Arcadeflow theme v 17.5 [Release] Updated 17 December 2024

[zpaolo11x]

Progretto-Snaps is the „unofficial“ resource that the „team“ uses. Snaps are taken is original size from mame. I don’t think they are included in the extras torrent yet maybe because there is more demand on arcade side of things.?

http://www.progettosnaps.net/softwareresources/

Thank you, I got my arcade snaps from Progettosnaps but couldn't find this page where all the other systems snaps are listed. This are proper snapshots at last! The only issue now is that all these use the mame naming convention, while all the other media I have for consoles uses the "emumovies" naming convention and hyperlist xml files.

I'm wondering if people into console emulation use mostly mame or specific emulators, or if there's a way to mix both worlds. Is there an xml file for the progettosnaps files?

Sorry for the noob questions but up until now I was mostly into mame arcade emulation

[keilmillerjr]

Progretto-Snaps is the „unofficial“ resource that the „team“ uses. Snaps are taken is original size from mame. I don’t think they are included in the extras torrent yet maybe because there is more demand on arcade side of things.?

http://www.progettosnaps.net/softwareresources/

Thank you, I got my arcade snaps from Progettosnaps but couldn't find this page where all the other systems snaps are listed. This are proper snapshots at last! The only issue now is that all these use the mame naming convention, while all the other media I have for consoles uses the "emumovies" naming convention and hyperlist xml files.

I'm wondering if people into console emulation use mostly mame or specific emulators, or if there's a way to mix both worlds. Is there an xml file for the progettosnaps files?

Sorry for the noob questions but up until now I was mostly into mame arcade emulation

Yeah, dude. Thats why i stay away from hyper anything.

[dukpoki]

I'm wondering if people into console emulation use mostly mame or specific emulators, or if there's a way to mix both worlds. Is there an xml file for the progettosnaps files?

Definitely separate, specific emulators.  Mame is really only good for the arcade side of things.   A good starting point of understanding the state of general emulation can be found here.  The gold standard of naming convention is Redump for disc based systems and No-intro for cartridge.

[Enkak]

I have a question for you guys: in my project of expanding Arcadeflow to support all kind of consoles I found that most snaps found on emumovies are rescaled. For example I got the Game Boy static snap pack and the resolution of snaps is 534 x 480, while the native GB resolution is 160 x 144. This is not a showstopper but messes a bit with the CRT shaders and especially messes with the LCD shader I was starting to develop. And it's also a bilinear filtered rescale so it's not easy to revert it back to "unfiltered" state.

Do you know if there's a native resolution snap/video pack for consoles, like there is for mame games? Maybe there's something since mame can now simulate consoles but I never tried this aspect of mame myself.

You can download the SQ quality snaps in EmuMovies to see if things improve because they have less resolution. The HQ quality sometimes mess things up for frontends, between the higher resolution and framerate (60 instead of 30).

[zpaolo11x]

Definitely separate, specific emulators.  Mame is really only good for the arcade side of things.   A good starting point of understanding the state of general emulation can be found here.  The gold standard of naming convention is Redump for disc based systems and No-intro for cartridge.

Ok, I already found the No-intro stuff. I will stick with separate emulators even if emumovies snaps and videos are not pixel perfect

[zpaolo11x]

You can download the SQ quality snaps in EmuMovies to see if things improve because they have less resolution. The HQ quality sometimes mess things up for frontends, between the higher resolution and framerate (60 instead of 30).

I already downloaded the SQ snaps and video snaps, but they are all "480p" images stretched with bilinear filtering I don't see the point of doing that, they take up a lot of space (gameboy snaps 60 MB instead of 8 MB!) and look worse when filtered.
Right now I scaled back and recolored gameboy snaps but I can't do it easily for videos

[keilmillerjr]

I'm wondering if people into console emulation use mostly mame or specific emulators, or if there's a way to mix both worlds. Is there an xml file for the progettosnaps files?

Definitely separate, specific emulators.  Mame is really only good for the arcade side of things.   A good starting point of understanding the state of general emulation can be found here.  The gold standard of naming convention is Redump for disc based systems and No-intro for cartridge.

Mame is actually good at many consoles. You can read the source for drivers on github. They often document whats left to tackle. Redump has a good naming convention, but not good for indicating different dumps and doesnt follow dos 8.3 standard. Might be important for some.

[spelunkyguy]

FWIW I use RetroArch as a multi-emulator solution. Personally I'm not interested in arcade emulation, but RetroArch has a MAME core too. I haven't messed with MAME in a long time but from memory it only handled older systems, whereas RA covers PSP, Wii and 3DS among others (I still use standalone emulators for PS2/3 and WiiU though). As far as video snaps go I mostly use ScreenScraper.

[zpaolo11x]

As far as video snaps go I mostly use ScreenScraper.

I didn't know this site, is it possible to download entire packs from there? Do I need to register?

[zpaolo11x]

Working to streamline v4.6 and on my universal scale/crop/adapt routine, here are the first results for handheld games: Game Boy Advance is horizontal, it's cropped in a 4:3 ratio, Game Boy is squarish and is cropped into a square aspect ratio. The title is now "popping" over and not inside the square thumb. The new look is intended to be homogeneous between arcade games, TV console games and handheld games.

The "Square" thumbs mode with cropped thumbnails and title inside the box will still be available, and applied throug all systems (arcade, console, handheld).

Of course boxart mode will be available too, this was only for thumbnails mode.

[zpaolo11x]

This is what I mean by "flexible" routine: in this romlist there are Genesis games, SNES games and GameBoy games. The layout happily mixes horizontal and squarish screens in "snapshot" mode, while in "boxart" mode horizontal, vertical and square game boxes are shown correctly. All this will be released in Arcadeflow 4.6 as soon as I check all the minor details

[Enkak]

Looking good the new previews. I like that everything is working homogeneous and automatic between the systems for thumbnails versions, and having also the extra option for boxart of course. So undecided here of which using between the two versions for consoles/handhelds. And for now not thinking much about the option of using flyers for Arcade since that can complicate things maybe.

[dukpoki]

Like it a lot but I have two ideas/suggestions...perhaps wishes 

1.  Instead of having two different modes.  I would just do boxart mode from the start.  Then when you hover over a game after a second, the box transitions to a snap and starts playing the video or snapshot.  I understand though that this may get too complicated because unlike how you have pictures of snaps transitioning to playing the video, you'll have different aspect ratios for box arts transitioning to the snaps.

2.  Have an option for a simpler UI.  I would love an option to disable most of the text on top.  I personally would just keep the Name/title of the game and the region for a cleaner look.

[zpaolo11x]

So undecided here of which using between the two versions for consoles/handhelds. And for now not thinking much about the option of using flyers for Arcade since that can complicate things maybe.

I'm not a fan of arcade flyers because they are usually huge and slow down the layout a bit, but with the new routine they look good and are rendered with the proper aspect ratio.

I have made some changes in 4.6: you can add "CRT" or "LCD" to System Identifier so the layout will adapt snapshots and filters accordingly, this makes a lot of sense since CRT display or LCD display is something that's bound to the emulator itself.

Box art mode on the other hand is now available for all systems, not only consoles, but is a global setting. I think the best option would be to make it a "per-display" setting (struggling a bit with that) instead of binding it to the emulator system identifier. I could add a "BOX" entry to the emulator system identifier to enable box art mode on a "per emulator" basis, but that would imply that on mixed romlists you'll have a mix of screenshots and box arts, gotta check if it works and I don't know if I like it

By the way, there's a nice addition in 4.6: you can use a menu or a custom button to switch from screenshots to box art on the fly, no need to enter layout options, no need to reload the layout, push a button and it switches, I'm so proud of that :O

[zpaolo11x]

Like it a lot but I have two ideas/suggestions...perhaps wishes 

I like suggestions, they make me go into directions maybe I didn’t think myself

1.
I won’t make box art default because Arcadeflow was born with a distinct look using snaps and popping titles, but your suggestion for snaps is good. It can actually be done pretty easily if the overlaying video has no border, glow effect or drop shadow, but that would look pretty dire imo.
It would be great to be able to morph the box art into a snapshot changing aspect smoothly but that would require dynamic shadows and glows while now they are fixed. I tried dynamic shadows in the past but it was very slow. I’ll think about it though.

2.
This can be done easily, I can implement a “game title only” mode that hides icons and other data