kritvichu

I build an arcade cabinet using my old PC, HP Elite 8300 SFF. It runs on an i5 3470 with an onboard graphic. The case is very small and equiped with a HP proprietary 240W PSU. I can't upgrade a PSU and finding a low profile GPU for this very small case is not worth much. I previously used Retroarch because it was light and had a good CRT shader using low resource intensive on GPU. Unfortunately, I ran into a problem with controller mapping conflict between arcade and consoles. So, I like to keep Retroarch for all consoles related and run a base MAME64 on arcade instead. I tried to configure the latest base MAME64 v0.219 to do a CRT shader like Retroarch with the least load on GPU as possible. Doing research, I know I can't run HSLS for sure and look like BGFX is the way to go. I followed this forum from Lordmonkus; https://forums.launchbox-app.com/topic/33564-mame-bgfx-shaders-tutorial/ Once I applied; "bgfx_screen_chains crt-geom" I noticed the gameplay and sound got stutter a lot. Though I like the graphic output, the gameplay got too much stutter. Once I removed bgfx, thing got back to normal. I guess it was too much for an onboard graphic to handle even it should be very low intensive on GPU. 1.Could anyone suggest me a base MAME64 version that can apply CRT shader for a very weak GPU? 2.Is there any other way to apply CRT shader that use the least GPU power?

Thank you very much, Lordmonkus, for answering my questions.

Look like it is mame.ini is the place to configure the rom path. I got more NOOB questions if you not mind. As I recall, some roms not worked correctly in the past but worked fine on the later version. When I tried to import the arcade rom files, I did not provide the dat file of the complete rom set I used. Then, there was checkbox options to filter fruits, casino, mature content, and many others. I am curious how it is possible. 1.Without providing the dat file, does Launchbox have a built-in database to detect the version of romset I use and apply filters accordingly? 2.Would this be possible if I use this filter option to help me get the rom set I need and move them to a specific folder I want to keep later on?

Thank you, Lordmonkus I'll check out the video and follow along. I have another question if you not mind. The game won't load if I not put roms inside the 'rom' folder under MAME. I like to create a rom folder at a specific location. Is it possible to point where to look for roms?

Greeting, I'm new to Launchbox. I previously had some hand on experiences on MAMEUI and Retroarch on PC. Launchbox is my very first front end to use, so I have no experience to compare with any. I heard lots of people highly recommended this and here I come. I plan to upgrade to Bigbox once I am able to figure out what it is capable of and whether it really suit my need or not. I'm not sure how this forum operates. Some places they not friendly open to a newbie to ask general questions and always point to do research before posting. I choose to ask in this NOOB forum. I hope my questions not irritate or bother anyone. If it does, please let me know. Currently, I have 0.218 non-merged romsets at 120GB. If I know the exact roms I like to play, it should be easy to trim the size down big time, but the problem is I don't know yet. So, I need to try out one-by-one. Because of this huge size, my hard drive is almost at limit. There is not much room for CHD and any software list for me. Deciding to switch to either merged or split set is a dilemma for me. I don't know which clones I should keep or delete. I guess I should keep them all for now and figure out later on which one to keep. I guess doing merged set should be easy to manage because all the clones are kept in the parent rom. I read the previous posts in this forum. Look like merged romset was not compatible with Launchbox, but that posts mentioned in 2018. Now is 2020. I am not quite sure if it is still the same. I would be appreciate if someone could enlighten me by answering these questions; 1. Between merged or split romsets, which works best and most comparability? 2.Can Launchbox fully support a merged romsets? If yes, how can I add the clone games? (The only way I figured out was to rename the parent file name to the clone name. That is too hectic and redundant. It is not different from using a non-merged set, but even worse, if I go this route. Also, people said to do a right click on games to choose either the parent or clones to load. I don't see any option. My merged test game is Puckman. I not see pacman or any other clone names to choose. My Launchbox should be the latest version as I just downloaded 10 days ago) 3.Another thing off topic but I really want to understand how Launchbox works and the logic behind. I imported the roms under "Arcade" platform and associated it with MAME64. I was curious to see the game still launched or not if I intentionally moved it to other platform. So, I tested moving the game to associated with "Super Nintendo" platform instead. I could see the game moved from Arcade to Super Nintendo platform as expected. The game still used MAME for emulator and emulator application path pointed to MAME64.exe, but the only game Associated Platform was "Arcade" (I didn't add Super Nintendo in here). How come I could still launch the game when there was no associated platform pointing to Super Nintendo? Does it means Launchbox not care about associate platform and leave the job to the emulator to run? If so, when I used Retroarch and pointed associated platform "Super Nintendo" to other core on purpose, not snes9x_libreto, it would not run. Why? I thought Launchbox not care and leave Retroarch to figure what core to use. But in this scenario, it looked like Launchbox tell Retroarch to use a specific core. Sorry if my question sounds confusing. I try to elaborate as much possible. I just want to understand the logic why Launchbox not care about MAME when no platform is associated with but it is so picky on Retroarch? Thank you.