At-The-Arcade Flex (multi-resolution / multi-aspect, MAME + pinball) [Release]

[Mark Norville]

Yeah been using that and also searching the forum like mad, sadly a lot of old information, and sometimes not very good information.

E.G I wanted to know what over views were, and how to get the text displayed. I searched the forums and found multiple confusing posts, some of which were not even complete. You would have steps 1 & 2 but 3,4 & 5 were not included.

I did find one useful post, and bumped that up with new information from 2022, mainly because it gives new users like myself the chance to read proper information.

I did actually use the strip from the Wiki, it took a bit of trial and error but in the end it worked, I had a couple of dodgy results such as SNK/SEGA so no spaces, that would still show, and then SNK (bootleg) would still show, but my code will strip everything out now but it will leave SNK Playmore etc.

The coding is pretty simple ish to understand, e.g it is getting the year and then storing the year into a Y string, then you can do whatever you like with that code, such as printing on screen. I could never write code from the ground up though, and I thought that all themes would just be as easy as the one that I am messing around with, but some are very complex.

Sadly I have a busy week this week, so I need to force myself off the PC and get everything done but as long as I wake up early enough I can spend a few hours just waking up and messing around. I am the sort of person that if I want to do something, that becomes my main focus, so trying to get those to strip yesterday took me hours where I just sat at the PC and never done anything else until I had it working. I did congratulate myself with a beer though, as I was chuffed that I worked it out.

Hopefully soon, I can start doing some videos, to show newbies like me how to set things up, as not many tutorials on YT for this, and hopefully might get new people in the forum and using AM as I am quite impressed with it, and I started off on HS, then went to CO, and fed up that they keep coming out with new layouts, but none of the stuff that they come out with support full rom sets.

I think that I tried AM years ago as I remember the Nevato theme, but never liked the front end, but it is actually very good and gives the ability to do a lot with filters which a lot of other front ends cannot do, the only downside is no skinning engine for it, but, you have given me an idea actually.

You could potentially skin with Hyper Theme, transfer that across to AM and potentially edit that. I might have to look at that

Right time for another cuppa and then real life.

Regards

Mark

[Multiplexer02]

What problem do I have here?

Version:
Attract-Mode v2.6.1 (Windows, SFML 2.5.1 +SWF +7z +Curl)
avcodec 58.54.100 / avformat 58.29.100 / swscale 5.5.100 / avutil 56.31.100 / swresample 3.5.100

[Mark Norville]

I think that the skin creator said on page one, that you need to download his artwork for this to work properly.

You do have a post here, saying that the cabinets were edited http://forum.attractmode.org/index.php?topic=3778.0

I am using artwork that I have from Coinops and I am getting the same issues.

Regards

Mark

[Tungsten78]

@tsaylor. RE: Git

Curious how you have your repo setup relative to your attract installation?
* After forking the repo it looks like I'll need to clone at the attract root
* Doing so will constrain from maintaining a few layouts simultaneously
* Would you consider changing the root of your repo to your layout folder itself?
* You haven't changed the gtc-common or modules folders have you?  Might be best to have these as separate repos.  For simplicity, could go down the route of an aggregated repo with these as submodules.

Thoughts?
I'd be happy to POC this if needed.

[Tungsten78]

Have you considered editing the input file metadata instead?

The magic string is pulling from the respective column in the romlist file.
This would be a fairly simple regex you could do in a text editor of your choosing.

I did actually use the strip from the Wiki, it took a bit of trial and error but in the end it worked, I had a couple of dodgy results such as SNK/SEGA so no spaces, that would still show, and then SNK (bootleg) would still show, but my code will strip everything out now but it will leave SNK Playmore etc.

[tsaylor]

@tsaylor. RE: Git

Curious how you have your repo setup relative to your attract installation?
* After forking the repo it looks like I'll need to clone at the attract root
* Doing so will constrain from maintaining a few layouts simultaneously
* Would you consider changing the root of your repo to your layout folder itself?
* You haven't changed the gtc-common or modules folders have you?  Might be best to have these as separate repos.  For simplicity, could go down the route of an aggregated repo with these as submodules.

Thoughts?
I'd be happy to POC this if needed.

So... I wasn't really sure how to handle that, since the original layout was distributed at that "Master" directory level with all the required dependencies included. I hesitated to even include them, as I wasn't involved in their creation and am not even sure of all the original sources ("modules" as well as "gtc-common"). Then there is also the matter of the install instructions which are stored at that top level.

I would have preferred if the layout install "package" simply included the directory that can simply be placed under "layouts", but that would leave some complexity with the dependencies (and potentially the need to copy some files around after the fact). But that would have made applying updates easier. Makes me wish there were a general AttractMode way to declare/import dependencies without needing to include them in the layout downloads.

What I did on my system is put the entire repo into its own directory, and then made the AM "layouts/At-The-Arcade Flex" directory just a symlink to my git location. So that's another possible approach you could use. But I'm open to changing it, if you think the git submodule approach would be more workable.

[Mark Norville]

Ok so good news and some bad news.

I done all the hard work, supervising my computer with my eyes closed. Ok give it some credit, while I was sleeping my computer ran a batch file and took the 1920 x 1080 (ORIGINAL CoinOps) cabinets and then made them to 3840 x 2160.

I thought that might have solved the issue of the cabinets, but sadly that did not work. Well it works, it looks great on the skin that I am playing around with at the moment, but did not work on this skin.

Oh and before anyone asks, the whole lot is just over 10 gigs in size, and I may potentially upload it in the future, but I cannot do anything this week as busy in real life.

I can see what you mean by butchering it now, 1300 x 1080 for cabinets.png. I have just tried one cabinet and reduced it down to 1300 x 1080 that just looks squashed, and does not even go to the width of your cabinet how that looks.

However, it still had the original back ground, hang on I will do another test.

Ok so I now have a full sized cabinet working, I had to create a transparent 1300 x 1080 canvas, I then removed the background from one cabinet and then I cut and pasted that into the 1300 x 1080 canvas, saved that and job done.

Here is a rough 24 second video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn6okATnrKM

I will try something else a minute, so shall end here as just on my second cup of coffee and I am not even human yet.

Regards

Mark

[Mark Norville]

Ok, another quick video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDIBIqldzl0 it is not perfect the wall on the left is out of alignment, but this was just a two minute play around while I wake up.

However, I will say, as you said that you have all the files in your own local directory and not gtc-common.

Why did you not release this with all asset's inside their own directory, instead of the end user having to copy X,Y and Z into a directory that they may want to keep junk free?

It means that nothing can break if something is deleted by accident, if it is all in the layouts folder then it is all safe. If I go on a mad deleting spree and just kept the layouts folder, I now have a layout that no longer works.

I am not going to download all of the artwork, but I might have a look at one pack or the cabinets, just to see what you have done with the graphics.

Let's have a look at those graphics

You have removed the brick wall, how the hell did you do that? lol I have been trying, and failing and that was trying to remove it from one picture, let alone all the rest of them. Sadly when I do a mask it hits the arcade machine as well, I was hoping for a batch like I did resizing the cabinets, so God knows how long you spent removing all of those backgrounds, hopefully you never done it all by hand.

Regards

Mark

[tsaylor]

Yeah, this theme was just an enhancement to the work of others. The decision to include those upper level directories had already been made when I started my work, so I just stayed with the status quo. It's possible we could do that differently but I think the original author's intent was to avoid duplication of shared resources that are also used by several other themes.

The modifications to the coinops artwork all came from this thread by damonxxx http://forum.attractmode.org/index.php?topic=3778.0. If you check that one I think you'll see some discussion about how those files were reformatted and the bricks removed.

[Mark Norville]

Well I am learning slowly,

I just found out what carriers are, as you know they change how many wheel or marquee images are displayed on screen.

// Carriers
local slf = 2;

I just got to find out how to use them to my advantage now, I shall have a read of that link now.

Thanks

Regards

Mark

I just read the thread, sadly not what I wanted to here, but it is doable. Sadly a lot of information gets hidden.

However, from what I read.

1) Get cabinets the same shape as each other.
2) Start recording a batch file in photoshop and cut out the black walls.
3) Run batch file and let PS do the rest.

Dam means I have to do everyone myself lol as you lot have butchered the cabinets by going far too small.

[estefan3112]

Absolute killer layout. Works like a charm in MacOS, whereas gtc-common has to be installed in the .attract directory. Works on MacOS flawlessly. Thank you, this is pure joy  . The changing cabinets drive me crazy  .

[Erg4zz4]

Absolute killer layout. Works like a charm in MacOS, whereas gtc-common has to be installed in the .attract directory. Works on MacOS flawlessly. Thank you, this is pure joy  . The changing cabinets drive me crazy  .

Hi, can you please help me, i’ve installed the theme on mac, everything is working fine, except for the games in the atomiswave or naomi white cabinets, i can see my old marquee behind the cab, any idea how to fix this? I will still use it if it’s not possible, the theme is amazing! Thanks

[tsaylor]

Hi, can you please help me, i’ve installed the theme on mac, everything is working fine, except for the games in the atomiswave or naomi white cabinets, i can see my old marquee behind the cab, any idea how to fix this? I will still use it if it’s not possible, the theme is amazing! Thanks

I've got an idea what is going wrong there. First of all, there is a designated space for showing the game's marquee, and many of the cabinet images include a blank (transparent) space there so that the marquee can show through from behind. But other cabinets (like the one's you're referencing I think) include that marquee as part of the cabinet, so the separate marquee image (not really needed in that case) will just show behind it and normally be hidden. But then we run into a smaller cabinet like this example, and the marquee shows around the top and sides because the marquee region isn't really covered.

So I think that explains the main issue, but the remaining bit is where does that image come from. I'm assuming there is no marquee file matching that rom name, so AttractMode starts looking elsewhere. Most likely it is finding a match for the emulator name or the display name (guessing something like mame.jpg). That image might be in the marquee directory, but it could also be in some other less obvious location. If I recall, I had a problem like that where the image was actually within the scraper directory.

I'd suggest looking around for that file, probably named the same as the emulator or display, and renaming it. If no substitute marquee image can be located, I think it will just be left blank and that should solve the issue.

[Erg4zz4]

Yes, in the picture I’ve posted you can see the “general” arcade marquee behind the cab, but if i remove that image (mame.png) then I won’t have any marquee for the cabinets where I actually don’t have the respective marquee’s rom.
It is like my marquee are always in the same position , and it is perfect for the classics shape cabinets, or the big white ones because they are covered behind , the only “problem” is with the cabinets that don’t cover all the screen.
I will check tomorrow the scraper folder, thanks again for the great work! I will post any updates

[tsaylor]

Ok, then how about this: Make a transparent image, and name it to match the problem rom (for each of the ones with shorter cabinets). That way it should show nothing behind the marquee area, but only for these cabinets.