Attract-Mode Frontend version 1.6 released

[dcninja]

the front end runs at a snails pace for me on my p4 mame box... all my games run flawless though... any idea as to why it does this? Currently it is unusable for my cab

[dcninja]

maybe it's the animated background because it seemed to get a bit faster when i went to screenshots instead of video previews but still not really usable... are there any simpler skins for this front end that are just still images? If so, how do I use them? I really like this front end and want to make it work. Thanks!

[raygun]

I love the idea of this front-end! Is it mostly for MAME/arcades or can it be configured to run RetroArch with its abundance of console cores as well?

Great work!

Hi, thanks

It should work with retroarch but i haven't tryed it myself.  You would just need to create an emulator configuration for each core you want to use.

[raygun]

the front end runs at a snails pace for me on my p4 mame box... all my games run flawless though... any idea as to why it does this? Currently it is unusable for my cab

hi dcninja, what OS are you using?  Graphics card?  Are you able to confirm if other programs using OpenGL are working ?

[dcninja]

Is opengl something that I have to install? I am using windows 7 on a pentium 4 with onboard video. runs mame fine.

[raygun]

Is opengl something that I have to install? I am using windows 7 on a pentium 4 with onboard video. runs mame fine.

You might be defaulting to a software version of opengl.  Installing the latest video drivers for your graphic hardware might help.  See:  http://www.opengl.org/wiki/Getting_Started

[crawlingpeter]

I love the idea of this front-end! Is it mostly for MAME/arcades or can it be configured to run RetroArch with its abundance of console cores as well?

Great work!

Hi, thanks

It should work with retroarch but i haven't tryed it myself.  You would just need to create an emulator configuration for each core you want to use.

Awesome. Thank you. I will give it a shot this weekend when I have time.

And also, I really dig the layout screenshot you posted about a month ago, cools. Would you be willing to update us with what you're working with now?

Thanks to you both!

[cools]

Mine hasn't really changed since I posted that screen. Some tweaks for colour and fades but pretty much the same (I've binned alpha text and used random pastels as the code for making objects fade to a loading screen was getting hideous). If I remember next time I'm at the cab I'll take a copy.

[dcninja]

latest drivers were installed already. i wiped and reinstalled to be sure. same issue.

[crawlingpeter]

As I was going through and setting up some MAME filters tonite, attract.exe crashed and closed. Here is the error in the Event Viewer in case it helps you at all!

Faulting application name: attract.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x52da1b32
Faulting module name: attract.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x52da1b32
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00071edb
Faulting process id: 0x2208
Faulting application start time: 0x01cf32a87c3a44ad
Faulting application path: C:\attract-1.1.1\attract.exe
Faulting module path: C:\attract-1.1.1\attract.exe
Report Id: 2b0559ec-9e9c-11e3-beac-5404a6c23fcd
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

Regardless, I still love this front-end and am very much looking forward to the next build.

[raygun]

Hi crawlingpeter,

yes the crash when creating filters is a known bug that will be fixed in the next version (which is almost ready!)

details here:
https://github.com/mickelson/attract/issues/11

thanks !

[cools]

Reminds me, it crashes when you press the PC power button as well. Logged.

[dcninja]

new fix did not work. still very slow even on options menu switching front end controls and stuff.

[crawlingpeter]

cools, I went through and added your newest layout and it's awesome! I also used a lot of the same filters you did... but I have another question. Is there a way to filter out clones? Like a wildcard character you can put in a rule to signify you want to hide every clone?

EDIT: Oh, and while we are talking of filters, I was also wondering if there was a way to hide CHD games.

Thanks to everyone! I can't wait for the new release!

[raygun]

Reminds me, it crashes when you press the PC power button as well. Logged.

Duoh! Thanks for the report.

new fix did not work. still very slow even on options menu switching front end controls and stuff.

Bummer DC.  Just so I'm clear, is this only happening to you on your one system?  Are you able to get attract-mode working well on another computer?  What happens when you switch to the "basic" layout and toggle movies off? Is it still unusable then?

cools, I went through and added your newest layout and it's awesome! I also used a lot of the same filters you did... but I have another question. Is there a way to filter out clones? Like a wildcard character you can put in a rule to signify you want to hide every clone?

EDIT: Oh, and while we are talking of filters, I was also wondering if there was a way to hide CHD games.

Thanks to everyone! I can't wait for the new release!

The filters work using regular expressions, so there are probably a few ways to do it... ".+" will match any combination of one or more characters, so if you filter the romof field to not contain ".+" it should filter out anything that indicates it is a clone.

I don't think there is a way to filter out CHD games at the moment...

[crawlingpeter]

Thanks! That did work to filter out clones, it seems... and I will just acquire the CHD set I suppose because I'd prefer even a broken game starting than nothing at all. 

[cools]

To get rid of clones I seem to remember I just did an equals for a blank field on clones...

[raygun]

Hey everyone,

Version 1.2 is now up on the website.  Thanks for all the great feedback and suggestions.

Here's what's new:

- Favourites added. Favourites can now be marked, filtered and navigated through for each romlist
- Added a French localization (thanks Nolan!)
- Improved gamepad and analog joystick support
- Added GLSL shader support to layouts
- Import from Hyperspin and Mamewah/Wahcade! romlists
- Support proper multi-user install on Linux and OS X
- Added ability to filter based on display type and number of displays
- Fixed crash when creating filters
- Added 'relaunch last game' and an option to auto-relaunch on startup
- Option to hide bracketed text in game titles
- You can now configure layout-specific options from the configure menu
- New included layout (thanks cools!)
- many other bug fixes and improvements

Download link: http://attractmode.org/download.html

[crawlingpeter]

Amazing work! This really is my favorite of all the front-ends already and that's just based on what I saw from the last version. Keep it up forever and ever!

EDIT: So far the new version is great! However, is it just me or are others getting some slowdown in their MAME videos after a second or two?

[dcninja]

there's no basic layout option. it works fine on my i5 nvidia system but not my p4 onboard system.

[nitrogen_widget]

What distribution are you running?  It was really easy to compile on my mame cabinet which is running Debian unstable, just installed the development packages for a few libraries, and followed the compile instructions.  On my Ubuntu  13.10 laptop, it was a PITA, because the version of SFML packaged for it was old, so I first had to get the latest version of that and compile it, and even then there were a few things I had to fix by hand (a few of the dynamic libraries that it created didn't have proper links to other libraies).  I've not tried it on anything else.

I was able to install all the dependencies & compile it (eventually) on a debian testing distro.
I havn't played with it too much yet though.

My plan is to create a live image for booting off USB or compact flash eventually.
I'd prefer using something tiny like Slitaz linux but SFML needs to be compiled for that distro since it's not available as a package.

[raygun]

Just released version 1.2.1.  It is a bugfix release addressing many of the bugs reported in 1.2.

[keilmillerjr]

This front end is amazing! I was playing with it last night. I hope to start on a theme for it tonight to match my neo geo mvs theme.

I haven't spent a huge amount of time with it yet, so forgive me if I ask a question where I may have overlooked the answer.

Is there a way to change the looks or color of the menus?
Any way I can load settings from a yaml/ini/cfg file to use in my theme to make it easy to apply different colors and images? I'm not familiar with squirrel (ruby dev).

Thank you!

[bleargh]

raygun, can themes show a movie in the background, and then overlay that with images?

I'm thinking along the lines of what cools has w/his layout, but w/video background instead of just the snap.  Alternatively, instead of doing it as a movie, maybe an MNG?  (don't know if that's supported by SFML though).

Regardless, attract-mode is AWESOME.  Compiling it on my Fedora-20 machine was pretty simple (RPM available on request to those who want it), and once I realized that I had to copy the files out of /usr/local/share/attract/config/layouts into ~/.attract/layouts/ to get them to work things went much faster.

Lov'n it!

[raygun]

This front end is amazing! I was playing with it last night. I hope to start on a theme for it tonight to match my neo geo mvs theme.

I haven't spent a huge amount of time with it yet, so forgive me if I ask a question where I may have overlooked the answer.

Is there a way to change the looks or color of the menus?
Is there a way to shut down computer on exit? Or can I run a script/exe on exit to accomplish the same task?
Any way I can load settings from a yaml/ini/cfg file to use in my theme? I'm not familiar with squirrel (ruby dev).

Thank you!

Hey there, glad you like it.

The themes/layouts are completely configurable, so you can change the look/colours/font etc of the menus by editing the associated layout script file.  The "Layout.md" file included in the distribution describes how the layouts work in detail.

If you go to the "General" menu in configuration mode, one of the options is to specify an Exit command that gets run whenever you exit the frontend.  If you are on linux you would put in something like "sudo shutdown" as the exit command, on windows I think it is "shutdown /s" that you want.

There isn't really a way to load layout settings from a yaml/ini/cfg file for a theme, at least not the way I think you mean.  The idea is that the squirrel script file for the theme will contain all the settings...

raygun, can themes show a movie in the background, and then overlay that with images?

I'm thinking along the lines of what cools has w/his layout, but w/video background instead of just the snap.  Alternatively, instead of doing it as a movie, maybe an MNG?  (don't know if that's supported by SFML though).

Regardless, attract-mode is AWESOME.  Compiling it on my Fedora-20 machine was pretty simple (RPM available on request to those who want it), and once I realized that I had to copy the files out of /usr/local/share/attract/config/layouts into ~/.attract/layouts/ to get them to work things went much faster.

Lov'n it!

Thanks! good to hear you can get it going on Fedora without too much pain.

And yes you can do video in the background and overlay that with images.  In fact, I'm pretty sure that's how cools has his layout running now, there's even a rough video of it in action:

The video and audio decoding for the frontend is done by FFmpeg, I'm not sure if it supports MNG.

The fact your layout files wound up in /usr/local/share/attract/config/layouts is a bit of a concern, they should have been installed into /usr/local/share/attract/layouts (i.e. without the "config" subdir).  Did you use "make install" to copy the files over originally or some other method?

[bleargh]

Thanks! good to hear you can get it going on Fedora without too much pain.

And yes you can do video in the background and overlay that with images.  In fact, I'm pretty sure that's how cools has his layout running now, there's even a rough video of it in action:

The video and audio decoding for the frontend is done by FFmpeg, I'm not sure if it supports MNG.

The fact your layout files wound up in /usr/local/share/attract/config/layouts is a bit of a concern, they should have been installed into /usr/local/share/attract/layouts (i.e. without the "config" subdir).  Did you use "make install" to copy the files over originally or some other method?

Was minimal pain getting it running on Fedora.  On second glance, though I see that the problem with my layout files not showing up is my bad... when doing the install when building an RPM package, I installed them one level too far down.  My bad.  I had to install the files manually as I didn't see an easy way in your Makefile to specify an install root (e.g. "install everything just like it would on a real box, but instead of doing it under '/', do it under '/var/tmp/rpm-123456'").  Thankfully, there aren't that many files here to install, so it wasn't that hard.  Sure enough, though, I still managed to botch that up.     

As for the videos, IIRC that was the one I saw before and which made me want to know if it was possible.  Looks awesome with the video playing, and I've been tweaking the cools theme to fit within the bezel I've got on the cocktail cabinet I'm building this into. 

[keilmillerjr]

Heres a video of my progress on the theme from last night.



Thanks for the reply raygun. I'll just use variables in squirrel to allow users to change things.

I'm running the theme in native 1920x1080 and it looks beautiful. However, the video is glitchy. I'm running an i3 3.1 HD2500. Is it due to my processor, video card, or something else?

Also, any idea of how I could add steam games?

When all is done, I'll upload it to github and then work on making other colors and resolutions.

[cools]

Yep, video already done https://github.com/rogalian/attract-extra/blob/master/layouts/cools/layout.nut

Note, just use the video/snap substitution within the frontend and control it like I do. If a video is missing you'll get the snap instead. I don't see any reason to have the video as a separate artwork in the emulator config because of this behaviour.

However, the video is glitchy. I'm running an i3 3.1 HD2500. Is it due to my processor, video card, or something else?

I've not had smooth video yet on anything, an old P4 (w/4350), an newer E8400 (w/4350), and a brand new i7 (w/Nvidia mobile something). The audio is fine but the video is choppy - but not on all videos, some are perfectly smooth. Reducing screen resolution does help, but not a huge amount. Note that in the example vid on youtube Boogie Wings is choppy, the others are all okay.

[keilmillerjr]

Thanks cools! That shows me some good ideas and code practices. What's odd is that one of the videos that was glitchy in the front end played just fine in windows media player. I'll have to investigate this more.

[cools]

Not sure about good code, there are bound to be easier and slicker ways of doing various things (highrand is nasty but works). I'd hope it's at least readable without massive comments though.

I'm really looking forward to the next release although I'll likely do a git compile tonight and mess about with that. Pinch and skew I've wanted since day one, and I know exactly how I'm going to be using them.

[raygun]

Hey could you send me one of the choppy videos so I can try and see what is going on? ...

[nitrogen_widget]

Was minimal pain getting it running on Fedora.  On second glance, though I see that the problem with my layout files not showing up is my bad... when doing the install when building an RPM package, I installed them one level too far down.  My bad.  I had to install the files manually as I didn't see an easy way in your Makefile to specify an install root (e.g. "install everything just like it would on a real box, but instead of doing it under '/', do it under '/var/tmp/rpm-123456'").  Thankfully, there aren't that many files here to install, so it wasn't that hard.  Sure enough, though, I still managed to botch that up.     

As for the videos, IIRC that was the one I saw before and which made me want to know if it was possible.  Looks awesome with the video playing, and I've been tweaking the cools theme to fit within the bezel I've got on the cocktail cabinet I'm building this into. 

My issue was SFML 2.
My distro doesn't have it in the repositories.
It only has an older version and the website for SFML is a mix between "I don't use linux" & "RTFM!" responses for people asking how to install on linux.

But I found this site.
http://sfmlcoder.wordpress.com/2011/08/16/building-sfml-2-0-with-make-for-gcc/

Which worked marvelous.

[raygun]

Also, any idea of how I could add steam games?

I haven't tried steam myself, but if I understand https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Command_Line_Options correctly you can run games from the command line with something like "steam.exe -applaunch 100" where 100 is an AppID.

So you can create a new emulator configuration in attract-mode with steam.exe as the executable and "-applaunch [name]" as the "Command Arguments".  I don't know how you get these AppIDs but you could create entries by hand in a romlist and just put the appids in instead of romnames...

Romlists are simple semicolon delimited text files with one game per line.  The format is as follows:

Name;Title;Emulator;CloneOf;Year;Manufacturer;Category;Players;Rotation;Control;Status;DisplayCount;DisplayType

You only really need the first three to get going, the rest of the entries can be left out, so something like "100;Awesome Steam Game;steam;" should work as a romlist entry...

But I found this site.
http://sfmlcoder.wordpress.com/2011/08/16/building-sfml-2-0-with-make-for-gcc/

Which worked marvelous.

Great find! I'll have to add a reference to this in the documentation.  Thanks

[keilmillerjr]

Hey could you send me one of the choppy videos so I can try and see what is going on? ...

It's slow on every video, using every theme shipped with attract-mode 1.2.1, and my own theme I'm working on. They are the 480p name videos from emumovies. Plays fine in windows media player on the same machine. Runing windows 8.1.

Thanks for the info on adding steam games! Seems easy enough as there is only a handful of games I purchased to play on this machine.

My theme is coming out awesome! I'm super excited!

[cools]

raygun: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxaCVgxhLwHFQWxJX040ZkV6U1U/edit?usp=sharing

That one is choppy here.

[raygun]

raygun: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxaCVgxhLwHFQWxJX040ZkV6U1U/edit?usp=sharing

That one is choppy here.

Thanks cools, that one was choppy for me as well.  So I think I've got it sorted out now and have made a test release, cools and keilmillerjr do you mind checking it out and letting me know if it fixes things for you:  https://github.com/mickelson/attract/releases/tag/v1.2.2

[cools]

Perfect. Tried with ~30 videos. Only problem I had was with Vs Super Mario Bros, as it was clipping due to the volume being at 100. Dropped it to 80 and fine.

[keilmillerjr]

Woohoo! Thanks ray gun! I tested a few games, and it looks like it's fixed.

[bleargh]

Ok, so someone explain to me... how do you get the videos showing up in your theme?

I've been trying here using "fe.add_artwork()", but can't get it to play any of the videos I've got here (which I know play fine w/ffmpeg as I use that to convert them to other things).

Am I missing something?  (probably) (and it's probably something really simple, I just don't have it right).

[keilmillerjr]

Ok, so someone explain to me... how do you get the videos showing up in your theme?

I've been trying here using "fe.add_artwork()", but can't get it to play any of the videos I've got here (which I know play fine w/ffmpeg as I use that to convert them to other things).

Am I missing something?  (probably) (and it's probably something really simple, I just don't have it right).

https://github.com/mickelson/attract/blob/master/Layouts.md

fe.add_artwork()

fe.add_artwork( label )
fe.add_artwork( label, x, y )   
fe.add_artwork( label, x, y, w, h )

You need to add a label for what kind of artwork you want to add. It's probably "snap". Check your config files.