100 bucks to first person who can get marquees displaying on my second monitor

[sshaw10]

mame hooker works but crashes sometimes.  I've spent weeks on lay files and nothing.  I give up.  If anyone wants a shot I'll pay $100 for the help but it has to work.  I have a relatively simple setup, running mala, mame 144 and LED Blinky.  I followed Arzoo's instructions for running blinky with hooker and hooker still occasionally crashes.  If anyone is interested I'll take requests in order.  I don't care if I have to build lay files for every game.  I have about 150 games I'm concerned about and I'll have another version of mame with everything where I don't care about the setup.  I'm ready to go Office Space on this thing.  I'm in Los Angels if that matters.

[NickG]

Last time I used MALA, I stretched a fixed MALA layout to my marquee monitor and had MALA show the marquees for me.   I can probably still  customize a layout for you, if you cannot figure out how to do it this way.  Tip: In order for this to work, the marquee display needs to moved to the left or above the main display in windows display options if you run games which resize the main display resolution.     

[Malenko]

just PM Howard Casto , he made mamehooker, so he'd be the one to ask for help. Might even save yourself $100

[Brizzle]

I can help, and I don't want your $100.  I am having issues with 3 arcade monitors, and I'll need to get help from people to get them running (I can't afford to spend the $600 to get them looked and a possibly fixed).. SO, we all help each other out

I use GameEx, which I prefer much more than Hyperspin even!  There is a section in the setup file that makes it easy, and you can even use a free version of the software (everything but the online functions are included!  and a lifetime license is $18 if you like it). 

I'm about to setup my 2nd monitor in my vertical cab.  Looks pretty easy to setup in GameEx, and I have artwork I collected after belonging to EmuMovies for a year. 

[lamprey]

If Mamehooker is not the way you want to go, you should be able to do what you want with a combination of INI and LAY files. Here is a sample that should work, if not then something may have changed:

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,146100.msg1520320.html#msg1520320

[Ginsu Victim]

When I did this for a friend, I just had Irfanview set to display on the second monitor, ran a batch conversion to resize all marquees, and had his front-end (mamewah) run irfanview when the game started.

[sshaw10]

Annoys me sometimes when OP's don't follow up so here goes in case someone finds any of this helpful later:

Ginsu - I'll try that with Infranview, all my marquees match the second monitor size so that part is simple.  I'll see if I can make that work.

lamprey - I had tried that link before, tried it again.  I follow it exactly and get no mame on main monitor and diagonal lines on marquee.  I get "unable to load component bitmap 'qbert_marquee.png'  and then an access violation.  The file is definitely there, I think the diagonals are mismatched resolution but not sure.  I have tried simply running mame by itself on monitor 1 and then on monitor 2 and can't get that working.  As soon as I add a second monitor to mame things don't work.  I'm running version 144 which should be good.  I've tried every page that describes using lay files and none work, just something no configured properly.

Brizzle - I'm using Mala, not sure what you're proposing there.

Malenko - I PM'd Howard and had emailed him but didn't hear back. 

NickG - I have a custom Mala layout I"m using for the selection, not sure how it would be modified to show marquees when games launch.  I'm interested if you want to pursue.

At this point I'll probably just use  hooker and reboot when it crashes and try to fix things later.  I just want to play games.  If anyone has any other ideas I'll keep checking.  Thanks.

[nexusmtz]

lamprey - I had tried that link before, tried it again.  I follow it exactly and get no mame on main monitor and diagonal lines on marquee.  I get "unable to load component bitmap 'qbert_marquee.png'  and then an access violation.  The file is definitely there, I think the diagonals are mismatched resolution but not sure.  I have tried simply running mame by itself on monitor 1 and then on monitor 2 and can't get that working.  As soon as I add a second monitor to mame things don't work.  I'm running version 144 which should be good.  I've tried every page that describes using lay files and none work, just something no configured properly.

It sounds like you need to step back and resolve one problem at a time. I tested both the 32 and 64 bit versions of mame v144 using the instructions listed in my other post to confirm that the layout works in that version.

If you're getting the warning that your marquee file is no good, mame has given up trying to use it. You get the diagonal lines because the code intentionally fills the bitmap with lines when it doesn't have a valid image to use. Since you're positive that the file exists, you'll have to make sure that it's actually a valid png file, and not, for example, a jpg or some other format renamed to a png. (I was easily able to recreate the component bitmap error and lines by doing exactly that.)

As for diagnosing the second screen problem, you should use mame -v to get your \\.\DISPLAY numbers, then try directing a single screen game to either screen with -video gdi -numscreens 1 -screen0 \\.\DISPLAYx . Since you've been playing with views, you'll also need to go into the UI video menu and choose the view that you want to see. That will help you determine if mame can see and use your second screen at all, and it will let you test the views in the layout file.

If it works with -video gdi, try -video d3d. If that fails, you know you have a video driver incompatibility of some sort.

Either a bad marquee file or an incompatible video driver could explain your problems with both mame and mamehooker. Let us know how you make out with doing the testing. I know you said you tried running on monitor 1 and monitor 2 already, but since you don't show us what commands you're using, we can't tell if the commands you're using are correct.