What would you guys want in a Racing Cab FE?

[Howard_Casto]

Now first off, a word of warning.  I've obviously got enough projects to keep me busy for the next year or more so nothing could come out of this discussion BUT....

I was starting to gather things up for my upcoming cab, started looking at fe options and all of them, even the ones I've made personally, don't seem to fit the bill. 

I'm thinking of something very very simple.  Not a whole lot of backend other than supporting/parsing mame's listxml and catver because let's face it, the gamelists would be really short and due to control issues you'd just about have to add individual games manually anyway.

In terms of layout, I suppose you could make it skin able, but I don't really see the point considering a lists specialized nature.  I'm thinking a row of snapshots at the bottom to navigate via the Wheel and the entire background a vid of the selected game.  Maybe a marquee at the top or something, but no graphics or anything like that to mention. 

In terms of controls, I think the Outrun 2k6 approach would be best.  Instead of generic Fe-based names for the controls, I could design the interface around controls typically found on a racing cab.  Start button would start the game (duh).  Any X axis, mosue or joystick, (wheel) would scroll through the list, as would any hat switch and maybe have a view button that toggles more info to the screen. 

Because of the oddball nature of racing games I would also like to add support for "halt" screens.  Upon launching a game the FE would optionally display a halt image for that game.  You would create one with instructions on how to set up the game.  The game wouldn't actually launch, until the conditions you specify are met. 

For example in a hi-low shifter game, you could make a halt screen instructing you to "Shift into Hi to Continue"  now mame with it's oddball toggling and inconsistent mapping might have trouble determining hi from low on a 2 switch shifter, but the FE wouldn't.  So long as you don't touch it during the game bootup, the shifter would remain in sync. 

Like wise if you had a dual wheel setup and needed to change to your optical wheel you could make a halt screen instructing you to change wheels and turn the wheel left to continue. 

Just some ideas floating around in my head.  I spent an hour or so writing some code to smoothly scroll a row of images similar to how hyperspin does it.  It seemed pretty quick considering I was just messing with picture boxes and wasn't even using HW-accel. 

[Well Fed Games]

I think that sounds pretty great. Good list navigation with a wheel and accounting for shifter weirdness would be top of my list, and you've already accounted for those.

[BadMouth]

I always wanted an FE that had screenshots and marquees moving horizontally across the center of the screen.
Navigation would be controlled by the wheel and a game would be launched by the gas pedal.
The highlighted snap in the center of the screen would switch to a video preview if you stopped on it for more than a second.
The background would look like a driving cab, with it's screen and marquee belonging to the highlighted game.
Driving cab marquees are hit or miss, so making some custom uniform ones would probably be in order.

As far as arcade games go and the variety of emulators required to run them, I wouldn't mind at all having to have an ahk script or batch file for every single one.  The front end could just look for shortcuts as far as I'm concerned.

Console games on the other hand, might require a more blanket approach, although there are shortcuts to creating batch files based on a list of roms.  If everyone agreed on a folder structure, we could just make them once and share.

[Howard_Casto]

I think I would need a mockup for what you are talking about to fully understand. 

In terms of using the gas pedal to launch games (or anything really) I would like to try to avoid it just to save me a headache.  If I support pedals then I've got to support mixed axis and single axis and half axis and inverted versions of all three.  Or I could just use the start button. 


Backend stuff is surprisingly easy.  I generally just parse clrmamepro dat files for games, they typically have the real name and year, even for a console rom.  For lists this short though, we could just about get away with adding games manually.  I know I did that for pac-fe (a pacman-centric vertical fe I haven't released publically) because I made custom marquees for each game instead of using a text-based list.  As I got a marquee done, I just added it to the list. 

Since there are so few racing games we could probably work on custom art as a community and as it gets finished add that particular game to a master list manually.  Then it would just be a matter of the end user filtering those games off.  You know, like the hyperspin community, minus the charge for the privilege of tech support.   

[twistedsymphony]

personally I would love something similar to the track selection screen in Daytona...

not so much graphically but the fact that it utilizes the force feedback to let you "feel" that you've moved to the next selection...

as for pedal selection considering not all driving cabs have start buttons (no Start Button on my San Fran rush cab... in-game you use the gas to start) I think it is rather important.  I also know I'm not interested in adding additional buttons to my cab either.

the buttons the cab DOSE have are view change, "music", "abort" and "reverse"... none of which make sense for "start game"

-----------

another thing that I've been thinking about with driving cabs... for linked setups a lot of time you need alternate configurations when performing a linked setup then when playing solo (most arcade games will sit in the boot screen waiting for the linked machines to respond).

so it might be nice to have some option to say "play linked", or "play solo" after selecting your game to boot using the proper configuration. Even better if after selecting linked the FE could send a message to the front end on the other machines to quit their current game (if necessary) and boot into linked mode. that way you don't have to walk the other player through selecting the right options in order to play in linked mode. Or maybe instead of quitting out of the other cabs if the other cabs are in-game then then it automatically selects Solo... or maybe prompts you as to whether you want to kick the other cabs ... or maybe all of these options configurable to how you want them to act, lol.

obviously this would have to be disabled completely for people with solo cabs... but for linked setups it's a HUGE problem really only effects racing games and none of the front ends out there even come close to addressing this.


In the end the biggest thing I want out of any front-end is for someone who has never used it before to easily use it without instruction from me.... IMO a FE needs to be good enough that it could work in a publicly placed machine without any user confusion.

[SegaOutrun]

I like my hyperspin setup. it was a pain but i like the themes, vids, logo and selection wheel. But if i had a racing only cabinet, a track selection theme like twistedsymphony mentioned seems pretty cool. Scroll thru the games as if they were tracks, with the highlighted one playing a video.

[Howard_Casto]

Good ideas all around.  I'll keep them in mind.

I like the pic you posted Outrun, but then again I see a lot of wasted space.  It'd be nice to be able to show more games on the screen at once, just for quicker navigation.  I think in my little test program I did 5 games on screen at once. 

I was thinking more like a tight row of snaps across the bottom, a logo centered at the top and a video of the currently selected game as the background.

[baritonomarchetto]

Maybe a feature that could be added later, but the auto run of the latest played game on startup is a feature i would like to see in a FE, especially for driving games. Not sure about you, but i generally have "phases" (outrun phase, daytona phase and so on) during which i play one game only (es. when a racing competition pops up  )

[twistedsymphony]

For the layout of the game selection screen something like what Hydro Thunder uses makes the most sense to me:


You have the game logos around the parameter of the screen then the currently selected game could not only be highlighted but also have it's title in the center along with a video.

[hiljak]

The Daytona track selection style theme/setup would be awesome for my needs!!

@twistedsymphony - Did you convert a San Fran Rush cab?  If so, are there photos?  I have a Rush cab that I'm thinking of converting but I'm still kicking around the idea.  From what I've found lurking around here, it seems like interfacing the existing FFB isn't practical so I was thinking of may trying to fit a G27 wheel into the cab.  Any inspiration I can get from other projects would be golden tho.

[twistedsymphony]

The Daytona track selection style theme/setup would be awesome for my needs!!

@twistedsymphony - Did you convert a San Fran Rush cab?  If so, are there photos?  I have a Rush cab that I'm thinking of converting but I'm still kicking around the idea.  From what I've found lurking around here, it seems like interfacing the existing FFB isn't practical so I was thinking of may trying to fit a G27 wheel into the cab.  Any inspiration I can get from other projects would be golden tho.

converting my San Fran Rush cabs is a ways off... there are a bunch of other project that I need to get done before that happens.

For me I want to be be able to use a legit arcade wheel and motor setup. I'm not happy with any of my machines unless they're indistinguishable from real arcade machines and every bit as strong and durable.

[Howard_Casto]

So for those of you following along, I'm about done with my racing cab. 

I'm thinking of whipping something up in terms of a front-end.  It might not be as feature-rich as what we've been talking about, but it'll be a start anyway.  I might take my un-released pac-fe (man I need to release some of this stuff) and modify it to save time. 

[Howard_Casto]

I don't think I've ever posted any vid of Pac-FE, so here you go:



I'm not exactly sure why youtube made the vid so low-res, maybe the vertical orientation confused it... I dunno. 

Anyway, the point of posting it was, as you can see, what it has in terms of layout is very similar to what we need, so I'm just going to modify it.  The first mod you can see in the vid.  I've added list scrolling animation, which would work well for a wheel.  This is just a raw speed test... I wanted to make sure it could handle loading a bunch of textures on the fly.  It seems to do ok. 

Btw for the video previews, I've always used png sets instead of videos.  They are crisper (which you can't see due to the poor quality of the video... grr) and they tend to render faster.  So I would like to keep it that way.  We may need to find a video-2-png converter.

 I can add video support of course, but it's a pain in the butt to pull frames from a video and put them in a direct-X app unless they are avi files, which as you know are huge.  I'll have to think on that one a bit.

[Howard_Casto]

So I worked on this a little more and added scrolling proper. 

I actually blatantly copied SegaOutrun's snapshot as a basis for the skin.  I really just needed something "racery" in terms of layout to start with. 

I still need to do a couple of things to make scrolling smoother, but other than that it works just fine.  I'll release some sort of demo soon.

[Howard_Casto]

Ok so while quite rough, it's in a useable state.  I can to add a bunch more stuff including a legitimate skin and those "please do ___ to continue" loading screens we mentioned, but most of the other stuff was already in Pac-FE.

I'm dubbing this FE Checkered Flag...because.....racing

Here's an extremely short demo video:

[Howard_Casto]

If anyone is interested in this project, we probably need to get started on the artwork. 

I think there are around 75-100 racing games in MAME, possibly less (it's hard to tell with clones).  Then there are probably 50 or so in other emulators.  Of course there are pc games and such but leaving those aside for now logo's need to be made for each game.  You can see that I did a couple already... typically I take the marquee and cut out the text and save the whole thing as a png.  And yes, checkered flag supports animated logos, you simply make multiple png images. 

So if anyone wants to work on this I will organize it, otherwise I'll put it on a shelf for the time being due to lack of interest. 

I don't really follow hyperspin, so maybe a collection of png logos already exists for it. 

[Paul Olson]

I can probably make a few, but I won't have much time for the next couple of weeks. Do you have a list of the games you want added?

I bought a Need For Speed Underground cabinet last week, so I am hoping to be able to just drop a new computer in it for MAME once I get tired of playing the original game. I will definitely give this a shot once I get the new computer. I have bought too many toys lately, so it may be a while unless I can somehow make my old core2Duo laptop work.

[BadMouth]

Whether I'm interested is highly dependent on how it works.

Is it made to launch all arcade games from the same list regardless of emulator?
Will it support video?

[Howard_Casto]

The list system is based upon Pac-FE's.  After all these years of making front-ends I realized that for most applications, you really only need three things, thus each entry in the list looks like this:

rom|name|emulator

Name isn't even used tbh, I don't have any text implemented in the FE because it severely kills the framerate unless you use sprite-based text.  But you know, just in case and for identification purposes.  The emulator entry is what allows the lists to have all emulators together.  When the game is called to launch it reads "emulator".txt and gets the pertinent info from it, which is really just the emu path, the exe name and the command line options.    This also allows for per-game options.  For example, in the demo Crusn USA and World have the emulator set to "crusn".  This is so I can turn off autoframeskip, which makes those two games stutter. 

So yes, you can have everything in one gamelist.  I kept the list format so short and so simple so that you can just add things manually to a list if you want. 

As for video.  Right now it supports png series.  I like those personally because they are cleaner and load better in a directX app.  To make those you use the -writemng flag with mame and when done run them through advmng to split them out.  I was hoping I could implement a system to where you could make an attract video in the FE... launch the game, exit when the attract mode is over and then trim the animation once you get back. 

But anyway, I realize that for a racing setup, especially pc games, this isn't exactly practical.  I can add video support fairly easily, but you'd be surprised how difficult it is to properly (keyword properly) render a video to texture in directX.  In DK it was a total hack job.... I would write the frames of the directshow window to a bitmap and then load the bitmap.  In theory I can write the bits to memory, but I never got it working properly.  Regardless, it actually worked pretty well... I got about 60 fps out of it.  I can also just use a wmp container and that works easily, but then you can't layer effects over top of it. 

I'm looking for alternatives, but after all these years it seems like M$ still thinks that writing a video to a texture is something we don't need. 

Long story short is I will add video support, I just don't know how good it will be. 

[Howard_Casto]

Ok so in regards to the video question.  I hooked up my old write to bitmap code... still works great.  The only problem is, these days mame vids are in mp4 format.

Mp4 is a horrid container when it comes to interfacing with directx because the images aren't rendered in 24 bit color.  Because of that decoding and saving is too slow.

If you convert the vids over to mpeg mpeg2 or avi, however, they play just fine.  I managed to get 60 fps with a 1024x1024 texture. 

Also if you aren't picky about layering... I can just render them on top of the screen... works with any format that way. 

[BadMouth]

In all honesty, I wouldn't put much time into this right now.  Let people create the artwork first.

If I had unlimited time, I would like to create a list of all the arcade driving games that it's possible to run and ensure that there are good snapshots, marquees (even if not original) and videos for all of them.  A lot of the videos out there are pretty bad.  The cars are twitchy because the person recording them originally was playing with a keyboard.  I have no such time though, nor a PC powerful enough to do the video capture.  I bought a video capture card with s-vid in for the purpose of making new gameplay vids for the old cab, but I'm not sure people would be happy with the 4:3 format or the quality.

[Howard_Casto]

Well it's purely for personal reasons.  If I can ever get my head straightened up (ugh.... wisdom teeth get pulled at the end of the month so I'm miserable until then) I've got to cut the metal beams that'll hold my dash box and then my rig is in a playable state.  I need something to put on there.  DK is too outdated, hyperspin is a pain in the butt, ect....

So I just want to release something that works and then you guys can have at it. I can add in the other features later. I did all the logos for my pacman cab over the course of a week or so.... I think there were around 100 of those. 

The main reason I was fooling with vids was to see what works.  Mp4 decidedly does NOT work.  I looked into it and most people working in directX have run into similar issues.  I think the reason it's being used is because hyperspin is flash based and flash has all these nice little functions that let you interface videos to it.  I believe that I can create a custom socket to make it work, but in all honesty it's not a good format to be working in to begin with.  The only benefit you get out of a mp4 container is a small frame size. 

Just for the record a png series (rip from mng) takes up around 4.3 megs for around 18 second of video.  So that's about 14.33 megs for a minute loop, not counting the audio of course (which we can compress to mp3 or ogg).  So it's pretty large file size wize, but considering the relatively small gamelist I don't think it would be an issue.  Let's say you have 300 games on your cab ... that's 4.5 gigs. 

You can see how nice png series works in the pacfe vid I posted.  The load is instant, there's no loss in frames and no slowdowns.  That's because any video card made in the last 10 years can load a single texture under 512x512 in a millisecond or two.  On the other hand, rendering a video, grabbing a frame and converting a frame to an image that can be loaded as a texture, that takes some time. 

I just realize how much a pain in the butt making videos would be.  So unless someone has a command-line mp4 2 png/mng tool that we could use for batch conversion, it would be impractical for a FE I'm intentionally trying to make easy to set up.   

I used to do intro videos for 3darcade back in the day btw.... it was a colossal pain in the butt so I can understand why every vid isn't great.  That being said we always took special care to make sure each vid was a tight attract mode loop... I don't think they do that anymore. 


It would be nice if mame had at start/stop option for writemng.  It doesn't really effect performance in the game so if I had that I could just automatically record the first 3 minutes or so of vid when a game launches without a video.  When you came back the extraction batch could run in the background and in a minute or two you'd have a vid. 

[Howard_Casto]

Eh I did a couple of MNGs just to test (it's been a few years).



Turns out, since I did it you can start/stop recording via shift+f12.... so it isn't as difficult to do a good loop. 

As you can see, the png sequences play nice and smooth. 

What kind of dumbstruck me though was the file size difference.  Pole Position and it's sequel are 8 bit games.  When I extract the pngs I convert them to 8 bit and remove the alpha channel.  The resulting minute or so of animation is around 13 megs... not bad.  Crus'n on the other hand... it's minute and a half attract sequence was 283 megs!  I guess the splitter can't compress it as well because it's 3d and full color. 

[BadMouth]

I'm feeling the urge to do another skin, or at least a mockup of one.

What size and file type is the background?
Can we make the selected game larger than the outside ones?


Is there a standardized size and format for each thing that makes the most sense?  (also asking everyone else's opinion)
No sense in creating things larger than they need to be.

For the marquees, I would like to start with a template and create new marquees that are all the same size.

A 640x480  video is still pretty good size on a 1080 screen.
Actual video on top with sound would be best IMO.  No need for it to be layered underneath anything.
Most of these games as well as the console games were 4:3 format, so maybe we're better off having 4:3 vids anyway.
I don't like the attract modes.  I want video that captures what the gameplay is really like.

For the snapshots I'm thinking either the first frame of the video so they just look paused when not highlighted.

[Howard_Casto]

How big of a texture you want to use is really dependent upon  your video card and how well it uses large textures.  That being said, I measure the size a texture will be displayed and scale it as I load it, so aside from a long load time (unlikely) there's no drawback to using 1080p as a base. PNGs are the preferred image format... 24 bit color, lossless and an alpha channel available so you only have to make them once. 

Now as for snaps and stuff, they are loaded on the fly as you scroll through the list, so making them 1080p probably isn't a good idea considering most arcade games are only 240p anyway.  Again, how well your video card loads textures will vastly effect the performance on loading.  Most modern cards advertise that they can handle 1024x1024 pretty well... in practice 512x512 is a safer bet.  That being said, for created artwork, as big as possible is preferred.  Afterall we can shrink it, but making it larger would require re-doing it.   

Maybe a brief explanation of how the FE works is in order.  Again, I've been at this for a while so I've realized that giving a resolution change option for a FE is pointless.  It was useful back in the day because emulators were poorly written and didn't always return you to the desktop resolution... but now this isn't a problem.  That being said each skin still has resolution entries for setting the resolution of the skin itself.  Like the Pac-FE vid I posted... that was captured on my pc with a horizontal monitor, but I set the resolution to 768x1024 so that it wouldn't look distorted.... I just get black bars on either side.  Long story short, if you want to do a 4:3 skin or a 16:9 it doesn't matter... it will be displayed the same on any monitor. 

Anyway, since I doubt I'll ever fully document this FE, let me just post a skin file and explain it a little:

-----------------------------------------------------
background|0|0|100|100|5|100|100,100,100
logo|3.5|0.3|93.4|9.4|5|100|100,100,100
infoart|0|0|100|100|5|100|100,100,100
list1|-31.75|34.4|28.1|39.4|5|100|100,100,100
list2|2.1|34.4|28.1|39.4|5|100|100,100,100
list4|70.3|34.4|28.1|39.4|5|100|100,100,100
list5|104.15|34.4|28.1|39.4|5|100|100,100,100
list3|35.95|34.4|28.1|39.4|5|100|100,100,100
mlist|0|5|150|150|5|100|100,100,100
cursor|0|0|105|105|5|100|100,100,100
snap|28.8|18.5|42.7|20|5|100|100,100,100
overlay|0|0|100|100|5|100|100,100,100
listeffect|2|30
booteffect|2|2
snappath|\list\
logopath|\logo\
gamelistpath|c:\mame\snap\
animationtime|66
musicvolume|100
loopgamelist|0
streamsnap|0
streambackground|0
streamoverlay|0
streamlogo|0
streamlist|1
streamskip|1
---------------------------------------------------------------------

The format is pretty basic... each element has a few options, x, y, width, height, blend mode (color keyed, solid, alpha channel, ect), alpha value and rgb color tint values.  Numbers are in percentage of the screen.  In photoshop you can turn on the info window, set it to show percentage and then as you move the cursor around your background image you can get the x/y percent and if you make a box with the selection tool it'll show the width and height of the selection in percent.  So yeah, I use photoshop to write the skin files.    The zorder is determined by the order of the skin file.  Stuff at the top are in the back of the screen, while stuff at the bottom are in front. 

As you can see, each list element has it's own sizing options, so yes, you can size them all differently.  You'll notice there are 5 list elements in the skin even though only three are shown.  This is so you have a image off-screen on either side to scroll in as the list scroll kicks in.  Also note "mlist" and cursor.  Mlist replaces the middle list element when you aren't moving.  So while scrolling all elements should be uniform size (looks better) but as so as you stop it can zoom in or what have you.  Also the cursor (image around the middle list element) disappears while scrolling.... I might change that one. 

List and boot effect are just some very basic special effects you can use when moving to another list or up bootup/return from the emulator.  I think I've got fades and horizontal/vertical scrolls implemented.  Fade looks best for booting while the scroll outs look good when changing lists. 

The path stuff is so you can use different elements with any image you choose... traditionally I would put that stuff in the main settings file but I actually find it more flexible this way as different skins can use different image paths.  I probably need to add a few more elements btw.  For Pac-FE I didn't need a lot, but for this I can see needing at least one more element. 

I think music volume and loop game list are pretty self-explanatory.

All the stream stuff just means enabling animation for that element.  *EDIT*  Oops!  it's been a while since I wrote this code.  ALL elements have animations turned on all the time, but if you turn on the "stream" setting, the animation is loaded a frame at a time on the fly, instead of all at once.  Since a split mng could have thousands of frames, this is a good thing. *EDIT*  Animation time is just a global setting to default all the animations to.  Here it's set to one frame every 66 milliseconds, or roughly 30 fps.  That can be over-ridden via a "settings.txt" in a animation's folder though. 

Streamskip is frame skipping for the animations only.  A setting of 1 means render every frame... 2 would mean every second frame, ect... it's similar to mame.  So if your vid card can't handle loading the videos at 60fps not to worry, you can easily change it to 30fps or even 15fps and it should still look good.  For the record, Pac-FE is on an old P4 in my pacman cab (without a video card) and it can handle 30fps... so as long as you have something decent, you should be ok. 

*EDIT2*

I should also mention that each list can have custom images.  You'll see that in the PAC-FE video.  It's simple stuff... each gamelist is named with a number (gamelist1.txt ect)  If you name your image with that number at the end, it'll load for that list.  So overlay.png loads for all lists... overlay1.png only loads for list #1, ect...  Works for animations as well. 

I decided against full-blown custom skins for each list though... it takes a while to load and is visually confusing.  Color coding like I did with the my pacman cab totally makes sense though.  It lets you know you are on a different list, while at the same time everything is in the same place so you aren't confused while navigating. 

[Howard_Casto]

Umm art suggestions:

Well while we are looking for art anyway, we might want to forward it to progretto for the official packs.  I know some of the racing games in particular have questionable marquees or none at all (Cruis'n USA has the "1" marquee for multiplayer instead of the stand-alone one for example.... this is odd considering I found the real one via a simple google search). 

As for size, the larger the better, we can scale down.  What I've been trying to do for the logos it to just cut the background out of the marquee and use that.  I don't think aspect is super important, but I think a "marquee-like" aspect would be best. 

We can do animations but each frame needs to be the same dimensions.  If you want to do an animation, put all the pngs in a folder and name the folder after the rom ("polepos" or what have you) the png names don't really matter in that case.  Personally I'm not big on animations... I don't want to build another hyperspin clone.... BUT if you are subtle about it....  Like having animated flames for Rave Racer would be cool, or a shine mark on chrome letters, ect....

There's one pesky bug I need to get rid off (when compiled the FE sometimes hangs when exiting) but after that I'll release a demo so it's easier to make skins/art. 

[BadMouth]

I'm not worried about animations, at least not now.

Official marquees probably won't look right anyway.  The originals were all kinds of different shapes and sizes.
Most of the photographs of them that I used the last time around were taken at an angle.

Personally I think we're better off making new marquees that are consistent in dimensions.
Not just for this FE, but for use with any FE.

[Howard_Casto]

Well yeah, but some people do prefer marquees and since a marquee would probably be the basis of the art anyway.....

[Howard_Casto]

This might help.... I really need to download and configure MAWler, but in the mean-time.

Here are all the games in MAME with "driving" in their category.  783... eeek!  Then again, that includes clones (each mame game averages two clones... don't ask how I know) and unplayable games.  The real number is probably closer to 260 or so. 

Also note that a lot of games that would be in other emulators (m2, supermodel, ect) are also in mame... so do this list and aside from PC games, we are done. 

[BadMouth]

Well yeah, but some people do prefer marquees and since a marquee would probably be the basis of the art anyway.....

I'm talking about making new marquees that are all the same size, but based on the original marquees where possible.
They wouldn't be the same shape as the original, but would still be representative of it.

Spreadsheet of MAME driving games:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aq37CSO6oe1fdERrVGt0emFCWnh1WDBiaFdoUmcweHc&usp=sharing#gid=0
There aren't that many.  You can throw out all the joystick based ones. 
Most people will be using PC steering wheels which don't play 360 degree games very well anyway.
If we started out doing the working potentiometer based ones first (good & imperfect emulation status), it would only be like 50.

My old driving cab utilized 6 different emulators and only had around 65 arcade games on it.

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah I get what you are saying... what I am saying is while we are working on marquees anyway, when we run across a version better than the one progretto has in his pack, we should send it to him.  Some of them are pretty bad even though better versions are readily available. 

That being said... making logos (what was in my vid) looks better and is usually easier to do than marquees altered to a standard size.  If it's too tall you can crop it, but if it's too short you have to fill in that area and that is difficult if all the AW you have available (marquees ect) is full color or photorealistic.  On the other hand just cutting out the background... not necessarily that hard. 

I guess I'd have to see what you are talking about. 

[BzZziLLa]

I bought a Need For Speed Underground cabinet last week, so I am hoping to be able to just drop a new computer in it for MAME once I get tired of playing the original game.

Lucky SOB! I would take an axe to my current cab if I had an underground cab. I looked forever locally for one.

[Paul Olson]

I bought a Need For Speed Underground cabinet last week, so I am hoping to be able to just drop a new computer in it for MAME once I get tired of playing the original game.

Lucky SOB! I would take an axe to my current cab if I had an underground cab. I looked forever locally for one.

haha, I left work for a long lunch to go pick it up. I offered $500 for it, and he took it. It is pretty much new and has only been played 1200 times. I bought a couple of the Global VR players cards on ebay this week so I can try out the career mode, then I will decide if I want to swap a new computer in there and get a little more variety.

I would rather convert one of my H2Overdrives since they have a 42" monitor, but this one already has all USB inputs and outputs, so I think it will work better. Most of the games I will be able to play were made for a 4:3 CRT anyway, so it should be good. I actually really like the 6-speed shifter on this game, but I wish they would have used a clutch.

[Howard_Casto]

So just an update.  I've been busy making logos, you know... so there will actually be something to show in the FE, but I can release it any time. 

I added a few things today like being able to read all 6 axis on a gamepad, which will probably come in handy for a racing setup.

I haven't added video support yet, but other than that all the basic features we need are in there. 

[Howard_Casto]

Preview:

[Le Chuck]

I like it! The sound of the ocean is very relaxing.

[Howard_Casto]

Heh... that's 2k6's background music.  I had to put something on there for the time being.  The FE actually supports playlists.... I know on my pacman cab it randomly rotates between Pacman Fever, Digdug Remix and "The Pacman" by weird al. 

I actually need to do rips of Daytona 2.  The "gentleman start your engines" vid would be good for a startup vid and I think there is a audible "select your course" sound that would work great for a startup sound after the vid is played. 

[BadMouth]

Anyone have suggestions for video standards?
(640x480?, 1024x768?, avi?, mp4?)

I'm wrapping up my home improvements and feel motivated to get a driving cab back together.

If the usb video capture device I want to sue co-operates, I can take on the videos.
I'm limited to 4:3 because I'll be using the S-vid input and recording on a different machine than the games are running on.
My PCs don't have the power to run some of the games and do video capture at the same time.

[Howard_Casto]

Well mame has the writeavi option and that's really what you should be using.  It records to the native game resolution and regardless of how slow the game plays, the video itself will be sped up to 60fps.  Of course you need to convert it afterwards.... avi is just too big.  I prefer mpeg myself because it can be decoded rapidly enough to snatch frames and put them onto textures. 

640x480 is too big for most games believe it or not.  Some of the racers make it up to 480p but most are 240p or less.  That's why it's always dumbfounded me that the emumovies guys have 480p vids as a premium feature.  90% of what's in mame never makes it that high. 


As for supermodel and what not, I dunno.  Don't you think a svid capture is going to hurt the quality?

[Howard_Casto]

Ok just a update on the status. 

I discovered that image streaming (which is required for both png set animations and grabbing frames from a video animations) was only hooked up for the list textures.  My bad... I originally wrote pac-fe a few years back. 

Anyway I need to fix that.  I fixed the snap element... that took a decent chunk of time, but I hadn't touched that part of the code in a few years so what do you expect?  Thankfully now that snap is working I can just copy the code and make it work for the other elements. 

I also need to add the video element and maybe another element for people that want more complex skins.  Honestly though, this is a racing FE.  It's purposefully built simple due to the style of controls and the limited amount of games. 

So I'm thinking this weekend for a release?