Hello,
I recently installed Attract Mode onto my win 10 pc (after binning coinops)
Welcome to the forum, such a nice and polite way that you introduced yourself and asked for help. I hope two other newbies see this.
However, glad to see that you binned coinops I done the same and never looked back. I am sick of new build after new build, you get one system up and running and then he releases something else. You spend more time wondering if it is worth carrying on with things, especially when Retro Arcade 2 was supposed to be an all singing and dancing build only to find out that it is not powerful enough for full collections.
Some newbie tips for you
1) Make two different AM (Attract Mode) directories, one for your main build and then one for learning. Use the learning one and make mistakes on that, but when you get things correct then copy those settings into your main build.
2) Always check for spelling mistakes, missing .exe for something that should have emulator.exe. Spelling mistakes have been the majority of my problems in the past, present and hopefully not future
3) When you have put things together in the emulator section you generate roms for the whole lot, call this
All Systems this means that you can add favourites etc to your builds, you can filter the rom set based on emulator or system name. I was doing PS1 Europe etc, using that rom list, trying to add games to my favourites but they would not add. Sadly this is a constraint on the system annoying but easy enough to work around.
4) Sadly another bad thing about AM is that sometimes you need to downgrade the videos, E.G it is not very good at handling MP4 so when you download from YT as an example and you download 720p,1080p or 4K if you have too many of them it can cause the program to slow down and a lot of stuttering videos. I use the free built in Windows 10 video editor just to downsize the videos.
5) Start off slowly, try five roms first, get things working before trying to import a thousand of so files, make sure you like how things are, can you make changes to improve, a lot easier changing things with only five files, than it is a thousand or so.
6) Use the back end to start with, but keep an eye on romslists and also attract.cfg file learn how they work, especially the attract.cfg and in the end it is a lot faster to make changes and add things to the attract.cfg file than it is to use the backend. You still need the back end to set up emulators, but apart from that new collections are far easier just editing the config file.
AM is a diamond in the rough piece of software, which means that yeah it is not perfect, but once you realise what it can actually do better than other software then you think WOW this is actually pretty good. It just takes a slight learning curve to get the best out of it. I swapped from CO about four months ago now, I have not looked back since. I was looking at HS once again or lunchbox but I hate lunchbox, and HS I really did not want to go back to.
The main feature of AM is that you can have one build but hundreds, thousands of different themes if you wanted to. E.G I can have theme A as my main display, I go to the Sega Master System, I can have Theme B display, I go to Sega Mega Drive, I can have Theme C display and so forth. One program different layouts, where on other front ends, you are stuck with one theme or layout for the rest of your life.
Regards
Mark
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