How to disable Mame Bezel in Launchbox/BigBox?

[dukey3784]

Can someone let me know how to disable the "bezel" in my mame games?  Thank you any help.

[cholzer]

I would like to know this too!

When I imported my Amiga, SNES, NES and MAME games I enabled the download of the "bezels". But there are a few games where these (slightly transparent) bezels cover parts of the game.
So I would like to disable the bezels for these specific games.
I have seen that RetroArch has an "Overlay" setting where I can disable these bezels, however that change does not stick, when I launch the game again then the bezels are there again - saving the config inside of RetroArch while the game is running throws an error that the config cant be saved.

A option to disable bezels entirely or on a game by game basis inside of LaunchBox would be great! (I could not find such an option)

[faeran]

After disabling overlays in RetroArch, go down to Overrides and save either a Core, Content Directory, or Game override.

[dukey3784]

I wonder how it can be done in either Launchbox or Mame itself?  

 

[dragon57]

4 hours ago, dukey3784 said:

I wonder how it can be done in either Launchbox or Mame itself?  

 

LaunchBox currently has no way to disable a bezel. For MAME, just remove the bezel from the artwork folder. Different versions of MAME have an ability to swap bezels, change bezel attributes, etc., and save certain settings, but it is just easier to clean-up the mentioned artwork directory directly.

[Headrush69]

6 hours ago, dragon57 said:

Different versions of MAME have an ability to swap bezels, change bezel attributes, etc., and save certain settings, but it is just easier to clean-up the mentioned artwork directory directly.

Do you mean having multiple bezels in different layout files per game that you can flip between? If so, do you know exactly which version?

I mostly use Bezel Project themed bezels, but there are dynamic features and overlay support in some MAME artwork sets and the ability to swap them easily would be super useful just while setting up bezels. Currently I have to swap back and forth between artwork folders, find the features I'm missing that I want and than manually add them to the layout file for the Bezel Project artwork.

Additional question: Would the Bezel Project accept the inclusion of updated layout files that add things as simple as colour overlays, or lit graphics if they were optional and never changed or affected the single bezel image?

[dragon57]

Most any modern version of MAME allows you to flip your bezels via the built-in menu system.

What I do here is to define more than one artwork folder path in the MAME.ini file. That allows you to have files from our project, plus the traditional ones that have additional features.

[Headrush69]

1 hour ago, dragon57 said:

What I do here is to define more than one artwork folder path in the MAME.ini file. That allows you to have files from our project, plus the traditional ones that have additional features.

I tried that in the past and it didn't work. Maybe it had some kind of identical naming issue between the sets, I'll check it out again.

[dragon57]

26 minutes ago, Headrush69 said:

I tried that in the past and it didn't work. Maybe it had some kind of identical naming issue between the sets, I'll check it out again.

If you have duplicate names, only one is seen, if I recall correctly.

[Headrush69]

20 minutes ago, dragon57 said:

If you have duplicate names, only one is seen, if I recall correctly.

That was indeed the issue. This helps as I can make a folder for my custom layouts and not worry about updates replacing them.

[cholzer]

On 6/24/2022 at 1:52 PM, faeran said:

After disabling overlays in RetroArch, go down to Overrides and save either a Core, Content Directory, or Game override.

THX! That seems to have worked!

[cholzer]

On 6/25/2022 at 9:35 AM, dragon57 said:

LaunchBox currently has no way to disable a bezel.

Would be really nice if an option could be added to entirely remove the downloaded bezels again in case that the user realizes that he does not want them.

[dragon57]

3 minutes ago, cholzer said:

Would be really nice if an option could be added to entirely remove the downloaded bezels again in case that the user realizes that he does not want them.

I can't speak for more options in LaunchBox, but the Bezel Projects app for Windows has a disable and uninstall option.

[cholzer]

4 minutes ago, dragon57 said:

I can't speak for more options in LaunchBox, but the Bezel Projects app for Windows has a disable and uninstall option.

my thinking is that since Launchbox offers an option to download bezels, Launchbox should also provide an option to remove them again. 

[Sbaby]

For mame, do you know if there is a keyboard command or button to disable and enable the bezel on the fly? without having to press tab and do it manually from the mame panel 🧐

[skizzosjt]

19 hours ago, Sbaby said:

For mame, do you know if there is a keyboard command or button to disable and enable the bezel on the fly? without having to press tab and do it manually from the mame panel 🧐

In MAME directly, as in the standalone emulator, I don't believe so. I would actually love it if someone could prove me wrong here though, it would be a welcomed feature!

 

If you are using MAME through Retroarch then yes there is a way. Retroarch has a hotkey for the overlays, should be called "next overlay". Seems the intended design was to swap to the next available overlay listed in the associated config file. If you want to turn them on/off on the fly, this is also doable. This is something I recently setup for myself. It's pretty basic overall, but not the easiest to implement in the sense it was time consuming.

 

The main thing you need do is edit the config file for the game or core/system. By default, assuming you got bezels initially setup through the Bezel Project, the config file will only be listing a single bezel associated for that game or core/system. So this file needs to change the line that details the number of overlays being just 1 to list 2 or however many you want if you would like to have multiple bezels available. Then you need to continue editing said config making a fake bezel entry. Take note how the config file lists out the file path to the photo to be used. If you were to leave that empty and not provide a file path at all it simply will not load a photo when that bezel is selected. It will end up looking like to the user, you, as if you had the ability to toggle the bezels on and off. Thanks to it being a hotkey you can assign this to any input Retroarch recognizes to turn them on/off in such an easy way, or to swap to different ones if you have multiple bezels for a single game or core/system. If you wanted for example three bezels to swap between and have a blank one you would need to make the number of bezels 4, one of those entries would need to blank (no file path) and the other three would list the appropriate file path to load the different photos

 

So now you just edited and setup a SINGLE game and/or core/system. Now do that 9,000 more times or however many games core/systems you want to edit lmao sounds like a terrible time right? I ended up writing an AHK script that did all this work for me because doing it manually would be insane! Though I'll admit the amount of time I put into writing the script I probably could have manually edited all the config files in the same time frame 🤣! I am willing to share my script because I know it will make this undertaking so much easier. If you or anyone is interested, please let me know and I'll pass it along

 

Another tip for doing the same thing with shaders with Retroarch. I wanted the ability to turn those on/off with the hotkey also so I setup a shader that basically does nothing so when I switch to that particular one it will look like shaders were turned off. No AHK hoops to jump through for this setup at least!

 

 

On 6/25/2022 at 10:01 AM, Headrush69 said:

Do you mean having multiple bezels in different layout files per game that you can flip between? If so, do you know exactly which version?

Looks like your question got answered but wanted to make sure you know that RocketLauncher is pretty darn handy in the bezel department. You can setup multiple bezels with various "layouts" as in the size and position of the game displaying, and you can swap between them on the fly with a hotkey too. I think it's the best implementation of bezels I've ever used. As you know you can have multiple bezels with MAME but doesn't have a built in feature to flip between them on the fly

[Sbaby]

1 hour ago, skizzosjt said:

In MAME directly, as in the standalone emulator, I don't believe so. I would actually love it if someone could prove me wrong here though, it would be a welcomed feature!

 

If you are using MAME through Retroarch then yes there is a way. Retroarch has a hotkey for the overlays, should be called "next overlay". Seems the intended design was to swap to the next available overlay listed in the associated config file. If you want to turn them on/off on the fly, this is also doable. This is something I recently setup for myself. It's pretty basic overall, but not the easiest to implement in the sense it was time consuming.

 

The main thing you need do is edit the config file for the game or core/system. By default, assuming you got bezels initially setup through the Bezel Project, the config file will only be listing a single bezel associated for that game or core/system. So this file needs to change the line that details the number of overlays being just 1 to list 2 or however many you want if you would like to have multiple bezels available. Then you need to continue editing said config making a fake bezel entry. Take note how the config file lists out the file path to the photo to be used. If you were to leave that empty and not provide a file path at all it simply will not load a photo when that bezel is selected. It will end up looking like to the user, you, as if you had the ability to toggle the bezels on and off. Thanks to it being a hotkey you can assign this to any input Retroarch recognizes to turn them on/off in such an easy way, or to swap to different ones if you have multiple bezels for a single game or core/system. If you wanted for example three bezels to swap between and have a blank one you would need to make the number of bezels 4, one of those entries would need to blank (no file path) and the other three would list the appropriate file path to load the different photos

 

So now you just edited and setup a SINGLE game and/or core/system. Now do that 9,000 more times or however many games core/systems you want to edit lmao sounds like a terrible time right? I ended up writing an AHK script that did all this work for me because doing it manually would be insane! Though I'll admit the amount of time I put into writing the script I probably could have manually edited all the config files in the same time frame 🤣! I am willing to share my script because I know it will make this undertaking so much easier. If you or anyone is interested, please let me know and I'll pass it along

 

Another tip for doing the same thing with shaders with Retroarch. I wanted the ability to turn those on/off with the hotkey also so I setup a shader that basically does nothing so when I switch to that particular one it will look like shaders were turned off. No AHK hoops to jump through for this setup at least!

 

for mame I am still using the native (not retroarch) for some reasons related to past configurations, but sooner or later I will also want to use retroarch

While for almost all consoles I use retroarch and I am very happy. In launchbox I set a configuration file for each platform emulated by retroarch with the command -c "folder\platform.cfg" .... Inside the file I set the string: input_overlay = ": \ overlays \ borders \ platform.cfg". so for example I have snes.cfg with the generic overlay with animated border of buttons. Then I also have various single-setup games that are automatically downloaded from launchbox and bezzel project in the \ overlays \ GameBezels folder. In short, as you can see, I have various configurations based on what I like! I am interested in being able to change the bezel on the fly for various reasons including also the safeguard of my oled screen, I would like to be able to change it every now and then with a button, for example when I do long gaming sessions, or turn it off, or that it changes by itself every minute with some autohotkey scripts. If you feel like giving me a hand I would be really grateful, even if for the moment only for retroarch is fine 🤗

[skizzosjt]

On 8/17/2022 at 2:37 PM, Sbaby said:

for mame I am still using the native (not retroarch) for some reasons related to past configurations, but sooner or later I will also want to use retroarch

While for almost all consoles I use retroarch and I am very happy. In launchbox I set a configuration file for each platform emulated by retroarch with the command -c "folder\platform.cfg" .... Inside the file I set the string: input_overlay = ": \ overlays \ borders \ platform.cfg". so for example I have snes.cfg with the generic overlay with animated border of buttons. Then I also have various single-setup games that are automatically downloaded from launchbox and bezzel project in the \ overlays \ GameBezels folder. In short, as you can see, I have various configurations based on what I like! I am interested in being able to change the bezel on the fly for various reasons including also the safeguard of my oled screen, I would like to be able to change it every now and then with a button, for example when I do long gaming sessions, or turn it off, or that it changes by itself every minute with some autohotkey scripts. If you feel like giving me a hand I would be really grateful, even if for the moment only for retroarch is fine 🤗

I can help with Retroarch, but not MAME because MAME doesn't have a change bezel/overlay hotkey. I don't think Retroarch assigns a hotkey to the change overlay hotkey by default, you need to manually enter the hotkey. In this example I set mine up as "o". What were doing here is using a script to automatically change the overlay every 60secs while still giving the ability to change with the Retroarch change overlay hotkey. You can change the hotkeys and the timing to your own preferences. You will need to edit the associated game and/or core/system configs appropriately to have multiple overlays for this to work.

 

 Go to this comment for final version of script

 

 

 

Old version of script

Spoiler

WinWait, ahk_exe retroarch.exe ;waits for Retroarch to exist before executing script

Loop
	{
	 Sleep, 60000 ;Waits 60secs before continuing to execute the script
	 Send {o down}{o up} ;Presses the o key and then releases the o key
	}

F12:: ;Sets F12 as a hotkey to toggle turning the script on and off
Pause, Toggle
Return

F11:: ;Sets F11 as a hotkey to terminate the script
ExitApp

 

Edited August 29, 2022 by skizzosjt

[Sbaby]

12 hours ago, skizzosjt said:

I can help with Retroarch, but not MAME because MAME doesn't have a change bezel/overlay hotkey. I don't think Retroarch assigns a hotkey to the change overlay hotkey by default, you need to manually enter the hotkey. In this example I set mine up as "o". What were doing here is using a script to automatically change the overlay every 60secs while still giving the ability to change with the Retroarch change overlay hotkey. You can change the hotkeys and the timing to your own preferences. You will need to edit the associated game and/or core/system configs appropriately to have multiple overlays for this to work.

 

WinWait, ahk_exe retroarch.exe ;waits for Retroarch to exist before executing script

Loop
	{
	 Sleep, 60000 ;Waits 60secs before continuing to execute the script
	 Send {o down}{o up} ;Presses the o key and then releases the o key
	}

F12:: ;Sets F12 as a hotkey to toggle turning the script on and off
Pause, Toggle
Return

F11:: ;Sets F11 as a hotkey to terminate the script
ExitApp

 

Fantastic ! It works ! 👍😊

it would be useful if it only worked when Retroarch is focus maximized! I would not like it to press "o" when I am in the bigbox pause or for some reason I momentarily minimized the retroarch window. How could this be done?

Edited August 20, 2022 by Sbaby

[skizzosjt]

Under where the F12 hotkey is add in your BigBox Pause Hotkey so when you go into pause screen it pause the script. Though, I would think if the "o" (or whatever hotkey was assigned) is hit when on the pause screen it would do nothing, this shouldn't be an issue. You also would need to always leave the pause screen through hitting the pause hotkey or use the other AHK pause key to resume it. You're kinda adding an unnecessary layer. Regardless....

In essence you're making more than one hotkey do the same thing, pause the script. make sure to remove the comment marker ";" semi-colon at the start of the line when you do put in the BigBox hotkey so it executes that line

I also added in a check to exit the script if retroarch closes

 

 Go to this comment for final version of script

 

Old version of script

Spoiler

WinWait, ahk_exe retroarch.exe ;waits for Retroarch to exist before executing script

Loop
	{
	 Sleep, 60000 ;Waits 60secs before continuing to execute the script
	 Send {o down}{o up} ;Presses the o key and then releases the o key
	 if not WinExist(RetroArch) ;checks each loop if Retroarch has been closed, terminates script if Retroarch was closed
		{
		 ExitApp
		}
	}

F12:: ;Sets F12 as a hotkey to toggle turning the script on and off
;[BIG-BOX-HOTKEY-HERE]::
Pause, Toggle
Return

F11:: ;Sets F11 as a hotkey to terminate the script
ExitApp

 

 

Edited August 29, 2022 by skizzosjt