Messages

1

General / Windows Cabinet, steam games showcase in hyperpiev2 theme + share of video snaps

« on: December 07, 2020, 07:12:05 PM »

Hey i just spend the last 3 days creating steam video snaps for some of the games i have on my windows arcade cabinet. Note with creating i mean searching for videos on youtube of people playing the games i have on my cabinet and then creating 1-2 minute gameplay snaps out of them. I have done about 50 of them. you can get these snaps here https://mega.nz/fm/wtZCxB7B and see a showcase video of them being used on my arcade cabinet here https://youtu.be/UDz0gBL1OGM . The files are named after the steam app id (as is used with attractmode). But i placed a txt file with each video containing the name of the game according to steam. My arcade cabinet has more videos than shared but they are not of great quality as i did not have the original files saved so can not redo them and some come from emumovies so can not really share those either. But these last 50 ones i did save the original files.
Also i'm no expert on video encoding etc but i basically saved the edited youtube video in 720p at full quality and the let them pas through ffmpeg. Maybe some of you have some use for them.

Also if you are interested in seeing these games run on an arcade cabinet I have a steam curator where i test these games and mention which ones work and how many buttons the game need as well as a youtube channel mentioning the same thing but also showing the games in action.

Steam curator: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38318244-Arcade-Cabinet-Gamers/
The arcade cabinet gamers, Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP7Y2TK3vvYth00d76pPpIg

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General / Re: Setting up attractmode for mame in windows example video using nevato layout

« on: August 01, 2020, 01:19:14 PM »

Hey going further with the setup from the 1st video i also created a video now showcasing how to add handhelds and consoles using retroarch as well as showing where you can get system video's and wheels for free and how they work in attract mode (menuart folder). i took Snes as example but setting up any other system using retroarch is always the same.

In case anyone is interested the video is here https://youtu.be/8GE-Z32cSHg and goes further where the 1st video ended but it's not really necassary to have followed the 1st video, you can always download attract and skraperui etc manually and then follow the video

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General / Re: [HELP] Displays Menu Options...

« on: June 20, 2020, 04:10:24 AM »

not sure i completely understand and never tried it before but i think if you first generate romlists per system / emulator first or if already have them it's just a matter of merging all those rom lists for consoles into 1 big romslist for handhelds into 1 big romslist etc and use those romlists and leave out the systems (middle part). The romslist contains the game names / roms but also emulators used and in theory it might work

4

General / Re: Scraping from thegamedb.net not working

« on: June 17, 2020, 08:30:54 AM »

gamesdb has a request limit which is not that high .. so if your scraping a lot it will fail at some point. you can use other scrapers to scrape for media .. skyskraper, skraper (uses screenscraper.fr) etc. if your scraping for gameinfo only other scraper that can do it is skyskraper but there is no support for a windows version only real supported version is the linux and thus pi version but it can scrape for gameinfo you just have to know what your doing with it.

5

General / Re: To developers (implementation)

« on: June 06, 2020, 05:02:29 AM »

can you share an example (mov) movies you could try ffmpeg mov to flv but i think flv might look bad? as far as i'm aware attract uses libavcodec (on my rpi4 at least) and if libavcodec supports it it should play.

edit: ffmpeg won't work for flv, ffmpeg only supports yuv420p not yuva420p for flv output

6

General / Setting up attractmode for mame&retroarch in windows example using nevato layout

« on: May 24, 2020, 02:02:06 PM »

someone needed some help so i created a very basic how to video on how to setup mame using attract. I know it's possible to generate / import the complete list at once and never do it again but already had to explain too much. If you follow step by step using same paths you should be able to have setup mame and have some media for it

https://youtu.be/eAmXj72ZNZc

7

General / Re: Game manuals plugin (Released)

« on: May 23, 2020, 03:55:16 AM »

yes i know about the zip support, but i also need a way to know (beforehand) that a certain file with certain filename exists and i don't think there is support for that with zip files. For normal files i had to use a workaround function to know if a file exists. If you know of a way to verify if a file inside certain zip exists please let me know then i can add support for it. The plugin checks if certain filenames exists and do it's logic on that. Its needed to know the difference between file available and thus showing either the file or a "no manual found" image

8

General / Re: Game Descriptions missing

« on: May 22, 2020, 03:33:38 PM »

in case anyone is looking for more overview files. I created and seperated some per skraper source / system using skysraper and uploaded them to github. The best ones are the the ones from previous url + the screenscraperfr one. They mostly follow hyperlist rom lists

https://github.com/joyrider3774/attract_overviews

9

General / Re: Game manuals plugin i'm working on

« on: May 20, 2020, 11:52:59 AM »

ok i released an initial version of the plugin

available here https://github.com/joyrider3774/attract_gamemanuals_plugin

i included a simple batch file + pdftopng.exe to do your pdf conversions.

basically your pdf file has to be named the same as your rom's gamename in the romlist. and all you have to do then is run 'pdftopng.exe "filename.pdf" "filename"'  so you repeat the filename at the end without including .pdf it will create the correct png files then.

Be sure to read the readme on github it has all the info you need.

10

General / Re: Game manuals plugin i'm working on

« on: May 20, 2020, 04:15:01 AM »

thanks there is only one downside... JPEG takes more space than PDF

i had about 20 gig of pdf converted to 80 gig of pngs (1 picture per page) i then converted those pngs to JPEG at 95% quality and it was about 60 gig. Am currently redoing them at 85% quality to see how big it is then. Space is not an issue for me though but just interested in knowing. Thats the only downside but for the rest i'm happy with it and i can use it on my raspberry pi also (also got a disk there)

EDIT: same manuals at 85% jpeg quality is only 36 gigabyte so going to use 85% almost halved in size compared to 95% quality

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General / Re: Game manuals plugin i'm working on

« on: May 20, 2020, 12:09:27 AM »

new video on the game manuals plugin. Add many new options and it will autodetect extension and give preference to video's first. So now you can also show instruction video's or games advertisements or first show the manual and at the end the instruction video or advertisement. Opacity can be set for both background + manual, background color can be changed.

https://youtu.be/bKykdoQ1BDQ

12

General / Re: Game manuals plugin i'm working on

« on: May 18, 2020, 10:57:14 PM »

Added new options:

Preserve aspect ratio is working now



added option to display black background (to overlay everything)



or when when no keep aspect ratio is set the manual is stretched to screen dimensions

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General / Re: Game manuals plugin i'm working on

« on: May 18, 2020, 08:38:30 PM »

customn1 is definable you can choose any customn key. (like customn2 / 3 etc)

The same key is pressed again to go to the next page. There is no exit button i wanted to use just a single button. each press with the key loads (changes) the image until no file is found anymore then it hides. or if you switch games or launch the game it will hide itselve also. although if it's prefered i could try adding another customn key to cancel the image.

Edit: cancel key is added

14

General / Game manuals plugin (Released)

« on: May 18, 2020, 03:03:33 PM »

Edit: it's released grab it here https://github.com/joyrider3774/attract_gamemanuals_plugin

Hello guys,

I'm working on a plugin to show game manuals inside attract, it should work with any layout but it does not display PDF files, you need to convert the pdf files to single page images first but i know of a tool from pdf tools to convert a pdf to png per page. So when my plugin is finished i'll provide it along with the plugin.

The plugin uses a lot of code from the SumatraPDF plugin but that plugin used an external pdf viewer and i wanted my manuals to be displayed inside attract itselve as i can't use an external pdf viewer on the pi.

Anyway the plugin is not finished yet but does work already you can see a previous video here on my youtube https://youtu.be/KqkXegUpZPQ

15

General / Re: Attract Mode scraper and updated rom sets

« on: May 17, 2020, 11:01:43 PM »

skrapers can't know if a certain artwork is updated or not unless they keep metadata and the build in skraper does not do that. However certain skrapers always overwrite files but i'm not sure if the build in skraper does this. If it does not i know of a way to easily identify these files and erase those screenshots so they get redownloaded if you scrape afterwards.

Most of the times (depending on where your scraper got the data) the same screenshot is used to show "not working" screenshot or something so you need a tool that can search for such identical pictures by CRC and lets you delete them. one such tool is dupterminator it finds duplicate files by comparing md5 hash.

You let the tool search the files and you find one screenshot (show large files in the dir view in explorer.Exe) and locate it in the search results by sorting on the checksum column first and then all other files wich use the same screenshot should be in the same group. Highlight the files and press del button and they are erased.  After doing that rescrape your files and it will download new screenshots for the files you had erased.