Mame in cab thread. Frontends, gamelists, configuration etc.

[pubjoe]

Nice clean and bold. Very nice mate.

That was a good idea with the jpegs.

Lol, I think everyone starts by **** retrogui!

[gargoyle67]

Bah use hyperspin with all the nice moving graphs

[driph]

Nice clean and bold. Very nice mate.

That was a good idea with the jpegs.

Lol, I think everyone starts by **** retrogui!

Thanks!

Retrogui is a great start for a theme, especially now that the console images have all been vectorized. Gonna work up a widescreen variant once I've got everything figured out for my MAME cab.

[glocknyne562]

I've got the bug at the moment.

I've spent quite a long time setting up a personal mala layout and many steps are not straight forward. Some of the things I've done are:

- Modified my own (E2 style) layout (**** retrogui).
- Made a little batch file to cycle through layout varients on each start up.
- Using virtualdub, batch edited videos and picture files to fit in nicely (sourced from emumovies).
- Reorganised the main list:
...... - Removed clones, except for certain good ones like SSF2T (I'd like advice on other keepers).
...... - Used 'mame content manager' to remove/restore mature games.
...... - Used multimame to build a mame.xml file that brings in other emulators (like zinc and makaron) where required.
...... - Added extra (unsupported by mame) games to the main list.

There are still plenty more things I want to do. One of the problems is that mame is always updating and some of the tools and ini files that would have been handy a couple of years ago are now out of date.

I won't list everything else I'd like to do just now. But if anyone is doing (or has done) this stuff and is interested in sharing knowledge, please let me know. A lot of this stuff has a steep learning curve.

My current FE (mala):

Wow, I wish my cab had a theme like that.

[pubjoe]

Thanks. Your welcome to the layout files but I wanted to finish it off before I put them up. One problem though is the videos are custom edited to fit and they're a few gig (a fraction of the size of the standard emumovies vids though) - I could just upload the virtualdub job file I made. It took a few hours to convert 4000 videos on my cab pc with a 3ghz single core CPU and 512mb ram so you'd surely do the job a lot quicker on a more recent computer.

The next thing I want to do is find a nice tall font but every tall font I know of is some sort of 'elegant' condensed thing with thin horizontal lines. I want to use something standard looking, but stretched all over, like just taking a normal font and doubling the height. I started making my own with an old raster font editor until I realised I couldn't export it on xp64. ...I'll get round to finishing this soon I should think.

[emphatic]

pubjoe: To get the selected (bold) item to the top like that, is there a setting in Mala's editor for this, or did you just move the top part of the list off screen?

I'm currently making an EGRET II theme for myself as well, but a vertical one, that has a huge Taito logo at the top to make it seem more like a real multiboard than a MAME list.

[pubjoe]

I'm pretty sure there is an option like 'items above' and 'items below'. I set the first to 0 and the second to 15.

That's cool your doing a vertical layout. I'd have to change things a lot to make mine vertical. I would be better off starting from scratch. I really like your idea of a logo at the top.

I haven't touched that layout (or my cab at all) for a couple of Months. I'm kinda going off it. To floaty - not solid enough. Sometimes I really dislike text over faded backgrounds. I think a much bolder font would improve things. I know exactly the type of thing I want and even edited a raster font how I wanted it in photoshop, but I just couldn't build a font with any of the free font editors... I dunno, I might try again later.

[emphatic]

I really tried to make MALA work, but it won't load ANY background pictures at all. I guess I'll have to try the latest beta instead of 1.04?

And, installed GameEx instead, the damned thing won't run!

[pubjoe]

I had the same problems getting used to the way mala layouts need to be arranged. You need to place the background image (and all other layout images) in a folder with the exact same name as the layout's .mll file to avoid problems like that.

There's a few things that are hard to get used too like this. Without doubt, the best way to start off a layout is by fiddling with an existing one like retrogui.

[emphatic]

There's a few things that are hard to get used too like this. Without doubt, the best way to start off a layout is by fiddling with an existing one like retrogui.

Thanks, I'll give it a go. While on the topic of MALA, can it be setup to exit windows somehow?

[pubjoe]

As in shut down windows on mala exit? If so, then yes. You can have mala send commands of your choice on exit and at various other times I think. Iirc, there's a setting something like 'run on exit' somewhere.

What I want to do eventually is turn off disk caching (and/or whatever I need to do) to be able to just switch of the computer, without worrying about shutting down when done.

[emphatic]

What I want to do eventually is turn off disk caching (and/or whatever I need to do) to be able to just switch of the computer, without worrying about shutting down when done.

Yeah, that would be most convenient. The last time I had a dedicated MAME computer I ran GameEx in it + a smart power strip. So as I exited GameEx and the computer was turned off, monitor, speakers etc was turned off as well.

I really haven't missed all of the tweaking etc to get the computer ready for cab use though...

[pubjoe]

Yeah, it's kinda satisfying for a bit, but then you realise your spending more time tweaking than playing games.

That's what I mean about catching the bug.

I am pretty pleased with my crt perspective preview videos though. When i next get to it, I want to get a better fontface and then have it setup so I can just switch it on, switch it off. Then I'll try to leave the fiddling alone. ...I would like to reduce the gamelist a bit ...well a lot, but that sort of tweaking can be done bit by bit later (if ever).

[emphatic]

I think I have 12 games in my list.

Just got GameEx working (it needed at least SP2 of XP), so I'm gonna stick to that because it's much easier to skin.

[pubjoe]

12 games? Nice one. A man who knows what he wants.

Tbh, mala's not too hard to use once you've done it before. But anyway, better just stick with what you know.

I've never seen gamex. It'd be cool if you'd post up a shot of your menu/theme when your done. That's why I started this thread, in the hope of seeing stuff like that.

[BackInTimeSime]

This Mala look good, I got a Mame cab next to the Astro that I use just for vert shooters, I use GAMEEX currently, its pretty good, but isnt spacific enough for what I want, might have a play with this, see what I can come up with.

[emphatic]

spacific

W00t?

[tmc]

Pubjoe, is there any chance that you'd upload that vector of the candy cab please?

Scince looking at your front end i'd like to give it a go myself.

Did you use instant sheller to hide windows?? if so - how do you get back to windows if needed?

many thanks, tmc.

[emphatic]

Did you use instant sheller to hide windows?? if so - how do you get back to windows if needed?

Use a keyboard, press ctrl+alt+del and choose task manager. Go to file->New task-> enter "My Computer", hit [Enter]. This should bring up an explorer window. That should be enough to fiddle about with your settings, but if you need to completely go back to Windows, you'll have to launch Instant Sheller again, and click the "Undo" button. Last time I tried this, it worked. You should also be able to install Instant Sheller so that it only affects a specific user account, so if you hit ctrl+alt+del, you could just logout or switch user.

[pubjoe]

Pubjoe, is there any chance that you'd upload that vector of the candy cab please?

Scince looking at your front end i'd like to give it a go myself.

Yeah that's fine. There are two. I made the second one more front facing to get a better view of the screen. They're just rasters, traced over photographs in photoshop, but you could easily vectorise it if you wanted to. I've made a few details on seperate layers so you can fiddle around with it - I thought it looked too busy with all the details like speakers and marquee visable.

Only thing is. I won't have access to the file for a couple of days, so I'll stuck it up soon for you.