Marquee screen

[fireslayer26]

So I have my attract mode setup and all is working great. I have a second monitor setup for my marquee's. It works great with the system menus and game marquee's when scrolling. But when I start a game, arcade or console based, the marquee disappears while playing the game, then comes back when I exit the game. Is there anyway to keep the marquee there while playing the game?

Thanks

[hermine.potter]

what you can test:

-set second display to same or lower resolution as first display

-in taskbar-settings, set taskbar to hide

-set Non-Blocking Mode Wait in emulator settings
start AM > press TAB key > Emulators > your_emulator > Non-Blocking Mode Wait
try it from 1 to 5 

-try another emulator for your system

[vengefultacos]

I have the same issue. I'm using Mame 64 on Windows 7, and have multimon enabled. Every time MAME starts up. the marquee display flips back to displaying the desktop.

I tried the settings mentioned:

• The taskbar has been hidden all along. That didn't help anything
• Block mode wait settings from 1 to 5 didn't work.
• Changing the display size of the marquee also din't have an effect.
• I don't have another emulator I want to run on this system, and don;t feel like setting one up just for debugging purposes. I did a test by creating a batch file that does nothing for 10 seconds and then quits. The marquee display doesn't get cleared, but then again neither does the main AM screen. So I guess that's not a good test. Maybe I can try something like launching a browser in kiosk mode to emulate another emulator.

I did find one weird sort of workaround. While I was debugging, the marquee screen would remain up after launching MAME once in a while. This caused me to tear my hair out until I figured out what was going on while writing this response. It turns out the marquee doesn't get cleared when MAME launches if I have an open VNC (remote desktop) connection to my arcade system. I sometimes use VNC to remotely access the arcade cabinet to tweak stuff because I often don't have a keyboard connected to it.  My guess is that the VNC server changes how the screen is rendered somehow, which somehow prevents the marquee screen from being wiped. I wonder if there is some sot of graphics level conflict between AM and MAME that causes a conflict?

[toothlessgrinn]

you still need the artwork files in mame dir.. if you already do then im no good to ya... lol.. hope you get it working.

[vengefultacos]

OK, I was able to fix this via the usual "change stuff until you find something that works" method. In my case, I'm running running MAME on Windows 7. The fix was to switch from using OpenGL to Direct 3D in mame.ini. I guess MAME's OpenGL renderer kicks Attract Mode off of the secondary display, even though it is not supposed to touch it. With Direct 3D, MAME doesn't seem to mess with Attract Mode's marquee display on the second monitor.

I guess that the reason why VNC was forcing things to work is that it forced everything through some sort of software renderer.

To be clear, I'm not letting MAME know about the second monitor. AM is control of the marquee. Here's the relevant section of my mame.ini:

Code: [Select]

#
# OSD VIDEO OPTIONS
#
video                     d3d
numscreens                1
window                    0
maximize                  1
waitvsync                 1
syncrefresh               0
monitorprovider           auto

And with that solved, my cab is now pretty much complete. Yeah!

[fireslayer26]

Mine does it no matter which emulator I'm using. Which leads me to believe its an issue with AM or Rocketlauncher??

[fireslayer26]

Ok, so it turned out to be a simple fix. I was using Attract Mode 2.2.1  and I updated it to 2.6.1 and now the marquee does not disappear when I start a game.

[nespcbuild]

What did you have to do to get AttracMode to display the marquee on your marquee monitor? Is there a specific theme you had to use or did you edit a theme to get it working? I'd like to get mine to display the marquees from AM instead of the method I'm currently using but I couldn't find any info on how to do that.

[nespcbuild]

Actually nevermind. I guess I just had to reboot or exit/relaunch AM after I enabled the multimon plugin and enabled multiple monitors in the settings. This is awesome! I was writing ahk scripts for every non-mame game I had on my cab. So much time wasted.

[hermine.potter]

@ nespcbuild
You didn't waste your time, because your AHK script sounds very interesting.
could you please post it?
For me, it's always useful to have such a script.

And the issue with multimon plugin / marquee on second screen:
I also had problems.
Posted my steps here

[nespcbuild]

Sure. Here's an example of the script. The way I have it, it's intended for the marquee monitor to be positioned directly above the other monitor in the Windows display settings but if you research the splashimage command online or are already familiar with it you can adjust the numbers to make it work with the marquee monitor positioned anywhere. I was able to get it working mostly fine with different width resolutions but I have one game that switches the resolution of the primary monitor and something was causing the marquee monitor to chop off the end of the image with that game and setting both monitors to resolutions with the same width was the way I fixed it. If I remember right, this method doesn't preserve the aspect ratio so the image needs the same ratio as the monitor's resolution or it may get distorted. I've been using the PCLauncher module in rocket launcher to launch these but I'm sure they could just be launched directly from AM.

Code: [Select]

SplashImage, C:\Emulation\RocketLauncher\_Media\marquee\tekken7.png, b t +x +y-810 w1920 zh-1 zw1920, ;displays the marquee on the marquee monitor. You can substitute the "+y-180 w1920 with the height (y) and width(w)of your montor.
Run, TEKKEN 7.url, C:\Emulation\RocketLauncher\_Launchers ;launches the game from a desktop shortcut. Use .url file extension for steam games and .lnk for gog games
Process, Wait, TEKKEN 7.exe ;waits for the games process to exist
Process, WaitClose, TEKKEN 7.exe ;waits for the game's process to close
SplashImage, Off ;removes the splash image from the marquee monitor
I think I'll mostly just use the built in feature from AM from now on since it works pretty well for me and is a lot less work, but this AHK method could potentially be modified to allow you to switch between a marquee and some other image like a moves list for a fighting game using a joystick command. I was thinking I might try that for certain games at some point down the road.

[hermine.potter]

@ nespcbuild
thank you. Currently testing which option is best for me to get a moves list in AM.
Try everthing soon: AM Plugins, external Scripts.