Headrush69

You can't tell from the photo, but the original tray is angled now so the steering wheel is very comfortable when sitting. (A few touches left to do, like enclosing analog flight stick under panel.)

They both look impressive but as always specs alone never tell the entire story and it will come down to other factors, exclusives for each, pricing, real time performance. The push for ray-tracing is great, but if performance suffers using it, it might change some people's opinions not understanding the differences. Since both systems are suppose to offer good backwards compatibility to previous systems, my guess is for the most part those in MS camp will stay with MS, and the same for the Sony camp.

I'm really conflicted on which I prefer. Even the software core at 2x internal resolution with a shader looks pretty good. If you go nuts with the hardware settings, you loose the feel for the real PS1 experience and you might as well run the PS2 version of the game. (Seems so many were done on both) I'll probably end with a mix of running different games with different renderers using beetle_hw_psx. At this point in my build it's more about reducing the number of cores/emulators for long term maintenance. It seems from the libretro github pages for those cores that the software only core is a stripped down version as they do share common commit and issue pages.

I've tried to find answers on Retroarch's forums and discord several times but never got any concrete answers. Anyone know 100% sure that the beetle_psx core is exactly the same as using the beetle_hw_psx core with the software renderer? Why maintain 2 cores then? Only thing I would summize would be that the beetle_psx core might be lighter on resources with the other renderers removed for more restricted hardware like the Pi. Also, anyone have experience using the PSX bios from the PSP with their emulators? From what I've read this Sony tweeked BIOS has improvements which helps and optimizes many games under emulation.

At least for a cabinet setup, I think one of the greatest benefits of the iPac is the shift key functionality for admin functions. You don't have to have extra buttons on the cabinet where users can touch them, but you have an extra 23 key strokes to access functionality as needed and hidden away. I no longer need/keep a keyboard with my cabinet and was able to re-configure my rec room master cabinet keyboard drawer into a mount for my steering wheel without being in the way of the top mounted controls.

This might help: Borderless Gaming with Steam Basically, you add you application or window name to the BorderlessGaming app, it watches for that windows/app and switches automatically.

dragon57, really appreciate your work on the Bezel Project, nice to have bezels that maximize screen size and look great. When the installer installs bezels, does it check for existing bezels or just dumps all of them for said system? The reason I ask is because for MAME I already had bezels for a lot of games, but some where hand added from Mr. Do's collection that included artwork that have dynamic elements, lamps, gear shifters, etc. I wouldn't want to run and update of Bezel Installer and over write those. I know there are ways around that, just curious if the installer checked.

The one caveat to this method is it can take Windows some time to recognize the new device when you change. It's a personal preference and decision but for me with a cabinet, waiting 20 seconds or so for Windows to change is a poor user experience. I keep my iPac4 in keyboard board as it provides extra flexibility and controller order stability that would be much harder if using XInput mode. I can keep both my arcade controls and XBOX 360 controllers activate at the same time and users can use either or. There are a few minor gotchas for emulators like Phoenix for 3DO and Atari Jaguar, but easy to work around.

You likely want the above. This is just letting MAME you want to use those devices. The previous entries that sundogak posted tell MAME which one of your devices to use when emulating those devices in MAME. If you have multiple mouse devices, like a spinner, trackball, mouse, Windows normally treats them as one single device. In that case you want to use multimouse 1 and within MAME, each device will appear as a different mouse device.

Generally it runs and stays resident in memory waiting for one of the applications you have set and than does it's thing. (Generally you set it to start automatically on startup) Is there a reason to start it manually? If you start it manually and the next application/emulator etc starts before its completely started and ready to scan for windows, you could run into timing issues.

Just tried it and no luck.

It was a proposed idea for preventing cheating. If a game doesn't have a changed cfg, the user hasn't changed dip switches in game that could give them an advantage. Edit: MAME auto generates a cfg on game run even if you DON'T change any settings. So to implement checking you either would have to checksum the file against a default "clean" version, or have to parse the specific items in the cfg.

Could be but it would really take looking at all the games that support high scores and seeing how many are customized and could be changed to a less optimal more general layout. You would also see issues with people that use multi-mouse support in a game like Marble madness. If you assume a default mouse1 devices, and someone with a cabinet has a spinner or trackball, it's very likely that device is mouse2 and they have a changed cfg. Lots of scenarios like that is well. Only method I could see would be building a database of specific settings that could affect games. Usually that just lives, and bonuses. The problem with that is someone would have to curate that and that's a lot of work. IMHO, it's a cool community thing and if someone is going to cheat for some type of gratification, so be it. You have also implemented weekly hi scores, so you can always look to that more for fun. Highly unlikely "cheaters" are going to keep playing every week to maintain their "status"

Agreed. That just seems like a lot of work for minimal return. As neil9000 said, it's more a fun thing than a competition. I wouldn't want to have to choose which version to use thinking "OK, i'm playing for scores now" Just imagine the sleepless nights I would have if I broke a high score and I was using the "fun" MAME and not the the high score version. Too much anxiety for this old heart. ?

Pretty much yes. I have a 2 rows of 3 buttons, and a 3rd row offset of 2 buttons. In MAME general control, they are assigned buttons 1 - 8 in logical order, top to bottom, left to right. A fighting game might use the first six buttons, but a game like 1942 uses only 2. So if you stick to the general MAME control layout, in 1942 the user would have to use the first two buttons holding their hands over the other buttons. With a custom cfg, the bottom row of 2 buttons is used and much better ergonomically. Jason, for me, if cfg scanning is what is needed it wouldn't bother me.

Since I'm using a 8 button arcade control panel, ever game I play with MAME I've created a custom cfg layout to best match the layout of each game. I'd rather just not worry about the high scores rather than messing around with something like that, but that's just my opinion.

The high score for that one is listed at 1,439,050. I guess we have some players better than both of us using LB.

I can understand why someone might think that as some of the scores seem to have overly high scores to others, but if someone is in doubt, they can look over at Twin Galaxies who have official record score for arcade games and there are some pretty incredible achievements. Example: Dig Dug high score over 5 million points. The guy played for over 11 hours straight! The issue with different dip switch settings for lives, hardiness, etc will make comparisons difficult, but this is also just for fun.

In Big Box settings, define a key for change view and then you can cycle through the views in the theme. Video is usually the last one. You have the option of having Big Box, prioritize theme videos over game play videos as well.

Probably. It's weird that it's still called a cart device, but they use the rom media type. Seems inconsistent. I did some searching in the MAME/MESS change logs and don't see much in regards to the Aamber Pegasus and when it changed. It wasn't an exhaustive search, but thought if it was just an over sight, would be something to report on Mame Testers. JoeViking245, kudos on your software import tool BTW. I don't use software lists much myself, but I appreciate you providing that tool for people that do. (After spending decades amassing rom files, since finding LaunchBox and making an arcade cabinet, I'm much more into a smaller curated list of games that play well within that setting. My Apple 2 collection only has 7 games. Only ones from my youth that still play well today.)

That was from 2016 and MAME version 0.174 though. You are right, MAME 0.219 itself lists: Directly from MAME is always best source.

I remember seeing some scripts in the past to extract the naomi roms from the MAME set, but I haven't been ab;e to find the link again. A full proof method is to use CLRMamePro and it's rebuilder feature to quickly extract the naomi roms from a full MAME set. Using the Set Information window in CLRMamePro, you select Naomi or Sammy, whichever set you want, point to your MAME set and then click Rebuild and within a few minutes you'll have a clean full set of only Naomi.

Can’t remember where I read it but pretty sure it just grabs the best one. if you are also downloading theme videos, you can end up with 2 obviously.

I just use the Retroarch Mupen64-Next core which uses GlideN64 as well, but M64P works as well. The more things I can keep under the Retroarch umbrella, the less work remembering details of how I've set up and use each emulator, plus you get all the features that come with Retroarch and are likely to be added in the future. The only issue I had with M64P was it didn't work with my control setup. (Needed multiple devices to control same interface) It was at that time that the author started charging $$, but looks like that ended, but by that time I had switched to Retroarch and it's cores were greatly improved and on par with the other options. It doesn't hurt to keep Project64 around as well, I've found if you plan to run any modded games, it handles them the best.

If you are trying to have a completely streamlined and consistent look, there are some things that RL can help with or at least make much easier than other solutions. Most of these are generally non-Retroarch/MAME systems and more obscure emus. Additionally RL does have robust support for 3rd party key mappers, device support for 3rd party tools and Window management code. Most users probably don't these need or care about these features, and for just running emus, LB has it covered.