Arcadeflow theme v 9.9 [Release] Updated 22 February 2021

[edekoning]

What a great theme, I like it a lot!

As I only have 27 games on my arcade cabinet, I made some tweaks to get an even cleaner look:
- removed the scrollbar at the bottom
- removed all the rom details from the top
- removed the letter object that shows when selecting a game with a different first letter
- scaled the tiles, to make use of the new empty space

Other than the above, the only real option I am missing is the ability to use wheel images in box art mode. Note that this is possible with the default Grid layout of Attract Mode.

[zpaolo11x]

Other than the above, the only real option I am missing is the ability to use wheel images in box art mode. Note that this is possible with the default Grid layout of Attract Mode.

Very nice "clean" version! You did a lot of editing and you did it right, which is great, considering the intricacy of the code
By the way the option you want is already in Arcadeflow: go to the Options menu, Thumbnail section and enable "Game title over box art", this will show the wheel art on top of box art.

[edekoning]

Hehe, yeah the code is quite complex, and I did not want to spend too much time on trying to understand it all  . So all the changes I did were mainly setting the visibility of various things to false, and preventing the down key to select the timeline. And finally changing the header and footer spacers, to give the thumbnails more space. So not that much work really

I think you misunderstood me. What I am looking for, is being able to just display wheel images, as shown in image I took in the standard Grid layout. So wheel image centered in the thumbnail area, with a nice dropshadow, and retaining the option to morph into a snap video.

[zpaolo11x]

I think you misunderstood me. What I am looking for, is being able to just display wheel images, as shown in image I took in the standard Grid layout.

Oh now I get it, well... at the moment this is not possible: wheel artwork with its own drop shadow is overlayed and doesn't morph into snaps, you could hide snaps completely but then wheel won't be centered correctly. The thing most similar to what you intend is using "Titles" as source for thumbnail artwork. Of course you can try using wheel source for thumbnails but you'll get a white or grey backdrop behind it because thumbs drop shadows are fake, not calculated in realtime

[zpaolo11x]

I get the metadata when I scrape ScreenScraper.fr using Skraper UI, but what they put in that field can be very convoluted, and sometimes have multiple caterogies. such as: Role playing games-Action-Action / Adventure

Back on topic: my XML converter for Arcadeflow is ready, and I'm clashing with the absurd genre tag produced by Skraper. Notable example: "Action / Adventure-Action-Puzzle-Game" is this "Action/Adventure", fine, but then why Action is separated by a "-" and "Puzzle-Game" has the same "-" in the category name?!? XML scraped from EmulationStation directly are much cleaner with only one genre per game, or at least separated by a ",". There's the genreID tag that should fix the issue but I have no idea how it works and no one seems to have a clear explanation.
At the moment my plan is to parse the genre field looking for "cascaded" categories ("/" separated) and use that if it's present, otherwise I'll try splitting multiple categories by "," or "-" fixing "Puzzle-Game" which hopefully is the only one with this absurd naming!

[katarak]

Yeah, That's exactly right... they add so many different tags.

I did notice the Genre id as well but I don't know what they are attributed to. Did you try asking in the screenscraper forums or discord? I haven't asked, but it's an idea.

I will probably take, either the first or last tag only from the absurd genre tags and go with that.
Last time you mentioned you created images for all the mame categories. Is there a list somewhere on the web of what those are? I'd base myself on that so make sure I use a tag which is recognised from that list.
(I have such a hard time understanding all the associated files for Mame. I'll be setting up that emulator last )

I also want to build in to my tool to merge 2 EmulationStation Gamelist into 1 AM list. For NGPC as an example. I'll try to add that this weekend

[zpaolo11x]

I did notice the Genre id as well but I don't know what they are attributed to. Did you try asking in the screenscraper forums or discord? I haven't asked, but it's an idea.

I asked, but got no answer, maybe because I asked in english and most people there seems to speak only french (or pretend they can't speak anything but french )

Last time you mentioned you created images for all the mame categories. Is there a list somewhere on the web of what those are? I'd base myself on that so make sure I use a tag which is recognised from that list.

You can open the catver.ini from mame folder and you'll find there all the category combinations. I actually didn't create icons for all of them, just the most used. At the moment I'm adjusting some icons names to adapt to RetroPie category names. I don't really understand why anyone would use a different naming scheme since MAME was there ages before RetroPie and all the other scrapers...

I also want to build in to my tool to merge 2 EmulationStation Gamelist into 1 AM list. For NGPC as an example. I'll try to add that this weekend

Nice idea. Next version of AF will be able to import RetroPie romlists with descriptions, ratings etc, I'm thinking of something similar to create "All Handhelds" collection but it's not so easy since I'll have to create displays too...

[katarak]

I can see why people don't appreciate the MAME categories now that I've looked into it a little bit.

It we take Beat'em Ups they show up in the "Fighter" Category.
Kungfu in Fighter / 2D
Final Fight in Fighter / 2.5D
and Art of Fighting in Fighter / Versus.

I think the console market came out with different terms for the genres than the arcade world and that's probably creating a lot of confusion.
For example I've always seen it this way

Final Fight -> Beat'em Up
Art of Fighting -> Fighter
Super Smash Bros -> Brawler

I'll have to keep thinking about the best way to do this.

Mame also does Role-Playing instead of RPG (your icons also don't respond to RPG I had to rename them )

[zpaolo11x]

I can see why people don't appreciate the MAME categories now that I've looked into it a little bit.

It we take Beat'em Ups they show up in the "Fighter" Category.
Kungfu in Fighter / 2D
Final Fight in Fighter / 2.5D
and Art of Fighting in Fighter / Versus.

I think the console market came out with different terms for the genres than the arcade world and that's probably creating a lot of confusion.
For example I've always seen it this way

Final Fight -> Beat'em Up
Art of Fighting -> Fighter
Super Smash Bros -> Brawler

The mame implementation makes much more sense to me: Kungfu, Final Fight and Art of Fighting are all fighting games, so they end up in the same "main category", and 2D, 2.5D and Versus are perfectly clear indication of the type of games we are talking about. Beat'em up, fighter and brawler are more difficult to tell apart, and most of all they all fall in different categories, instead of one macro category, which is much easier to organize.

That said, I'm not native english speaker but even in italian we used to tell apart subgenres within the main "picchiaduro" genre.

[zpaolo11x]

Arcadeflow 9.7 is out!

Introducing the new tool to import RetroPie XML lists into Attract Mode romlists. Handle with care, make a backup of your lists just in case something bad happens... The tool takes the xml path from your emulator configuration file, if it's in RetroPie format it will process it and substitute your romlist with the new one, otherwise it will leave your romlist alone and safe

Enjoy!

[wivelden]

Hi,
I installed Retropie on my Raspberry Pi 3 and also installed attract mode and fully updated the whole system. I went to install this them but all I get is the games list as text vertically on the screen with a snap image background for each game. I tried another theme and that worked fine. Am I missing something here as I would love to get this theme working as I love the grid layout on my Arcade1Up Street Fighter cab.
Do you install this the same as the other themes for attract mode?

[mahuti]

Welcome to the board Wivelden.  Unfortunately this is one of the few layouts that won't run on a Pi. Even the 4 is a touch underpowered and won't fully run this theme at this time... but almost. On the 4 it loads and runs but upon returning from a game won't display any text or graphics.

[zpaolo11x]

Hi,
I installed Retropie on my Raspberry Pi 3 and also installed attract mode and fully updated the whole system. I went to install this them but all I get is the games list as text vertically on the screen with a snap image background for each game. I tried another theme and that worked fine. Am I missing something here as I would love to get this theme working as I love the grid layout on my Arcade1Up Street Fighter cab.
Do you install this the same as the other themes for attract mode?

As mahuti explaind in his answer, Arcadeflow has issues with PI systems, and AFAIK it doesn't work on a PI3. The fact that you see only a list of names with background is a bit strange though, there was an error in the packaging of the latest version, so you can try re-downloading it from the website. That said, don't expect it to work much better, but at least it should launch and not bring you to that kind of screen.
Not working with the PI is a big issue for AF, but it's a very GPU intensive layout so it's very difficult to make it work on the Raspberry which has some limitation in its GPU design

[mahuti]

A temporary hack "fixes" the problems on a Raspberry Pi 4 as shown below. Obviously this disables some functionality I'm sure, but if you really wanna use this on a Pi4... it's something I'm trying anyway just for fun.

Find this:

Code: [Select]

function on_transition( ttype, var0, ttime ) {

if (ttype == Transition.FromGame) {
change to this:

Code: [Select]

function on_transition( ttype, var0, ttime ) {

    if ( ttype == Transition.FromGame )
    {
       fe.set_display(fe.list.display_index) /*  Zpaolo11x offered this workaround, similar to Oomek's suggestion */
        return false
    }

if (ttype == Transition.FromGame) {
On the AM discord channel a similar problem came up which led to this from Oomek:

Seems like shaders and textures are being destroyed with the context
The only way I can think of is to reload the layout after exiting the game

if ( ttype == Transition.FromGame )
{
    fe.signal("reload")
    return false
}

Carrier does not need [a] workaround when I add the above to the main layout.nut transition
So it's a problem with AM, not with carrier or my layout....

[The Raspberry Pi 4] DRM version destroys the OpenGL context while launching a game
That brings a lot of collateral damage to drawables and shaders
The only way of fixing it atm is as I said to reload on FromGame trasition

So... try it, but beware. It may cause unforseen problems. YMMV.

You'll want to disable the splash logo, otherwise you'll see it every time you exit a game.

[adu]

Hello zpaolo11x

Again, thanks a lot for this theme and all your updates so far !

I got a question, maybe it's a dumb one ...
I'm currently making a Tate Cabinet ... Is your theme working on a Tate display ? (Is there an option to rotate the display when it is started, but let the Win Desktop in a yoko mode) ?