@dankcushions Thanks. I prefer shaders, as the zFast gives you a nice touch of bilinear with scanlines. I found the curved version was slowing things down, but when I went with standard, it was fine. I guess that little extra processing step to warp the edges was just a little too much. When I remove that, things work pretty well (and look great).

@Rion Thanks for the Feedback...
But as this was a rushed release, because of me trying to be helpfull, it has taken me a while to come up with the next step...

The VPCalc script itself was ready in the time I opened this topic, but me and readmes are only friends in context of me reading them, not writing such.... (and then, in (CP)2020 CP2077 came to be)... well, as life is passing by, instead of having the filter scripted and at least in beta stage by now, I may have that one ready in 202101/02 ... here we are with the viewport calculator: Project VPC: VPCalc at least. ...

As I had to use used some markdown/html patchwork to create the readme which is, so far and for now, working on git, but unusable here.... I am only providing the link for now...

Edit: And a look at the UI:
VPCalc-UI

Besides me living in Night City at the moment, the UI for the filtering App/Script is in its alpha and ready to be populated/used by/with further scripting.... sneak preview:

VPC_DatFilter.png

By the way, could you make a proper release. I mean, with the readme, update link and all. Imagine few years later opening the zip files and wonder what it was.

@m2306 - I was thinking about this over the weekend and there might be another way but requires a bit more work. I don't think it would be to much really and only initially. If you're set and good to go then no worries.

Take CPS games for example. Basically if you had a list of parent ROM names in a text file with one per line like so:

... 1941 avsp ddsom dino sf2 etc.

With a list like this it would be pretty easy to pull parent ROMs only or parent + clones.

The advantage being is you only need to track parent ROMs and not clones as they are automatically linked to the parent.

So basically by listing the 70 or 80 CPS games you could generate new DATs after an update with very little changes after the initial setup.

I don't believe parent ROMs change to often and if they do it would be only a matter of changing the name in the list like sf2 to sfi2 for example. The clones will be automatically linked.

The clones make up a much larger part of the games list by several hundred so it's nice that you only need to track the parent.

I think a lot of filter lists and batch files that copy ROMs are based of specific DATs in time and are outdated with the next release whereas this would allow you to be a bit more dynamic with new releases and generate a current correct ROM set.

You could also stack lists to make a master list. Like combine the CPS and Neo Geo list or CPS, Neo Geo plus favorites, etc.

I'm not sure of that makes sense but I believe it would work fairly well.

@TimZett said in General questions on applying shaders (video filters):

The vertical shader I just took for testing purpose, because it shows something significant ;-)
Currently I'm using the bilinear (blur) shader since I find the Atari games in all emulators way too blocky.

I use CRT + smoother for everything. Then again, the only stuff I really play on RetroPie is SNES and PS1.

@TimZett I think @dankcushions posted a link (maybe in another topic) to the Shader docs in Retropie's documentation - https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Shaders-and-Smoothing/.

I had the same issue as I'm building a system for my 7yo nephew and I bumped into this thread. What I ended up doing was using Excel's powerful filtering features to filter on the unwanted games.
Specifically I did the below:

Found the gamelist.xml document for each respective emulator. In my case this was the location: \\RetroPie\roms\arcade\gamelist.xml I opened the file in Excel (2013+) as an XML document. I filtered on the "genre" filter for all the games that I wanted to delete
17b67adc-af4d-426a-bd5c-c0161b1db20b-image.png I grabbed the filenames of both the games and the media I had scraped and I wrote a fomula that creates the proper delete command like so: =IF(ISERR("del "& RIGHT(Sheet3!G1,LEN(Sheet3!G1)-2)),"","del "& RIGHT(Sheet3!G1,LEN(Sheet3!G1)-2))

e165a2d1-952d-437c-b57f-1c8667d72423-image.png
5) I mapped RetroPie as a network drive on my computer then
6) Opened DOS and ran the delete commands from the DOS terminal

To then rebuild the gamelist.xml document download and run this tool
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/11074/a-gamelist-xml-cleaner-tool/2

@markwkidd thanks for your updates, one of these days I'd like to delve into romlister to filter out game types. I know floob had done some in the past but for the few people who filter Mame rom lists might be a useful tool.

Yep i tried but there is registration probleme on their forum. I'm blocked

I am using a pi zero in combination with a 3.5 inch monitor via composite output of the pi
The emulator used is lr-gpsp