ItchyRobot

What does this do for games that require you to choose from multiple bios before entering the game? Does it it still leave that option for us to choose?

Hah, I hear you. This emulation stuff will bring that out in you. I was up way too late every day last week fine tuning my MAME controls and artwork. It does not make waking up early for work fun at all.

There are a couple that are animated. It looks like his latest bezels started to incorporate it. It's neat, but a bit annoying and distracting during gameplay - and it hits the cpu pretty hard, which sucks for sower systems/setups. I think he was just tinkering around and trying to make something different. One of the street fighter games and a few more had animated art. It's not a big deal, I was able to switch to his other view with a diff art. Though I art in the animated bezel better. I need to re-download your set and see what you have for those. I am kind of making a mashup all the bezel sets, mainly just trying to find missing art for the more obscure games I have pinned to my favorites list. It seems like every set focuses on different game styles; sometimes having missing art for some of the big classics.

Awesome. Good to hear you are working by his example. The only thing I do not like about some of Derek's recent bezels are the animated controls. While neat, I find them pretty distracting; and make some of my game choppy on my old ass laptop (more my fault for using such a piece of crap machine). Do you know how to strip out the animated controls out of his bezels and leave the main artwork? Do I just delete the extra small control over images, or do I also need to amend the LAY file? Also, you don't happen to have a single file I can download of your set do you? I accidentally deleted them the other night and have to re-download =(

Man, that sounds like a nightmare. Sorry to hear that. I too am not that techy, and am wading through the MAME setup myself. I think it will be worth it in the end though. That way I will know how everything works and ties together so I can fix stuff myself later on. Have you seen Derek Moore's YouTube channel? He does a bunch of MAME bezel tutorials, and has a very good eye for clean, quality work. He doesn't have a ton of bezels, but the ones he does are spot on and really a great example of quality work for other to aspire too. He has a couple templates that you can download and use to create your own. I think I will eventually create my own using his templates once I get a free laptop from work; I am currently using an old laptop that barely gets me by... actually very aggravating to use, but I dont have a choice right now. Its good enough for building my MAME collection and loading up my hard drives. Here is Derek Moores YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/oldstarscream Here is his bezel art collection, along with blank templates: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B_kYDaRET47FaG9hS1Rjdnh4clk Here are his tutorials on making bezels:

Hey @Reevesad I like your approach better than Orions. Not to belittle his work, truely amazing and great. But I like a bigger playing field. Unfortunately I have to start all over now that I found yours =( I just finished setting all his stuff up and tweaked/stretched to fit my TV. It took a lot of work since a decent amount of it was not sized correctly, or at least for my 1080p TV. I also noticed that a lot of his bezels did not function correctly, creating a weird diagonal line with blurry pixels through the screen. This limited the amount of usable views he has that worked correctly. It sounds like a recent MAME bug since it only started happening on 198. He said he has same issue, but it work fine with older builds. Do you have this problem with your bezels in 198 MAME, or newer builds? Also, question about cfg files. From what I understand, all the X/Y screen stretch parameters are stores in the romname.cfg files. This is also where the game/machine control settings are stored for each game that I have tweaked. Unless I understand how MAME works, this kind of puts me in a dilemma. When I start bringing in your bezels, I will need to keep my old cfg files so that my controls work correctly ... i really dont want to go through that again. But that means I will have to re-stretch and position my screen setting to match your bezels. Do you know any tricks to make this easier? If not, I guess I will have to just reconfigure my screen stretch/position settings once I replace Orions artwork with yours.

Ok, good. I do have the non-merged ROM set, but my CHD set is merged... will that affect me? I didn't see a non-merged CHD set when searching the P.D. site. That's why I ended up with the merged CHD set.

This looks like it may be what I was looking for. Anyone have experience with the program? https://github.com/longjoel/MameMiner

Noob here again ... I have the entire 198 MAME rom set. Using the default MAME gui, I have slowly gone through and set about 100 games to "Favorites". Before setting up Launchbox I would like to pull out all of my "Favorites" into a curated rom set, and not use all the other 1000's of roms in the set... just a waste of space. I know MAME is finicky, sometimes not having a single rom, but instead requiring multiple roms (parent, etc) piggy backing on top of each other, and also sometimes requiring separate chd's for the rom to load. Obviously, I have all the needed files, with the roms on one folder, the chd's in another folder... but there are thousands upon thousands of files to look through, and I can not tell which ones are dependent on each other. Is there a tool, or some other easy way to see what files I need for each game? Like I said, I would like to only use the files i NEED for each rom to run. For example, there are a lot of Gauntlet roms in the 198 rom set, but I only want to use the 2-player version that I have setup already. How do I know if I can pull that single rom out, or if I need the other ten or more associated roms. =========== On a side note, is this the same approach you guys take with MAME? I kind of like the idea of maybe leaving the entire set to scroll through and slowly build up my Arcade playlist over time. But I figured I could do that on the side as I continue to find new gems and perfect their bezels and controls before adding them to Launchbox. Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.

This is my goal ? Great job! Thanks for showing the cores you used and your PC stats. This should help me when I finally get around to adding consoles. I am still in the beginning phase and wrestling with MAME and getting its bezels and controls set up. Very time consuming since I am starting from scratch, with no experience. Almost done though, then I'll move to the older consoles and work my way up.

OK, thanks. Maybe the guide needs to be updated, or a side note about that added. Do you have a preference over one or the other, HLSL/BGFX, now that both have evolved? I was about to dive into the scan line part of my collection once I get my bezels set and would rather start with the better of the two options.

Isn't this a huge downside, and deal breaker? It seems that if I have to set up each game before playing, it just would not be worth it. On a side note: I am setting up all the bezels and tweaking the sizing to get the screens to fit perfectly within the bezels for my monitor/setup. I am having to slightly stretch/shrink some of the X/Y aspect ratios to get the game window to fit perfectly within the bezel windows. I have a feeling this will come into play since it essentially changes the pixel layouts for the games. Does anyone have any experience on using bezels and how tweaking the X/Y aspect ratios affects to look of HLSL and this BGFX look of the scan lines? It seems that a lot of the bezels I have downloaded do not do a great job of preserving the exact aspect ratio of the games, and I am afraid it may affect the scan line effects of the MAME HSLSL and BGFX tools.

@damageinc86 Yeah, I downloaded the realistic ones too. Neat, but the playable area is a bit too small and the scratches/smudges on the png file can be a bit distracting. I see that Metalzoic's bezel pack requires Rocketlauncher to work. I was hoping to use the standard MAME png/lay setup, but it looks like that is impossible with Metalzoic's pack. Do you have a recommended tutorial that I can watch or read that explains how to use the Rocketlauncher MAME bezels. I would rather not use Rocketlauncher, but if that is where the best bezels are, then maybe I need to learn how. This quest for bezels has become more time consuming than I wanted =(

I know i turned off Sticky Keys, I need to check on the Filter Keys when I get home tonight. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll update once I have a chance to look at that.

Thanks for the help @neil9000 When downloading bezels from EmuMovies and here, do I need to look for a certain pack that is for 1920x1080 (1080p), or is that assumed now a days?

Thanks @neil9000 . What is the best source for this? I do have a life membership with Launchbox and EmuMovies. Do these sources automatically download MAME compatible bezels that I can point my MAME.ini paths to? Looking at that picture you posted, your artwork is in the MAME folder, so I assume you got them from a different source than LB or EmoMovies, or maybe moved from the Launchbox folder after they downloaded ....? FYI - the 15% off coupon that I got when purchasing Launchbox did not work when I bought my lifetime EmuMovies pass. I bought it anyways, but kinda sucked that I could not use it.

@damageinc86 any update on your progress? I am in the middle of configuring MAME for my hardware and controllers and would love to eventually get bezels incorporated into my setup. Like the original poster, I too am a bit hesitant/intimidated by the process. And the idea of having a pre-configured setup like yours, and maybe a short how-to, sounds amazing. I assume you are using 1080p?

My custom Mame arcade controller is setup in the following manner ... See green tape in photo above and below the buttons. These are what the buttons really represent on the keyboard. The problem is that when I click Control+Alt+Shift+Spacebar at the same time (when spazzing) Windows pops up a"Default Settings" window. Any idea how to stop this?

See this thread, it may help... http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=153154.0

@depooter For trackballs, I used the below video to help me get set up. He talks a bunch about setting the buttons up, just ignore that and go to the below bookmarks ... Go to minute 3:10 to get to the point where he is explaining the control setup that you need. Go to minute 6:15 to learn how to speed up the movement of the cursor To adjust the speed of you spinner, check out this video...

No I haven't tried Stella. I was hoping I could use the MAME engine and controls since I am using that for my arcade games already. It sounds like I may need to give Stella a try

I am starting to experiment on getting my controls setup through MAME for my Atari 2600 games. Some of the games work best with a paddle controller, such as Kaboom. I would like to use my spinner to act like the Atari 2600 paddle but can not figure out where that is possible. I tried looking under the TAB>Machine settings, but I do not see anywhere to set analog settings for my spinner for Kaboom; like I am used to seeing for other spinner games like Tempest and Arcanoid. Any help would be appreciated

Thanks @jayjay

So, after a few weeks of learning I am about ready to start installing Launchbox / Retroarch and importing my games. I have the complete MAME .198 ROMs, CHDs, Software List ROMs, and Software List CHDs. This alone takes up almost 4TB, and this is without artwork, program installs, and emulators that Launchbox and Retroarch will install. My main question is, how much more space can I expect from artwork and the other odds and ends? I know this is a broad question, depending on what boxes I check during the install/import process; but, I am mainly trying to get a ballpark number or range. I plan on installing all the Arcade games (US/World), Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, Intellivision, NES, SNES, N64, , Game Boy, Game Boy Adv, Genesis, Saturn, and Jaguar games. And maybe a few other odd systems. Any input or suggestions would be appreciated.

I will check all those out tonight after work. Thanks