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How do I add MAME Bezels?


knightCrawler

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I want to add MAME Bezels to mame only at this time, but not looking to use retroarch at this time..  I'm comparing between full stretched games and games with bezel and with bezels look better since its the original resolution I would also like to know how to add bezels per games instead of the whole library at once.

Thanks

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The only thing wrong with the Merrit and Orion's realistic bezels are that they made the game screen area really dark , so the game ends up being really dark.  I found someone's set that removed merrits screens, and that took others and made the opacity 80%.  I am about halfway through Orion's set doing the 80% opacity.  This will make the game screen area a bit lighter along with the rest of the artwork.  But the fact that mame running full screen has black sides will bring the rest of the artwork back to being dark, and the game area shine brighter through that portion of the bezel.  It's either that, or pen tool every single game screen area of those bezels.  

Its too bad they had to bake in the game screen area to be so dark, but that's the workaround. You will have to play a lot with some of the games horizontal and vertical stretch and position settings in the slider controls menu. But once you get those done for each game, boy does it look great!

Edited by damageinc86
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Eh, that sounds like a lot of hassle actually. Thanks a lot for the post. I find that I have to scale back my ambitions,  I want everything perfect, but at the same time all of these types of projects really eat up the finite amount of free time I have to actually play the games so it's a balancing act.

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Rocket Launcher is pretty easy to setup, and if you are only configuring MAME initially it shouldn't be too time consuming.  That would be the easiest way to get Bezels for most MAME games.  There are many Bezel Packs available in their forums and other places if you google "MAME Bezel Packs".  

That's just my opinion.

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Thanks for that information! So Rocket Launcher would be involved. Part of me doesn't want this to turn into another full time job, but on the other hand when I'm in the right mood, I love these types of projects and could spend hours on then, as I've done to get as far as I've gotten in the past year since starting in on emulation and retro gaming. In fact, I've just spent the last 90 minutes or so messing around with RomCenter for the first time- really cool what it can do! And really not too hard to figure out how to do stuff.

It would for sure be waaaay fracking cool to have those bezels on there when playing an arcade classic. Especially if if I ever build a MAME cabinet like I've started to have vague fantasies of doing lately.

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7 hours ago, usuallee76 said:

Eh, that sounds like a lot of hassle actually. Thanks a lot for the post. I find that I have to scale back my ambitions,  I want everything perfect, but at the same time all of these types of projects really eat up the finite amount of free time I have to actually play the games so it's a balancing act.

Well give me a little time and I'll have them all changed. Already to the letter P. And I plan on keeping up with Orionsangel's releases because I love them. I'll be posting it all soon.  But yeah the screen position may or may not be the big hassle. Sometimes you get lucky and the coordinates that come with it are good.  Sometimes not. But I guess if someone takes the time to really dial that in 100% then those configs could be shared as well. I plan on getting to that point as well, but artwork stuff first

there are some great packs for rocketlauncher, and that's be what I've used for the last few years or so.  Metalzoics pack is a great compilation.  I only recently switched to the built in mame bezel feature because that's what the realistic ones were being built for.  

Edited by damageinc86
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Sounds awesome, thanks for doing that. It would be brilliant to have those bezels incorporated. It's definitely on my list. Sometimes I love working on those kinds of projects, I find myself regretting the word choice "hassle" - "fun challenge" could be just as valid a way to say it and a more positive way to say it.

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  • 6 months later...

@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?

Edited by ItchyRobot
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10 minutes ago, ItchyRobot said:

@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?

MAME bezels simply go in your MAME/artwork directory. They must be zipped and specifically for mame, bezels made for other emulators will not work.405799942_Screenshot(177).thumb.png.117236c494f93eabd74a85f7e9f57ab0.png

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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.

Edited by ItchyRobot
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The bezels are available as a full pack on the emumovies ftp or are split into packs here in the download section of the forums. They are not something that is scrapable im afraid. If you just put them in the artwork folder in your mame emulator folder MAME will see them automatically.

https://forums.launchbox-app.com/files/category/12-platform-bezelsoverlays/

Not sure what to tell you about the emumovies code im afraid, you could try emailing support@unbrokensoftware.com.

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I ended up going back to metalzoic's RL universal bezel packs.  Those realistic ones were very cool, but I started to get annoyed at the amount of screen glare and scratches.  Sometimes the reflections in the screen glare were so light and bright that it began to overshadow the game.  It ended up feeling not that realistic with that aspect, since most screen glare is very subdued in a dark arcade with crt light and very dark blacks.  Those screen glare layers were taken in a brightly lit room with the "screen" turned off.  So the glare is amplified under that setting.

the other thing I ended up not liking was the very small gameplay screen area that is used in order to accommodate most of the cabinet and bordering cabinet with background stuff.  With the RL packs, the gameplay area is maximized.

Edited by damageinc86
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@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 =(

 

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