is MAME usable in a cocktail cabinet

riverdealer

I am very new to Retropie...i am in the early stages of building a cocktail cabinet and am considering using Retropie with Raspberry PI as opposed to a desktop/laptop. my first question is there a way to orient the screen display to be vertical as opposed to horizontal. the next is will Retropie allow for screen flipping for player 2. last question, is there a way to have a dual/split display (like punchout) where each display would face one player/side (like MAME32 can do).

mitu

Sure, it's possible

You can rotate the screen through the boot configuration file - /boot/config.txt- see the reference file here.

Flipping for P2 should be available (Tate mode) in the emulator - I know mame2003 supports it (more details here).

For the dual/split display - I don't know if it's supported in the Mame versions available in RetroPie.

caver01

@riverdealer YES. Check my signature/profile for details about my 4 player cocktail cab. Arcade games that support this design in real life can do the flipping if you configure the virtual DIP switch setting which is emulated by MAME.

One catch: Emulation Station is setup for landscape, so if you intend to boot up and control game selections from a vertical position, your front end is the wrong orientation. That works great on my system because I have a three-sided cabinet with controls along the horizontal side, but I have all of the classics configured to play from he vertical ends in cocktail mode with screen flipping..

I have read threads here that you can probably find where others have built vertical cabinets and setup Attract Mode in place of Emulation Station as their default front end. I guess AM has a theme for vertical setups.

Finally, I would avoid the temptation to configure the Raspberry Pi to run with a 90 degree rotation in config.txt. While this may work, there is supposedly a severe performance hit in the games when the whole OS is rotated that you don’t get when MAME has them running full screen vertical.

riverdealer

@caver01 - Thank you very much for your response...I can live with a horizontal menu as long as i can play games vertically...one other question, if you don't have a 3 sided cabinet, can MAME display a 'split' screen with each side facing the 2 vertical players...this is an option with MAME32 but since i don't have the hardware yet i was wondering if there was a setting for that so i wouldn't need a third side

caver01

@riverdealer If you are using a Raspberry Pi, not the versions of MAME you probably want to run. I am pretty sure the more recent versions of MAME can do this, but remember, because the Pi has limited performance, we are primarily using MAME that is from 15 years ago. You should check the docs. RetroPie can have a lot of different versions installed. I bet there are nine or more versions of MAME you could run and one of them might do the mirroring you describe. However, it probably won’t have all of the features you want or the performance you need.

riverdealer

@mitu
Thank you again for your assistance…I like your 3-sided cocktail cabinet design. I was curious though…I am currently using EG STARTS joystick and button set along with a USB trackball. This currently uses 3 USB ports for my computer. I read the Raspberry PI only has 4 ports. If I were to make a 3-sided cabinet, that would require more than 4 ports. How were you able to overcome this issue? Are you able to use a ‘4-way USB splitter with PI or did you do the wiring differently? Thank you for your assistance

mitu

@riverdealer I don't have a cocktail setup - @caver01 does, one of the links I posted is his post - but you can use an USB hub to have more than 4 port. In your case, I guess you'll need 9 ports ? I think there are panel with Joystick + Buttons tied to only 1 USB encoder, so you might be able to reduce the number of needed ports to only 6 (i.e. 3 encoders and 3 trackballs).

riverdealer

@mitu - thank you...i wasn't sure if you could use a 4 way hub...i most likely will begin with a 2 way vertical cocktail and upgrade at a future date

caver01

@riverdealer I handle all four of my primary player inputs with an Ultimarc IPAC4 controller interface. This beast handles four players with joysticks and 8 buttons each plus coin 1234 and start 1234. That’s a lot of inputs Ann on a single USB port. Of course, if you look at my build post here you also see that I am only using 6 buttons for the horizontal player positions and just four for the verticals. I then have a bunch of admin buttons for exit, pause, volume, etc. which all run from the IPAC. Then, I added two spinners and a trackball using two more USB ports, some LED lighting on another USB, speaker power on another, a spare input routed to a port on the back. I have a USB hub.

dankcushions

@riverdealer said in is MAME usable in a cocktail cabinet:

@caver01 - Thank you very much for your response...I can live with a horizontal menu as long as i can play games vertically...one other question, if you don't have a 3 sided cabinet, can MAME display a 'split' screen with each side facing the 2 vertical players...this is an option with MAME32 but since i don't have the hardware yet i was wondering if there was a setting for that so i wouldn't need a third side

yes you can do this. see https://forums.libretro.com/t/retropie-cocktail-shader/5860

caver01

@dankcushions I forgot about that! I have never tried it, but it might be interesting to try.

grant2258

good luck running them shaders full speed on a pi :)

riverdealer

@caver01 - Thank you for your help...basically with the IPAC, you just run the wires yourself instead of the wiring set with EG STARTS kit