help with bezel artwork on vertical monitor cabinet

[severdhed]

i'm working on my next project, a small bartop unit with a vertical monitor.   There are plenty of horizontal games i'd like to be able to play on here as well, which I can do and they work fine.  I seem to be missing bezel artwork for a large number of them though, causing a ton of black space above and below the game screen.    I figured out how to make a custom bezel and name the zip to match the desired rom, and everything works fine.  the problem is, i'd rather not have to do them all manually.  I also don't want to mess up the vertical games i already have.    Is there an easy way to accomplish this? 


From what i can tell, there doesn't seem to be a way to set a generic bezel for games that don't have one included (this sucks), unless i'm missing something.  Im running mame 150 x64 if that make a difference.

so, i guess i need some way to take my generic.lay file and bezel.png, rename generic.lay to romname.lay, zip both of them up into romname.zip and have it do this for every horizontal game in my gamelist. any ideas?

 maybe there is another option?

[yamatetsu]

To rename your .lay files :

You can use an editor that has a macro feature for that. I recommend notepad++, which is free (https://notepad-plus-plus.org/).

Copy your vertical roms into a directory. Copy the generic.lay file into the same directory. Open up a DOS window, type 'dir /b >roms.txt' (without the '). This creates a.txt file that contains the rom names.

Open up notepad++.

Go to the top of your roms.txt. Click at the first position to make sure that the cursor is positioned before the first letter of the first romname.

Go to the 'macro' menu, select 'start recording'.

Type 'copy generic.lay ' (without the '), hit the 'end' key to go to the end of the line.

Use backspace to delete 'zip'. Type 'lay' (without the '), then hit the 'home' key to go to the beginning of the line. You should now have something like 'copy generic.lay firstromname.lay'

Hit 'arrow down' to go to the beginning of the next line.

Go to the 'macro' menu, select 'stop recording'.
In the 'macro' menu, select 'run a macro multiple times', then 'run until the end of file'.

Save the file, exit Notepad++ and rename roms.txt to roms.bat.

Open up a DOS window and type 'roms.bat' (without the ') and hit enter. After that, you have your .lay files.

This sounds complicated, but it is in fact very easy to do.

For zipping the .lay files and the bezel image you can use a command line version of PKzip using the same method.

[severdhed]

awesome, thanks...i'll give that a shot tomorrow

[lamprey]

If you familiar with how to compile MAME you can add a generic "lay" file so you don't have to name it for each game. I did that a while back for a Vertical and Horizontal layout for games with no artwork.

With all the changes to MAME, I'm not 100% if these instructions still work, but here ya go:
http://mrdo.mameworld.info/mame_artwork_generic.php

[severdhed]

i saw that, but the instructions say it only works with mame 139 or older, i'm running 150.  thanks though

[lamprey]

i saw that, but the instructions say it only works with mame 139 or older, i'm running 150.  thanks though

Unfortunately, Mr. Do doesn't have time to update anything and that statement isn't accurate. I *think* the MAME devs changed something after 139 that made those instructions obsolete. But, they brought that functionality back at some point. I know I used those instructions for a 163(ish) build and it worked just fine. It may will be that 150 won't work, but might be worth a try.

[Drybonz]

I have been working on some vertical bezels for use with Rocketlauncher. They are here if you would like to look at them.

http://www.hyperspin-fe.com/topic/24943-drybonz-custom-mame-bezels/

[severdhed]

It WORKED!!!!

i created my vertical.lay and horizont.lay to my liking with my own bezel graphics.  I followed Mr Do's instructions and they worked great.  basically, copy the bezel png files into the artwork folder, copy the .lay files into the proper folder, then compile.  now no matter what game i launch, it displays the generic bezel artwork that i wanted.


Thanks so much.