Neo Geo X Build

ruckage

@ruckage Are you building the bartop from scratch? Or will you use a kit?

I'm doing it from scratch, I've been using sketchup to make some plans. Kits are good and pretty well priced (especially when you consider the time and tools needed to do it from scratch) but there wasn't anything available that exactly met my needs. It will be a fun challenge anyway.

edmaul69

@ruckage nice to see one of these docks used for this. Super awesome. I am super jelly of your theme. I am a huge neo geo fan and absolutely love this.

edmaul69

@ruckage you can use a vertical monitor on retropie. You should also add cps3 roms. On a certain site i downloaded all the final burn alpha capcom roms. Cps 1-3 and pre cps capcom roms. You dont need the hard drive files for cps3 when using lr-fba-next. (or whatever it might be called now)

ruckage

@edmaul69 said in Neo Geo X Build:

@ruckage nice to see one of these docks used for this. Super awesome. I am super jelly of your theme. I am a huge neo geo fan and absolutely love this.

Thanks, I'm a big Neo Geo fan myself. The theme will only cover Neo-Geo and possibly CPS1/CPS2 but i'd be happy to share it along with the customised wheel images once it's done if anyone is interested in making something similar.
Speaking of Neo Geo, have you seen there is an official visual history book being released soon? I think I may order it once pre-orders are available.

edmaul69

@ruckage read my last post. We posted at the same time. No i have not seen the book. I will have to look for it.

TMNTturtlguy

@edmaul69 yes, you can use a vertical monitor setup on retropie, however ES does not play well with that orientation. I had a terrible time getting ES themes to display properly in that orientation. What have you done to get that to work out nicely?

ruckage

@edmaul69 said in Neo Geo X Build:

@ruckage you can use a vertical monitor on retropie. You should also add cps3 roms. On a certain site i downloaded all the final burn alpha capcom roms. Cps 1-3 and pre cps capcom roms. You dont need the hard drive files for cps3 when using lr-fba-next. (or whatever it might be called now)

I meant to say CPS3 as well - can't miss out on Red Earth and SFiii.
Regarding vertical monitor, I though that just used the built in raspbian rotation which is reaalllly slow.

edmaul69

@ruckage i havent done it so i didnt know it was really slow. I made a mame cabinet out of a metal 29" neo candy neo geo cabinet. This was my modded xbox i used to use back in the day.

ruckage

@edmaul69 Very nice, I like it. Is that woodgrain effect? What does the LCD display do?

Yeah, unless things have changed when you rotate the screen on a raspberry pi it suffers from slowdown, I tried it in the past and it was really bad (I believe it uses cpu rather than gpu to do the rotation).

It's not an issue for the emulators though as they offer the option to rotate the games however you like but sadly ES is strictly landscape which is shame.

@jdrassa has said he may look into adding the ability to rotate graphics, text etc. in EmulationStation which would make it possible to create portrait specific themes (though the menu's would still be the wrong way around).

edmaul69

@ruckage yes it is a wood grain decal. The lcd would say "please insert $.25" If you went to play a video or dvd it would give you all the info you got on a dvd player. If you went into a game it would display info on it. You will notice that there is black round circle on the right side of the faceplate. That is the dvd remote dongle. I had a relay rigged up that if you plugged a controller in the 4th player port, it would disable the dvd dongle. The huge eject button is an actual arcade pushbutton. Very modified to fit in the little space.

ruckage

Having some trouble with the metadata for Neo Geo, I've tried several different scraping sources but the number of players is inaccurate (most show every game as being 2 player). I know most games on Neo Geo were 2 player but there are several 1 player games as well as at least one 4 player game. Anyone know of an accurate list of Neo-Geo games that shows supported players to make it easier to edit the metadata myself?

meleu

@ruckage said in Neo Geo X Build:

I'm working on a theme for it

Man, please please please release that theme. It'll look just perfect on my arcade:

neogeo

I use the @Rookervik 's Neo Geo video splash and it looks awesome. With your theme it would be nothing but perfect!

Also, how can we support your work here? Your contributions are really cool.

ruckage

@meleu said in Neo Geo X Build:

Man, please please please release that theme. It'll look just perfect on my arcade:
I use the @Rookervik 's Neo Geo video splash and it looks awesome. With your theme it would be nothing but perfect!

Also, how can we support your work here? Your contributions are really cool.

Wow, that cab looks great - really jealous. Did you build it yourself?

I'll be happy to release the theme once done, as I said it will be limited to neogo/capcom but I could probably add a generic arcade system as well. For your cab though I guess the Neogeo system style alone would be ideal. Also the wheel/marquee images are customized to add that border around them. I can probably do a complete arcade wheel set though if needed as I have a photoshop batch setup to do it, it will just take a while to process.

I've worked a bit more on the theme , now added a small amount of metadata (rating, players, release date). To be honest players is a little redundant as virtually all neogeo games are 2 player but it looks cool and will be useful for other arcade systems (notice I've used a little trick to show icons for the players rather than a number).

0_1496787081856_neogeo meta.png

ruckage

Added the Capcom system, I decided to have just a single system that covers CPS 1,2, and 3. I've also updated the selector bar as the latest version of ES has image support for the selector bar.
I removed the release date metadata as it didn't look right, ideally I would just show the year of release and have it centre aligned but unfortunately neither of those things are possible. It leaves a bit of a gap though so I will probably put something else in it's place.

A Former User

Release date looked weird. Good call taking it out.

Theme looks fantastic. 👍

TMNTturtlguy

Incredible work, you are very talented! Can i but you to share with me how you got the players to act like the stars? I have not looked into it and thought maybe that was hard coded into ES so i just replace the stars graphic with my graphic under the same file name. I might steel your coding if you don't mind?!?

ruckage

@TMNTturtlguy said in Neo Geo X Build:

Incredible work, you are very talented! Can i but you to share with me how you got the players to act like the stars? I have not looked into it and thought maybe that was hard coded into ES so i just replace the stars graphic with my graphic under the same file name. I might steel your coding if you don't mind?!?

You're the first person to ask how I did the players :)

It's actually a special font I made. I figured that players in the xml are always represented by a number so I just made a font where each number shows the relevant number of player icons. This specific font goes up to 4 players but I can add up to 9 (I doubt many games go over 8 players.)
If you had a specific symbol that you'd like to represent the player icons then I'd be happy to make a player font for you.

TMNTturtlguy

@ruckage That is genius! Let me noodle on it a bit and get back to you! I am leaving for a work trip in an hour so I don't have much time until this weekend. Thanks for the offer and I will let you know if i come up with anything.

ruckage

@TMNTturtlguy
No problem. If you do decide you'd like me to make the font you'd just need to find a single colour symbols as obviously the fonts don't support full colour, any format for the image would be fine as I can easily vectorize it.

edmaul69

@ruckage are you going to release this with all the graphics? Not sure how i would get the title logos. Do they scrape from somewhere or are you creating them?