Artworks aka flyers not displaying

[Neil]

I have this weird problem in my latest install where artworks no longer display. The snaps videos play fine and all the files are in their proper folders yet instead I get a no image available message. I'm using Windows 7 pro.

[progets]

Which layout are you using? Where are your images stored? Post your emulator.cfg for the system you're using.

[Neil]

I'm using Game Station as the theme. The pc is on Windows 7, i3 7350k, ATI HD 6450, 8gb ram on an asrock mother board.

The images are stored in the attract mode folder scraps/mame/flyers

All other parts of the scraps folder is working (marquee, snaps and wheels I believe they are called).

When I had set it up on my other computer it worked without a problem.

Sorry if this sounds incredibly newbish but what is a emulator.cfg?

[progets]

The file that represents the emulator/system your trying to use in \attractmode\emulators\<system_name>.cfg. Also post your \attractmode\attract.cfg file.

[Neil]

Thank you for the explanation. I found the file and am attaching it.

[Neil]

So now instead of having "no image available" displayed I'm now getting something else, what looks like a bunch of angled horizontal lines, something that looks like a monitor getting an image in the wrong resolution (this is on the lcd by the way). Only a few flyers are appearing correctly and they seem to be the very low res ones like wonder boy in monster land and such.

EDIT: Scratch that, now after quitting and restarting I'm getting the "no image available" message again.

This doesn't happen on my other pc so I'm not sure what I did wrong here.

[progets]

Thank you for the explanation. I found the file and am attaching it.

This file doesn't contain a "flyer" artwork field. You need to add this to your file. You can use the GUI, Configure-->Emulators-->mame-->Add Artwork-->Artwork Name=flyer and Artwork Path=C:\attract-v2.5.1-win64\scraper\mame\flyer (or whatever your path is).

You can also manually replace the contents of your mame.cfg with my suggestion below (verify the paths are correct). I tweaked a few things.

Your current file

Code: [Select]

# Generated by Attract-Mode v2.5.1
#
executable           C:\mame\mame64.exe
args                 [name]
workdir              C:\attract-v2.5.1-win64\.
rompath              C:\mame\roms/
romext               .zip;.7z
system               Arcade
info_source          listxml
artwork    marquee         $HOME/mame/marquee
artwork    snap            $HOME/mame/video;$HOME/mame/snap

My suggested new file

Code: [Select]

# Generated by Attract-Mode v2.5.1
#
executable           C:\mame\mame64.exe
args                 [name]
workdir              C:\mame
rompath              C:\mame\roms
romext               .zip;.7z
system               Arcade
info_source          listxml
artwork    flyer     C:\attract-v2.5.1-win64\scraper\mame\flyer
artwork    marquee   C:\attract-v2.5.1-win64\scraper\mame\marquee
artwork    snap      C:\attract-v2.5.1-win64\scraper\mame\snap


[Neil]

Thank you so much. So I went ahead and copied everything exactly as you presented it but unfortunately it still won't display the images. Not sure if this is relevant or what not but I also find that compared to my other PC the navigation is very slow. I'm wondering if I shouldn't try reducing the resolution of the images, maybe it's not able to keep up. The gpu on the groovymame pc is an ATI HD6450. cpu is an i3 7350k but I'm not sure whether that matters in this matter.

Here's the current mame.cfg I don't think I missed anything but just in case.

[Neil]

So it looks like once it encounters an artwork it can display it does so (like I can see Shadow Force) and after that it will display other ones with scribbled horizontal lines of different colors. It looks like it can mostly see the ones that are around or under 1mb in size.

[progets]

Confirm that you your flyer artwork is in C:\attract-v2.5.1-win64\scraper\mame\flyer and the file names match your rom names.

[Neil]

Yes I did. So turns out when I reduce the resolution of the images, to say 600 vertical pixels, the file size is also reduced dramatically and at this point it appears I am able to display them properly. I guess I'll just have to do that for each one of them, it probably shouldn't matter on the crt anyway but I'm surprised this step is necessary.

One thing that surprises me is how slow the navigation is, going up or down between each game has a lag, perhaps one or sometimes even 2 seconds to load up the next one. Is that normal behavior with older gpus like the HD 6450?

[progets]

You might want to test with different layouts before converting your flyers. Some layouts are made for 4:3 while other are made for 16:9. There are also parameters in the layout.nut files that can call for a true aspect ratio for an image vs. an altered aspect ratio to fit into a specific space.

Converting your images is an option and can be done in an automated batch job with a free program to make things easy if that's the option you take.

[Neil]

Thank you. Is there a way to tell what resolutions different layouts are compatible with? I'm wondering whether Game station might be incompatible with 640x480 and that might be causing the issue I have on the crt.

Meanwhile the artwork problem is solved with the lower size files, but browsing is still quite slow and I'm not sure what to do to improve that, perhaps I will have to stick with basic on the groovymame pc.

[rand0m]

Neil if flyers have taken you long to collect and are in excellent form (clear, large resolution and without color distortion) then keeping originals in some archive (zipped) is what I'll recommend. Create copies in shorter resolution for AM (many batch apps available).

You can try mipmap to improve browsing speed. In the layout where instructions for flyers are, add the line:

flyers.mipmap = true;

"flyers" should be replaced with whatever you are calling flyers locally.

[Neil]

Thank you so much! That alleviated the sluggishness big time when testing on the lcd.
Now I've migrated to the crt so I'm just having to figure out how to get Attract Mode working there (currently just giving me a black screen with white lines flying around) but that's a different matter I'm currently inquiring about in the "emulator" section. Hopefully I can get it working eventually.