MAMEUI Migration - GLSL

[Drybonz]

With MAMEUIFX, my main MAME, shutting down again, I decided to go ahead and migrate to MAMEUI, which I haven't used for a while. As I was setting it up, I noticed that there are no options to select GLSL shaders (like Lotte's, etc) in the default game options. Does anyone know how that works for MAMEUI? Is it not supported?

[Drybonz]

Any shader gurus out there?... lordmonkus?

[Drybonz]

Maybe a suggestion as to what MAME version to use for shaders now that MAMEUIFX is gone?

[Lordmonkus]

If you have a newer Mame rom set such as 178 or 179 use a Mame 178 or 179, they added a new .key file to the Capcom CPS roms and the older CPS roms don't work in the newer versions of Mame. If you aren't up to date on Mame roms I would suggest Mame 177 and since you are used to using MameUI you can get an addon program for Mame called Arcade which is just an executable you drop into your Mame folder and it basically just gives you back the old MameUI interface. Get it from EmuCR. http://www.emucr.com/search/label/MAME?&max-results=12

From there I recommend ditching GLSL and using the new BGFX shaders which you can setup in Arcade. Here are a couple of screen grabs to what you need to do in the UI config. If you notice in the 2nd picture the highlighted BGFX screen chains it says crt-geom 3 times, that isn't a mistake or anything. This is for multi monitor games such as the triple screen games like Darius and Ninja Warriors. This is a feature where you can have different shader effects for each monitor for the game.

If you don't want to use Arcade for a UI and just want to use the standard command line version of Mame which is what I use here is a full written tutorial I did for setting up BGFX.

BGFX shaders are very nice, you have several to choose from and they have the benefits of HLSL where they will work on vertical and horizontal without separate configs and they look good out of the box unlike HLSL which requires some tweaking. BGFX shaders cannot be tweaked and saved to a config file yet but it is planned from what I have read. They can be tweaked while a game is running using the built in Mame interface but the settings will not be saved on exiting the game. If you want to look at the different shaders while in game press the "tilde" key ' and press the down arrow key on the keyboard about 12 times you will find the slider where you can go left and right with the arrow keys to look at shaders. The shader will stay while you are still playing that game but once you exit out it will reset, CRT-Geom is my favourite.

[Charco]

I currently have standalone MAME with the blue and green GUI set up. I don't see any option to add scanlines or shaders in the video options. Can this be done in that version also?

Edited November 8, 2016 by Charco

[Lordmonkus]

What version of Mame is it ?

[Charco]

I set it up about a month ago so I think it's probably 177 or 176? I am at work at the moment and can't check but can have a look this evening.

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah it should be able to do the BGFX shaders, it was something that was added in I think in 172 or somewhere around there but wasn't really functional. The supprt was in it but no shaders were written at the time. Version 175 added a couple of shaders, I am not sure at all if 176 added more or not but I know 177 and 178 has more options of shader choices.

If the UI of whatever version doesn't have direct controls for it you should still be able to do it through the mame.ini file.

[Charco]

Ah ok. I am definitely more of a GUI person than fiddling in files, does it require much tinkering do you think?

[Lordmonkus]

Not all, just 2 lines in the ini to enable and select which shader you want.

# OSD VIDEO OPTIONS
#
video                     bgfx

and

# BGFX POST-PROCESSING OPTIONS

bgfx_screen_chains        crt-geom,crt-geom,crt-geom

[Charco]

Cool!

[Drybonz]

Ok, thanks for the reply.  I'm definitely interested in checking out the BGFX shaders.  Does the Arcade gui allow you to separate your settings by vertical and horizontal games, like MAMEUIFX?

[DOS76]

From @lordmonkuspost I would say it does because MAMEUI has those features

[Lordmonkus]

2 hours ago, Drybonz said:

Ok, thanks for the reply.  I'm definitely interested in checking out the BGFX shaders.  Does the Arcade gui allow you to separate your settings by vertical and horizontal games, like MAMEUIFX?

Probably but with BGFX you don't have to worry about it, it's smart like HLSL where the one shader looks good in both scenarios.

[Drybonz]

Nice... I just updated my rom set and going to set up MAME and Arcade next.  Hoping for a new version of Lightspeed as well.  

Thanks for the help and suggestions.

[Lordmonkus]

No problem.

[Drybonz]

So, I have this set up and I'm testing the shaders... with the BGFX, the CRT-geom looks good but is there a way to remove the curvature for all games without tweaking the sliders for each game individually?  Is there a way to add scanlines without the curvature?

[Lordmonkus]

Like I said, you can tweak settings within the Mame UI but for now there is no way to save those settings, all changes made will be lost once you exit the game. The shader files for now are the .json files which as far as I know are not editable but I am uncertain of that.

If you would prefer for now to just use straight up HLSL here are the settings I used before switching over to BGFX.

 

[Drybonz]

Thanks... I will definitely take a look at your HLSL settings.  I think the BGFX looks like it is going to be really sweet once you can edit and save the settings.  I had a setup that I thought looked really great, but of course it wouldn't save.  So hopefully, we will be able to do that soon.  It will be cool if you can, at some point, mix and match those "effects" into your own "chains".

Edited November 8, 2016 by Drybonz

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah once you can make some changes and save out settings and reload them it will be awesome.

BGFX is a pretty new feature, I think it was 171 or 172 which brought in initial support but had no shaders at the time and then it was 175 that got any shaders at all but only had 1 or 2. Now we got several presets and on their documentation page they do plan on allowing tweaks and saved settings

"Currently BGFX HLSL settings are not saved or loaded from any configuration files. This is expected to change in the future." from their docs page near the bottom. http://docs.mamedev.org/advanced/bgfx.html