Confused as to why games lose theming.

[Stewbie67]

Hi guys,

I am building an Arcade cabinet which will be housing a 32" monitor in Portrait mode, so I am trying to get BigBox running with a portrait/vertical theme. 

I have tried Vertical Aspirations and Vertical Vision! themes and they work fine until the game is loaded in mame and runs fine, but I lose the theming and just have the mame game running with black bars at the top and the bottom.

I am trying to setup the system so I have the game's marquee, then the game, then maybe the instruction card/button layout at the bottom - which is what you see on the Theme selection screen.

Obviously, I am missing something here, can anyone direct me in the right direction here please?

Thanks,

Stuart

[Retro808]

Because that is just a BB theme and not an overlay (or bezel) for when an emulator is running a game. BB does not stay running over top of emulation displaying UI elements. When a game is launched the emulator takes focus so you would need some sort of emulator overlay to accomplish what you need. Both Mame and Retroarch can do this. Plenty of resources to get these set-up just Google or Youtube  "vertical bezels"