Has anyone made Retropie artwork files for Game And Watch games?

JimmyFromTheBay

To be clear, I'm talking about the Nintendo G&W titles prefixed with "gnw_", eg gnw_octopus, that run in lr-mess-cmd, NOT the ones run by lr-gw. (Many of the latter already run with artwork, but almost all of them look dreadful.)

They currently look like this:

But obviously I want them to look like this, as they do in MAME on my desktop PC:

I have all the MAME art assets from here:

https://www.progettosnaps.net/artworks/artworks_files.php?romname=gnw&description=

and I can easily put those together into single Retropie-compatible overlay images like this:

But while I've made literally hundreds of Retropie overlays, I cannot figure how the transparency element works (I've got a caveman version of Paint Shop Pro here), so I end up with something like this (photos of my monitor):

...where to avoid having a giant bright white box around the play area, I have to turn the opacity so high that you can barely see the gameplay (and there's still a white box anyway).

Now, I could spend a zillion hours finding the docs and then being completely unable to comprehend them as usual. But before I raise my blood pressure to dangerously high levels and waste a big slab of my life trying to work it out and then doing it for 48 separate games, has anyone done it already and made the files conveniently downloadable somewhere?

jamrom2

@jimmyfromthebay

What is in the center of the screen now in your overlay? White or black? It needs to be like a very light grey. Making the "crystal" look of the LCD display might be tough though.

I haven't tried the GW games, but I've made a ton of MAME, and other TV like bezels for many of my Libtrettro based emulators.

Try that... and I'll play along with it as well, see what I come up with..

jamrom2

@jimmyfromthebay said in Has anyone made Retropie artwork files for Game And Watch games?:

gnw_octopus

I see what you mean. I went so far as to cut out the graphics from the "no shadow" background and put it on a near all-black background. It looks horrible.

Normally, this would be a no brainer... usually very easy to make. But for whatever reason, I can't get this to look any better than what you did already.

Not sure how this one gets done right.

Folly

@jimmyfromthebay

Due to this thread I found that there was a mistake in my script and I fixed it.
So now it can create lr-mess overlays for gnw from the mame artwork.

I think it's not what you are looking for, though.
It is still an overlay and transparency is always used and not perfect.

I have tried the combination lr-mess with mame artwork but never had any result,
because then the game just won't load.

Perhaps you both can find a way.
It would really be nice if it could work like you want to.