Mame pictures in backround whilst playing a game???

[madtanks]

Hiya..im just trying to find out if theres a way to have the pictures of the game whilst playing it, like on coinops. Basically when i play the mame games lots of them are small screen and have a lot of black screen to the left and right.. on coinops there were pics of the game to the sides. Is there anyway of doing this on launchbox. i have paid for for bigbox and subscribed to emu movies. Sorry if this is a stupid topic or if its in the wrong place.

[neil9000]

20 minutes ago, madtanks said:

Hiya..im just trying to find out if theres a way to have the pictures of the game whilst playing it, like on coinops. Basically when i play the mame games lots of them are small screen and have a lot of black screen to the left and right.. on coinops there were pics of the game to the sides. Is there anyway of doing this on launchbox. i have paid for for bigbox and subscribed to emu movies. Sorry if this is a stupid topic or if its in the wrong place.

What you are referring to are called bezels, they are handled by the emulators themselves, not Launchbox/Bigbox.

[Lordmonkus]

 

[madtanks]

Bezels...well there ya go.. its hard when you dont know the name of what your looking for. Thankyou so much.

[madtanks]

So... Do all Emulators have the option of having bezels or is it purely a mame thing?

 

[Lordmonkus]

Mame and Retroarch supports them natively, those are the only 2 I am aware of. You can force bezels in emulators that do not support them on their own through the use of 3rd party middleware called RocketLauncher though that comes with a steep learning curve.

[madtanks]

Sweet thanks for your help guys...Maybe you can now help with another problem i have. I imported my mame roms and ran thru bigbox, everything was working ok, i could select games,load and play using my xbox1 controller...now all of a sudden the xbox controller doesnt work...snes,genesis,gba etc all work fine and i can play...but mame has stopped working. The games load up fine, but i cant control anything. Sorry for being a dumbass.

[Lordmonkus]

My first guess is that you are using a wireless controller loaded Mame at some point with the controller not turned on. Mame has a nasty habit of resetting its controller bindings when that happens.

To fix this you can try setting your default.cfg in the \cfg folder to read only or use wired controllers. Take that with a grain of salt though, I don't use wireless controllers, I only use wired ones and never had the issue of the controls resetting.

[madtanks]

Awesome. That worked a treat. I had a copy of the default config, i just copy and pasted that into the original. Thankyou

[madtanks]

Hello again. Im still have a problem getting the bezels for mame to work. i changed a confiq file that had bezels 0 to bezels 1. all that done was put a weird black and red bezel to the sides of all the games. im missing something here.

Also, I cant load the mame64.exe as it just opens and closes, the games work fine when running from lb or bb. 

ive got a mame folder inside the launchbox directory and inside there it has artwork in there is all the games in seperate folders, each game folder has bezel.png and a LAY file. 

 

little help please guys.

[neil9000]

2 minutes ago, madtanks said:

Hello again. Im still have a problem getting the bezels for mame to work. i changed a confiq file that had bezels 0 to bezels 1. all that done was put a weird black and red bezel to the sides of all the games. im missing something here.

Also, I cant load the mame64.exe as it just opens and closes, the games work fine when running from lb or bb. 

ive got a mame folder inside the launchbox directory and inside there it has artwork in there is all the games in seperate folders, each game folder has bezel.png and a LAY file. 

 

little help please guys.

Bezels for MAME shouldn't be folders they should be .zips.

[madtanks]

Thats how the pack came. What can i do about this? would it help to zip them all up? is there a way to do this all in one go.

thanks for your speedy reply.

[spycat]

Hi @madtanks

It's odd that you can't open MAME by running mame64.exe
Have you tried opening MAME from within LaunchBox by right=clicking any arcade game and then choosing Open MAME (or whatever descriptive name you've given the emulator)?

By the way, game artwork like bezels will work whether the artwork folders are zipped or unzipped, unlike the actual games which must be left zipped.
It's normal practise to have the various artwork folders, zipped or not, in MAME's artwork folder.
 

[madtanks]

Hiya. Mame doesnt launch from within launchbox via the open mame or launch with options. The game will boot only by double clicking. The mame.exe just opens and closes within a second.

I dont mind so much as i can play the games, I really just want to resolve this issue with the bezels as the games look kinda stupid with only a small play area and huge black parts to the left and right.

Should i maybe just start again and get a new mame pack?

[spycat]

It may help if you can post an image of one of your bezels and it's lay file content, as well as the name of the game's bezel png and lay.

[madtanks]

Ok. Ill try that 2moro at sum point. 

Thanks.

[spycat]

You're welcome.
However, personally I'd put bezel support aside for the moment and concentrate on why you can't open MAME itself. That is just not normal.
 

[madtanks]

OK.. So i went through the mame folder and took out a file from within the plugins folder named Boot.Lua. Mame booted from the .exe after that but launchbox didnt like it. I then changed the emulator path to Mame in place of Mame64.

Everything seems to be working ok...

Now...onto the damned bezels please people.

[spycat]

MAME arcade games artwork folders (zipped or otherwise) all go in the artwork folder inside MAME.
Each game's artwork folder should be named after the game rom.
Clones are a bit flexible in that the game's artwork folder can be named after either the clone or parent. However, a parent game will not accept a clone named artwork folder.
Of course, if you have different bezels for a parent and it's clones, then you need separate artwork folders.

The included lay file should be named either after the folder containing it or as default.
The lay's image file string must match with the bezel's name including the extension.

Your mame.ini artpath must know the path to the folder containing your games artwork folders.

[madtanks]

Thanks for helping me out. I still cant seem to get this to work. ill upload a file i found in the artwork folder. it says default bezel and this is the only thing that i get when playing any game. Could this be the problem?