the sides and just make the other side player 1's side (the player 1 side has the start buttons) but I'd like to avoid that if possible. Also trying to avoid individual game configs (theres over a thousand games).

The core is lr-mame2003-plus.

Thorr69

@ramsom11

Use game-specific override configs and not the the main retroarch.cfg file.

Every game is built different and will have its own rotational needs. The orientation of the screen will be based on how the original cabinet was built. As such, there is no single setting that will cover all your needs in one shot. The solution is to make individual override configs.

So, an example of this solution goes as follows. First, Tate mode needs to be ON as part of the standard config for lr-mame2003-plus (open up the config menu, set tate mode to on, then save it as a Core Override). Now, let's say this is for Ms Pacman. Standard rom name for Ms Pacman is "mspacman.zip" and you should have that file in your roms/arcade folder. With that in mind, do this:

create text file called mspacman.zip.cfg in the SAME folder where the ROM exists.
Edit that text file and make it contain the following lines:

allow_video_rotate = false
video_rotation = 2

Use whatever number you need to for video rotation. 1,2, or 3 which are basically 90,180,270 degrees.
3) save the file and fire up the ROM to see the results.
4) rinse and repeat for every game you need. The number of vertical games isn't terribly high (around 70-80 iirc) so it's not a big deal to make configs as necessary.

Personally, I made configs for all the vertical games and keep a backup of the files in storage so that I can just copy them over to new installations as necessary. I have a rotating monitor and I just turn the screen for vertical games when I play them. I have my configs rotate each game as necessary to match my monitor.

I've given this answer in this thread: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/26289/tate-setting-causing-games-to-be-double-rotated
See also this thread: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/30135/what-s-the-correct-aspect-ratio-i-should-be-using-as-a-config-for-a-happ-vision-pro-19-lcd-arcade-monitor-for-mame-horizontal-vertical-games
and also this thread: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/5919/lr-mame2003-rom-specific-rotation-aspect-issues

barbudreadmon

@ramsom11 I think MAME2003-Plus's TATE rotation might indeed be "incorrect" if you compare it to MAME standalone, it should probably be reported to @mahoneyt944 (one of its devs).

My personal recommendation would be to implement 2 TATE modes to be sure to accomodate everyone, that's what i did in FBNeo (TATE and TATE alternate in the Vertical Mode core option).

I really don't think being forced into creating hundreds of game-specific overrides for this is the reasonable answer here...

mahoneyt944

This sounds like there's a mismatch with the physical layout of the cabinet. Would you be able to use tate mode and just swap the p1 and p2 inputs?

There could be an internal rotation issue, but it would be hard to verify without seeing more of your setup and how you have the monitor rotated and controls routed.

Thorr69

@barbudreadmon said in Vertical MAME games appear upside down.:

I really don't think being forced into creating hundreds of game-specific overrides for this is the reasonable answer here...

It's not even close to that. It's about 70.

barbudreadmon

@Thorr69 said in Vertical MAME games appear upside down.:

It's not even close to that. It's about 70.

I'm kind of surprised MAME2003-Plus "only" supports 70 romsets that are vertical games, FBNeo has 2429 of them.
Either way, creating 70 overrides for this still seems like a pain.

Ashpool

@Thorr69 Mh, just filtered the xml of mame2k3plus for vertical roms and I got 1584 entries.

Thorr69

@Ashpool said in Vertical MAME games appear upside down.:

@Thorr69 Mh, just filtered the xml of mame2k3plus for vertical roms and I got 1584 entries.

You're right. I just realized I only gave two craps about 70 of them.

Somewhere in the message board is an archive with a complete set of vertical configs premade. I have the zip file here in my dropbox and it contains 1462 cfg files. It's as easy as extracting this archive to the roms directory. I don't really have a place to host the file, so I can't immediately provide it. Perhaps a search of the filename will yield the original thread:
RetroPie Vert Orient Configs (mame2003 v0.78).zip

Oh look! Here it is!
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/post/39029
(But it appears to be dead...)
Ah friggit... I'll put it in my public dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dyfldfmc9mfxctv0yi72x/RetroPie-Vert-Orient-Configs-mame2003-v0.78.zip?rlkey=n6lq2lsulbznbezgvoymf3gj5&dl=0

barbudreadmon

Well, the OP should just move to MAME current tbh, not only it has support for TATE in both directions, but it probably also has better support for cocktail mode (i highly doubt all cocktail fixes from the past 22 years were backported to MAME2003+).

As for FBNeo, it is not suitable at all for cocktail setups : some games had their 2P mode and cocktail mode tied together, and ended up being un-cocktail-ified so that 2 players could play them without requiring a cocktail setup.