Main > Driving & Racing Cabinets
What would you guys want in a Racing Cab FE?
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.
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