Sidebar only overlays?
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Thanks Everyone
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@stinkwinkerton Just created a "sidebar only" overlay for City Connection. Have a look here; it may also help you understanding required cfg files settings.
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@UDb23 Thanks, I'll check it out.
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I was looking for this too. I don't know why all overlays resize the screen. I wan't to full-fill the streen (from 4:3 to 16:9) with a beautiful borders, not do the screen small to have a useless "Power" led in the fake Game Boy screen overlay.
Something like UDb23 post here.
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@Lortropic So, I had some time to fiddle with this over the weekend. I can't say I was successful, but maybe this will give some insights to someone else for ideas on how this could be accomplished. In MY perfect world on this, there would be a single default background regardless of the orientation or scale of the game. When the game is played, the background would not be seen through it but would take up the rest of the screen area.
After examining how Floob built the MAME overlays, for testing purposes I modified one of the .cfg files in his custom overlay's directory. I changed one of the .png files to a new .png file a regular desktop background image. Happily, it worked. Sadly, it showed through the game play- but at least I knew what to do.
I then adjusted the .cfg file to change the opacity of the overlay. I was hoping that by doing this the outside border where the game wasn't being played would stay but the game would play over it. I guess OPACITY means something other than what I thought it would, because making the background have no opacity just made it disappear completely. I suspect that although from looking at it you would think the emulator is windowed, but it really isn't. So, back to the drawing board!
I sincerely wish that I could use command-line switches (and maybe you can) in MAME in particular. A few years ago I was using Hyperspin and got the artwork packs for mame in-game working pretty well, including the bezels, and as I recall I just used command line switches to say "Use Bezel art, don't scale" stuck the .zip artwork packs in the right directory, and what I got was a the bezel art and that didn't scale so the games played using all the real estate and the bezels cut off the top and bottom. Not perfect, but I'd prefer that.
I'm going to fiddle with that artwork solution using non-libretto MAME cores in retropie-- but I haven't been able to find command line switches and don't understand how to use them YET. So, if anyone has some reference materials on that I would appreciate it - especially for mame4all. -
@stinkwinkerton together with @Rion we're trying to create a way to generate overlays to 'adapt' to different resolutions. Check here.
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@stinkwinkerton I did experiment with Mame native overlay support in the past; it's quite a headache. You can find info in this thread.
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@stinkwinkerton said in Sidebar only overlays?:
@Lortropic After examining how Floob built the MAME overlays, for testing purposes I modified one of the .cfg files in his custom overlay's directory. I changed one of the .png files to a new .png file a regular desktop background image. Happily, it worked. Sadly, it showed through the game play- but at least I knew what to do.
I then adjusted the .cfg file to change the opacity of the overlay. I was hoping that by doing this the outside border where the game wasn't being played would stay but the game would play over it. I guess OPACITY means something other than what I thought it would, because making the background have no opacity just made it disappear completely. I suspect that although from looking at it you would think the emulator is windowed, but it really isn't. So, back to the drawing board!I JUST started looking into this myself, so please excuse me if I'm being overtly basic. Since I'm a graphic/web designer I thought I could make cool overlays and started researching this ever so briefly in the last week...
From what I think you're saying is you took a regular desktop background and used it as the overlay for the game, and when you said "it [the desktop background image] showed through the game play", means that you ONLY saw the desktop background (with I assume sound so you knew the game was playing underneath it), but the gameplay itself wasn't visible, correct?
If I understood that correctly, that's completely normal. Overlays are called overlays because they are laid OVER the screen area of the game (when I say "screen", I mean the screen area is what you would see on your 4:3 ratio CRT Tube TV in an arcade game cabinet for example). So if a solid image is used (with no area for the screen cut out to peek through), you'll only see that image and not the game itself. What all this opacity stuff is, is basically setting up where you want that hole made in the graphic for the screen to show through (which generally you want the center part of the image cut out for the 4:3 ratio screen to show through - with solid graphics/artwork on the left and right side filling up that normally-blank/black-space our modern 16:9 ratio widescreen TV's/Monitors have on the sides). -- hope this makes sense so far--
How they do that cut-out part of the image is use a graphics program like Adobe Photoshop or GIMP (which is a free program), and by exclusively using PNG images. They use PNG images because it's a file format which can have transparency in select areas of the image. So for the solid left and right sidebars, you want them to be 100% Opaque (Opacity 100%) and NOT see-through in any way; whereas for the central 4:3 game screen area, you want that to be completely see-through (Opacity 0%) so you can see the game itself while you're playing it. --- This is also why I would bet that on the back-end programming you would want to leave the Opacity at 100% most of the time (since you want the PNG graphic itself to dictate what's transparent - and NOT the programming on the back end to tell you what is and isn't transparent).
Some of the pre-built overlays I've seen go even further. They're basically photos of the actual arcade machine cabinet (with screen/game area centered in the photo), then they make the 4:3 screen area maybe 10% opaque (so not quite 100% see-through), because they wanted just a little bit of the scratched plexi-glass (of the original arcade machine) to show through and give you a more 'realistic' playing experience.
Anyway, I'm going to try this out myself when I get a chance...it does seem pretty darn complicated since you have to match up programming on the back-end of RetroPie with some graphic know-how (which I'm more than proficient in Photoshop, but programming not so much). If anybody needs a graphic cut-out feel free to contact me - it'll take me literally 10 seconds (now if I could only find the Private Message function of this darn forum....)
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Well, that helps a lot. I was hoping that the opacity would work differently. So far I've been stumbling through it. I'm still going to look at how to use command line options for MAME since that's where I would like most of my overlays and where I play the most games. Thank you for the education, I genuinely appreciate it.
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@Dochartaigh So, really, it would be cool if we could do an underlay instead of an overlay. Seems a lot simpler don't you think?
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@stinkwinkerton said in Sidebar only overlays?:
@Dochartaigh So, really, it would be cool if we could do an underlay instead of an overlay. Seems a lot simpler don't you think?
You have to remember that overlays are biggest for MAME games I think, and if you remember back to the arcades there were many, well, quite literal "overlays" (over top of the screen) with graphics that overlap parts of the screen themselves (like asteroids, a sword, shield, little monster creatures, etc.). Even old CRT TV's had that little part of trim that commonly went around the edge of the tube (which is why we sometimes see weird stuff on the edges of old console game ROMS - since the very edge of the screen was covered up by plastic moulding way back when).
http://www.arcadeshop.com/pics/donkey-kong-bezel.jpg
http://www.classicarcadegame.rentals/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Asteroids.png
http://1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/donkeykongcrt2.jpgThis also lets them get creative with the "I'm actually looking through dirty plexiglass at the screen just like back in 1981" - which I personally don't get, but whatever.
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