Bezel Bother

[megagarrym]

Hi
I'm really struggling with game bezels in RetroArch.  They've been working ok for a while but have become a bit hit and miss today.

For example, If I play a ZX Spectrum game the game-specific bezel appears unless there isn't one, in which case a generic ZX Spectrum bezel displays instead.  No problem there.

If I play a Sega 32X game there is no bezel showing until I go to the RetroArch Quick Menu, On-Screen Overlay and turn it on, then it shows fine, but next time I go in that or any other 32X game it's not there again.

If I try a Genesis/Megadrive game or Master System game I can do the same, ie turn on the bezel but then it's lost next time I go in to it and I have to do it again.

I removed all my Master system games from Launchbox and re-imported them including downloading bezels from The Bezel Project but this made no difference and in some cases the bezel doesn't show even if i turn it on in RetroArch and I know that it is there in the correct folder.

I have .cfg files all over the place in my RetroArch folder structure.

It appears that I have one per core in \\Retroarch\Config, then in \Retroarch\Overlays It looks like one per platform and then in \Retroarch\Overlays\GameBezels\MachineName are the game-specific bezels and config files.

Screenshots attached.

Is there anything obvious that I am doing wrong?  Is there any guidance on how this all hangs together? Is it a core-specific thing? Could be a simple setting in Retroarch?

I haven't created or edited any of the bezels or config files, they've all come from the Bezel Project through Launchbox when I've imported the roms.  I do have the Bezel Project installed separately and have fiddled with that to get updated bezels so not sure If I've done something with that that's caused the problems.   

I'm having the problem with most platforms.

Any help or guidance greatly appreciated.

 

Edit: Just to Add... Launchbox version 13.19, Retroarch version 1.20.0  

Edited February 24 by megagarrym

[dragon57]

It sounds like you have a core cfg file saved with menu_show_overlays set to false. You will have to force save an updated core cfg file inside of Retroarch after changing this to true, or manually change the value inside the questioned cfg files (make sure Retroarch isn't running if you manually edit anything).

[megagarrym]

I think I'm getting to the bottom of this now.  I've had some issues caused by my ROM names not matching the per-game config files exactly and sometimes when there just wasn't a bezel for a particular game for whatever reason.

One other issue is down to using the same core for multiple platforms.  If I have identical Names for roms on multiple platforms using the same core(such as Genesis and Master System both using Genesis Plus GX core)  That can make things awkward.  The per-game configs are stored in the Core specific folder so I've had Genesis games appearing with a Master System style bezel. 

I know how to fix it but it's gonna take a while to fix fully.  

1.Rename my roms to remove the region identifier and re-import.

2.Rename the game-specific config files to match the rom names, and the filepaths in the file.  Same for the bezel files.

3.Do not use a core for more than one platform.

4.Identify Games with a missing bezel and create one/Identify games with a missing core config file and create one.

I think that should do it.

Cheers.

[dragon57]

That indeed is the correct flow. #3 is a big pain point for our Bezel Project. I plan to see what I can do about that sometime coming up. All the old requested bezel repos for consoles/system will be done very, very soon (probably a week). Then the plan is to hit every repo for outstanding issues and see if a bullet point structure will alleviate the problem of using a core for multiple systems.

 

[megagarrym]

Thanks Dragon!  I've been able to use python scripts to create a config file for every game that points to the correct bezel cfg (only done Genesis so far) and it's worked extremely well.

Cheers