MAME Bezels....

[Lukeyboy67]

I've got 2870 Mame roms of which 1431 have bezels. I want to add a generic Mame bezel to all the roms missing one. The way I've been doing it so far is to run a game and if it's not got a bezel I look at the rom name, rename my generic bezel and drop it in the Mame art folder, I've done around 10 and the thought of repeating this process another 1429 times doesn't exactly fill me with enthusiasm!

Is there a easier/quicker way of achieving this? many thanks for any help forthcoming ?

[fromlostdays]

You have a few options, and maybe a few more I don't know about.

1: The best option would be if you can configure mame to do this. Alas, I don't know if this is possible, though I do suspect it is. I'm just not sure how.

2: Use Retroarch, as you can apply a per core bezel that will always show up, and then the rest of the bezels per game. The problem here is that it doesn't save you much time as you'll still have to apply the game bezels per game.

3: Rocketlauncher is a program that helps you control the actual launch of games, and you can configure Bezels per game and per system. 

4: Make 1429 copies of the general Mame bezel and try to use a program like Fatmatch and/or Bulk Rename Utility to automatically change the names of the copies to the rom names, and then just put them in the right folder. Both of those programs will rely on you having a folder with only the roms you want to rename the bezels to, though.

5: Download Bezels for the missing games. There's a Bezels project, called The Bezel Project that is aiming to make a unique bezel for every game, including all the Mame games. https://github.com/thebezelproject/BezelProject You can look into this, though I think they will download in a format that is compatible with Retroarch. Also, the Hyperspin, Rocketlauncher, and especially Emumovies forums and FTPs are full of MAME Bezel sets. Also, there is a Mame artwork file released with I think every version of Mame and downloadable from the same places you can reputably download Mame sets. This might have most of the bezels ready to go. It may be a little work but at least at the end of all the effort you'll have unique bezels for your games instead of just managing to apply a system specific one.  So if 1 doesn't work, I'd recommend 5.

Hope it helps, and sorry I don't have a better answer to your specific question about Mame function!

Goodluck!

 

 

Edited January 4, 2020 by fromlostdays

[Lukeyboy67]

Hey man thanks so much for yer reply!

I don't use or plan to use Retroarch or Rocketlauncer any time soon but thanks for the suggestion. Option 4 sounds doable but of course I'd much rather have a unique bezel for every game instead of the generic one I planned to use so option 5 seems the way to go.

I'll look into it. Thanks again for your help ?

[spycat]

You can use MAME's fallback artwork feature to allow any arcade game that does not have an external artwork file to launch with a generic bezel.

First create two separate artwork zips for horizontal (4:3) and vertical (3:4) games.
Each of these two zips should have a suitable lay file and a generic bezel.
Name the zips as
genericHoriz.zip
genericVert.zip
and drop them into your artwork folder.

Next create two empty ini files named
horizont.ini
vertical.ini

Add the line
fallback_artwork genericHoriz
to the horizont.ini
and add the line
fallback_artwork genericVert
to the vertical.ini
and drop both ini files into MAME's ini folder

Now, any arcade game that does not have it's own artwork will use the fallback artwork.

Edit:
There are some games which, in the absence of an external artwork zip, will not by default use fallback artwork.
Games such as Breakout and Rebound which are currently built in to MAME will use a built in video option known as Colour Overlay.
Multiple screen games like Darius will use a video option such as Triple Side-By-Side.
You can change these in the games video options menu to whatever you set in the lay's view name string to allow future launches to use fallback artwork.
These are exceptions and the vast majority of arcade games will by default use fallback artwork in the absence of an artwork zip
 

Edited January 5, 2020 by spycat

[Headrush69]

16 hours ago, spycat said:

There are some games which, in the absence of an external artwork zip, will not by default use fallback artwork.
Games such as Breakout and Rebound which are currently built in to MAME will use a built in video option known as Colour Overlay.
Multiple screen games like Darius will use a video option such as Triple Side-By-Side.

These built in options are just regular layouts as well which you can grab from the mame source.

So if you want to create a layout using default artwork or a specific bezel and combine it with the built in color overlay, it's not to hard to mesh the two together.

 

[Lukeyboy67]

Cheers guys! ?

I followed your instructions to the letter but it didn't work....

Edited January 5, 2020 by Lukeyboy67

[spycat]

If you can't get the fallback artwork feature to work first check that your mame.ini has it's inipath set to recognize the ini folder.

Also check the names of your generic artwork lays. A lay should be either named after the zip containing it, or as default.lay

And check that your generic bezel png names match their image file definitions within the lays.

[spycat]

@Headrush69

Many thanks for that tip. I wasn't aware that those lays for internal artwork views were so easily available in the source code.

[Headrush69]

28 minutes ago, spycat said:

@Headrush69

Many thanks for that tip. I wasn't aware that those lays for internal artwork views were so easily available in the source code.

The only gotcha to watch out for when combining layouts is stick to one coordinate system since there are several options. The mame guides on layout basics is very helpful in explaining them.

Once you get the hang of it, it's easy to make layouts that are specific to your setup. I have a Logitech steering wheel modded into my cabinet, but I use the arcade buttons for shifting. (Removed the Logitech stick to fit in an all in one cabinet.) I grabbed the layout code from one of the internal layouts to add an on screen shifter in addition to the bezel for games that support it.

 

 

[Mute64]

On 1/5/2020 at 11:38 AM, spycat said:

You can use MAME's fallback artwork feature to allow any arcade game that does not have an external artwork file to launch with a generic bezel.

First create two separate artwork zips for horizontal (4:3) and vertical (3:4) games.
Each of these two zips should have a suitable lay file and a generic bezel.
Name the zips as
genericHoriz.zip
genericVert.zip
and drop them into your artwork folder.

Next create two empty ini files named
horizont.ini
vertical.ini

Add the line
fallback_artwork genericHoriz
to the horizont.ini
and add the line
fallback_artwork genericVert
to the vertical.ini
and drop both ini files into MAME's ini folder

Now, any arcade game that does not have it's own artwork will use the fallback artwork.

Edit:
There are some games which, in the absence of an external artwork zip, will not by default use fallback artwork.
Games such as Breakout and Rebound which are currently built in to MAME will use a built in video option known as Colour Overlay.
Multiple screen games like Darius will use a video option such as Triple Side-By-Side.
You can change these in the games video options menu to whatever you set in the lay's view name string to allow future launches to use fallback artwork.
These are exceptions and the vast majority of arcade games will by default use fallback artwork in the absence of an artwork zip
 

would i be correct in saying this feature is only available for mame .194 ??