Arcadeflow theme v 17.4 [Release] Updated 05 September 2024

[tekn0]

This is amazing and looks fantastic! Thank you so much. I would love a beta release. That way I can help test it as well. Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

Also, I'm sorry about that file.io link going down so fast. I thought it would last at least a week or two.

[zpaolo11x]

This is amazing and looks fantastic! Thank you so much. I would love a beta release. That way I can help test it as well. Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

Here it is, you can download the beta from here: http://www.mixandmatch.it/AF/layouts/Arcadeflow_109BETA.zip it is pre-configured in a way that should work fine with vertical arcade artwork (9:16 correction enabled, moderate tile zooming, boxart mode), let me know if you have issues. This beta requires either attract mode nightly build for Windows or attractplus executable to work, I mean, it works also with 2.6.1 but with some issues in shadows.

[tekn0]

I am so excited to try this. Thank you! I will have to grab a nightly build of attract mode for testing. I am unable to find a windows compiled binary for AttractPlus on oomeks GitHub https://github.com/oomek/attractplus. Unless there is a thread on here somewhere with it posted for download?

Again, I really appreciate your help and support in adding these features. I can't wait to report back after testing.

[tekn0]

Here it is, you can download the beta from here: http://www.mixandmatch.it/AF/layouts/Arcadeflow_109BETA.zip it is pre-configured in a way that should work fine with vertical arcade artwork (9:16 correction enabled, moderate tile zooming, boxart mode), let me know if you have issues. This beta requires either attract mode nightly build for Windows or attractplus executable to work, I mean, it works also with 2.6.1 but with some issues in shadows.

Just an update, everything is working perfectly on my Windows 10 system! Using the newest attract more daily build from the forum and your 109BETA. Everything is smooth and looks great!. Fantastic work. Thank you again.

[zpaolo11x]

Just an update, everything is working perfectly on my Windows 10 system! Using the newest attract more daily build from the forum and your 109BETA. Everything is smooth and looks great!. Fantastic work. Thank you again.

Glad that everything is working fine Can you share a screenshot to see how it looks with a complete system?

[tekn0]

Absolutely! Here is an image of it up and running on the 32-inch TV I've been testing with. Once I get the rest of the images renamed to match my ROM list, I can post some more! I generated a romlist with around 300 or so games that have cabinets. In hopes to streamline the set up.

This is it running from attract mode daily, and your beta.

[zpaolo11x]

This is it running from attract mode daily, and your beta.

Looks neat I was thinking while coding the fix... at the moment the blurred background comes from the "cabinet" artwork, so probably it will be dark and not very colorful in this case, maybe it would be even better if the background was the actual snapshot of the game blurred, while the thumbnail artwork is the 9:16 cabinet.

[tekn0]

That is a cool idea as well! Although in this case, I actually turned the background from Pop to Dark on purpose. My eyes are sensitive to light sometimes, so I like to keep things dark when possible. The vertical cabinet idea is fantastic, but it is basically a whole screen turned vertically in your face depending on how close you are. That can get a bit bright over time. So keeping your theme on dark mode helps as a nice pallet cleanser for the eyes.

[tekn0]

When you had mentioned that your theme requires the latest version of attract mode, or attract mode plus. Does that have anything to do with asynchronous loading?

On my mid-range emulation system, scrolling through three columns seems to be a bit slow. Changing things to full-screen mode in attract mode general options sped things up slightly. But it's still very noticeable. I was just wondering if there are any workarounds that you might be able to suggest? Everything looks fantastic and is perfect otherwise. Thank you for any further assistance!

[zpaolo11x]

When you had mentioned that your theme requires the latest version of attract mode, or attract mold plus. Does that have anything to do with asynchronous loading?

No, asynchronous loading is buggy in AM and not yet implemented in AM+, the need for AM daily or AM+ is related to surface effects.

The issue you get can be caused by the large size of thumbnails, what is the resolution and average file size of the images you are using as "boxart" in the layout? Another issue could be if your GPU is not powerful enough for rendering the complex structure of Arcadeflow: on my late 2013 MBP AF doesn't run at 60 fps in fullscreen because of that.

[tekn0]

No, asynchronous loading is buggy in AM and not yet implemented in AM+, the need for AM daily or AM+ is related to surface effects.

The issue you get can be caused by the large size of thumbnails, what is the resolution and average file size of the images you are using as "boxart" in the layout? Another issue could be if your GPU is not powerful enough for rendering the complex structure of Arcadeflow: on my late 2013 MBP AF doesn't run at 60 fps in fullscreen because of that.

Thank you for clarifying, also are there any other benefits to attract mode plus? I still am unable to find a precompiled binary for windows. So I am using attract mode daily from the sticky thread.

The flyer/boxart images I am using are directly from that vertical arcade website, I spent an evening downloading and renaming them all. So they are 4K JPEG's. I could probably use a batch process to convert them to a lower resolution and try that. Thank you for the suggestion.

The computer I'm currently using is an Alienware alpha R1, with an Nvidia GTX 970 GPU. My goal is to try to get this running on a pi4 at 1080P. I was actually able to get things running on the Pi4 using retroarch/FBNEO with run ahead at 2 frames while using the Zfast Curved shader. I could have cooked food on the Pi4 it was so hot, but it was stable at 60fps.

[zpaolo11x]

The flyer/boxart images I am using are directly from that vertical arcade website, I spent an evening downloading and renaming them all. So they are 4K JPEG's. I could probably use a batch process to convert them to a lower resolution and try that. Thank you for the suggestion.

Well you should definitely try, 4K images are so large they can really slow down the system. For comparison I can clearly see a performance hit when using "flyers" from mame instead of snaps, or even if compared to console box artwork since those are usually 500x500 while mame flyers are much higher res. I suggest you try scaling the 4K pics to something around 500 on the long edge (or something more if you see blurryness)

The computer I'm currently using is an Alienware alpha R1, with an Nvidia GTX 970 GPU. My goal is to try to get this running on a pi4 at 1080P. I was actually able to get things running on the Pi4 using retroarch/FBNEO with run ahead at 2 frames while using the Zfast Curved shader. I could have cooked food on the Pi4 it was so hot, but it was stable at 60fps.

Well the Alienware sounds more than powerful enough to run AF at full speed, so the issue is probably in the file size. As far as the Pi4 is concerned, did you run AF on that? Wondering how it will run...

As for the AM+ binaries, you can download them only if you are logged in to Github, you can create an account and if you have issues please let me know

[tekn0]

I suggest you try scaling the 4K pics to something around 500 on the long edge (or something more if you see blurryness)

As far as the Pi4 is concerned, did you run AF on that? Wondering how it will run...

As for the AM+ binaries, you can download them only if you are logged in to Github, you can create an account and if you have issues please let me know

I will definitely try lowering the resolution on the images. I also upped the attract mode cache size to a few gigabytes. I do notice when I change the columns from 2 to 3 the response is smoother. I also can't decide if I like 2 columns or 3. They both look great!

I do not have arcade flow for running on the pi yet, but I do have attract mode running in retropie on my other arcade cabinet. In the future, I will definitely share my progress on that as well testing Arace Flow!

Thank you for the suggestion on github, I do have an account, I will try to login and download it there. I was looking at the documentation and I can't find any information on what is different from the mainline attract mode.

Again, this theme is so awesome. With your recent updates in this beta, it is a dream come true for this new vertical arcade style. Here is another image of the beta running. Sorry about the low image quality but the forum limits the file size.

[tekn0]

Some more images from the new beta with vertical arcade support!

[zpaolo11x]

Arcadeflow 10.9 is out!

This new version requires AM daily build or AM+ current build, it's been tweaked to take advantage of improvements that are not present in AM "classic".

New features include support for VerticalArcade cabinets with an option to have less spacing between snapshots, a new contextual menu and most important a brand new metadata editor that allows you to change the metadata of your games (it's non destructive and won't touch your romlist!)

Enjoy!