johnsanc

Is there a plugin or anything available that can display a splash screen letting you know the game you chose to run is either broken or unemulated? I love having all the artwork displayed, even if some games are not playable. However trying to load a game and having it either crash or dump you back to Big Box isn't very elegant.

I made a few tweaks to this theme to work a bit better for my particular setup: I adjusted the game video area to reduce cropping. This bothered me more than the perfectly filled space, so its a trade off. I added a solid color aperture grille which was the same color as the dark theme background. I may replace this and play with different scanline/grile sizes. This allows for it to blend in with the background and adjust to any size video. There may be a better way to do this, but this was simple to do and I have little to no XAML knowledge. This has 2 benefits in my opinion: 1) Make low res videos look better, and 2) Reduces the brightness at night since I use a 55 inch TV. I don't mean to tarnish the artistic integrity, but I thought I would share. This is hands down my favorite theme, and the way Viking so cleanly formatted the views, this was a relatively simple change.

Is there a fairly easy way to tweak the theme a bit to add scanlines to the game video area? The theme itself looks fantastic, but some of the lower res game videos blown up to near full screen look pretty bad. Some simple scanlines would really help.

These look great! I tried searching but I couldn't find a clear logo for Sega CD 32X. Would it be too much trouble to create one or point me in the direction or where an existing one is?

Aside from a few obscure systems that only MAME emulates there are better emulator options. This means fewer people need the feature if they only care about the popular systems. That leads to fewer votes. Either way, I'm just glad the plugin exists. Frankly I'd be more inclined to vote for other features simply because there's already a solution to this problem... with the plugin hah!

AWESOME! That enhancement just made this tool an absolute must-have for anyone trying to work with software lists. Well... I guess it was already but now its even better

I'm glad eatkinola's enhancements helped more than just me! With the DLL update this theme is better than ever.

@eatkinola - THANK YOU!!! That modified dll did the trick. The switching lag is completely gone. It works just as smooth as @viking's vanilla view or when I break the paths to game videos. I understand why the original dll would cause some slowness due to the looping through videos... but BigBox supports that natively without any issue using the "Use random game video for missing platform videos" setting. I guess maybe this dll was doing something a bit different or more intensive or checking if the video paths were valid or something. Either way, thank you so much for the quick dll update to test with. Do you plan on making an official version with a change? Or maybe a different method that is less intensive for non-image / non-video snooping?

@viking - This theme. And I'll try your new platform view here shortly and post an update. EDIT: Yes the platform switching is laggy with the new platform view. Another interesting thing is that Attract Mode is also completely smooth when it does its platform switching.

@wallmachine - Viking brings up a good point. I didn't realize you didnt use platform videos. Try using dedicated platform videos too and see if that makes things better. When you don't have dedicated platform videos it uses a random game video - seeking for a random video could be causing performance issues for you. @viking - I agree! I have NO idea why the Colorful Games view is butter smooth. Maybe theres something else going on with Nostalgia theme in the Games view that is causing the slowness. I have not tried BigCouch. I noticed with Nostalgia the games switching is significantly slower than other themes even with no games videos. Perhaps it's also checking rompaths (which for me are also on a network share)? or perhaps the icon display on the side is causing slowness? not sure.

@eatkinola - That is correct. Performance issues completely go away if I remove the references to game videos or purposely make them a bad path that does not exist. Colorful is only impacted by this on the Platform view. Nostalgia is impacted in both Platform and the Games view. There is a video earlier in this thread showing the lag with Colorful.

@wallmachine - Try the variant viking posted a few replies above. I'm curious if your stutter issues are better, worse, or stay the same with the "colorless" variant.

Please don't rework the logic of theme just for me! My setup is not the norm since I am accessing videos over a mapped network drive. Not sure if this same issue exists if videos were on hard drive with slower seek times too - unfortunately I can't really test that. Unfortunately it looks like something about that plugin and certain ways of using it cause huge performance problems in some setups. What I don't quite understand is why with Colorful all of the Games views work really fast but the platform view has the issue... It looks like SelectionSnoop is used in all of your games views. With the Nostalgia theme BOTH the platform and games views are very slow for me.

@viking - Whatever you did with that last update FIXED the platform switching issue! Although I do see that all platform colors are green now... is there another way to implement that that doesn't require whatever was causing the issue? The platform transitions are pretty fluid for me in 4k, sometimes there is a little bit of stutter. Are there two versions with the switching lag fix you would like me to compare? I dont think its a fair comparison to compare the fixed one vs prior versions that had the lag for me.

@viking - I tried your modified xaml and the animations look pretty much the same to me. I also tried modifying the games count to "TEST" but that also did not resolve the platform switching lag. I thought about that too awhile back, but that doesn't really explain why if I remove or create bad references to my game videos the switching lag COMPLETELY goes away. Its also very weird that I don't have this issue with any other theme, which is why I'm stumpped! There has to be something going on with checking the game video paths. I have a feeling its related to SelectionSnoop - based on what info I can find, it looks like it returns info that is not readily available, so I assume that means it must parse the platform XMLs which would definitely cause slowdown if its checking video links for some reason. Would it be possible to get a version that doesnt use SelectionSnoop to try? I noticed Unified Refried does not use this, and that is the theme I am currently using for performance comparisions. EDIT: YES we are getting closer. Its definitely related to something in @eatkinola's Themer plugins. Nostalgia theme also has the exact same platform switching lag behavior. However the Nostalgia game view is incredibly slow for me, it takes 2-3 seconds to switch a game. The colorful game view is VERY smooth, so no issues there.

I like the curvature. I just had to adjust the crt-geom-deluxe view distance to about 0.8 and now everything fits perfect. Yeah some of the cabs are banged up but I think it adds to the authenticity of an arcade. I’m just saying it would be nice to have a less banged up option. I might modify to erase some of the damage on the bezels I’m using for default. Good suggestion!

Do you know of any that are a bit less beat up than the ones I’m using? I love these, but on some games particularly with dark backgrounds the screen damage seems a bit much

Are there generic 4k horizontal and vertical bezels? Right now I'm using "chelnov" as a generic horizontal bezel and "1945kiii" as the vertical. I just copied and renamed them to "generich" and "genericv" respectively. I then reference these in 2 separate single line inis: horizont.ini = fallback_artwork generich vertical.ini = fallback_artwork genericv Dedicated generic bezels would be a GREAT addition to the packs since MAME supports fallback bezel artwork in the mame.ini

@JoeViking245 - that sounds perfect. Good idea on how to handle import vs copy! I was referring to import since I keep my software lists spread out and with all my other stuff for each system. I like to keep my roms in place. Also if you do add in the Broken flag that should only go on parent sets if the “add clones as additional applications” setting is used. Wouldn’t want a broken clone marking a working parent set as broken. (Not sure if that’s even a scenario to worry about, but something I just thought of)