questions about video/hlsl and such -mame & mess

[aldub516]

thanks for help in advance. My new build is finally done for myself, and im down to the last basics.. and one big one is the somewhat crappy graphics i have going on. And yes, i know, its because neither classic arcade games, or sega genesis games were made for 32" 1080p ips monitors. Now id like to learn about hlsl and see if i can make anything better. Mame honestly looks pretty good. Scanlines might be the finishing touch or some nice shaders, but my main concern at this moment is mess and console systems. they look EXTRA atrocious. Sega looks like tiger.com handheld.. or atleast i think. Anyways, another thing i noticed was both in mame and mess, enabling hlsl in .ini doesnt do anything at all. I use hyperspin so im trying to narrow down if i should be focusing on mame and mess on their own, or within hyperspin.. after googling around i found that hlsl could be fairly complicated. so im basically a noob for now.. what can i do to remedy this? and with that, things like vsync, and other features found with in .ini are kind of alien to me. Suggestions of where to start or any files i can supply to see my settings

Lenovo M90P Desktop Computer PC Intel i5 PC 3.2 GHz 8GB ram

[aldub516]

i guess my first issue.. i cant get hlsl to work at all.. period. enabled, d3d video setting, disabled filter, i cant get any type of hlsl effects to show up. tried the jezzeshader way, but no matter what no effects appear.. help im running mame .147

[yamatetsu]

Try using a newer version of MAME. 0.161 works for me. Just do a test install and overwrite mame.ini with the .ini file in the attached .rar, it's a variation of the Jezze settings that I found in a forum.

[B2K24]

Forget these guys that tell you to use outdated obsolete releases. Get the latest version and PortAudio, BGFX, and crt-geom/crt-geom-deluxe are your friends

[yamatetsu]

I forgot that you also need slot-mask.png to be in the artwork folder for this to work properly. It's included in the attachment.

[aldub516]

my issue about updating mame is.. wouldnt that make my romset obsolete? Mind you, the ONLY reason why im not currently updated is because im temporarily live in southern oregon and my wifi is terrible, so downloading rom sets isnt happening... arent i correct by saying the rom set needs to match the mame version?

[yamatetsu]

Yep. There are changes in the romset. You might try to install MAME 0.161, copy your romset over and see which roms still work.

[aldub516]

well. considering i have a rather large set of roms, making sure they all work doesnt seem feasible unless theres a quick way to run the romset against the mame version..so to start, it seems the problem is mame 147 doesnt support hlsl, correct? and one more important question, as i may try to update to the newest mame and romset.... what are the cpu usage differences? I know a lot of people say certain versions of mame can be much more taxing.. i posted my pc build above.. would a new version of mame lag or have issues running?

[aldub516]

and also, since mess and home consoles are my real concern because they look horrid, do console system roms have the same naming changes as mame? or would i easily be able to update my mess version to use hlsl with the current roms i have

[yamatetsu]

it seems the problem is mame 147 doesnt support hlsl, correct?

I don't know about v147, v149 does not, at least not on my computer. If I turn HLSL to 1 in mame.ini, nothing happens.

considering i have a rather large set of roms, making sure they all work doesnt seem feasible unless theres a quick way to run the romset against the mame version..

What I do to test a romset is to create a batch file that starts every rom, so I only have to start the batch file, if the rom works, I press ESC, if it doesn't, I get an error message from MAME.
It's a really simple process.

i posted my pc build above.. would a new version of mame lag or have issues running?

I don't know anything about that. This might be a topic for a separate thread.

and also, since mess and home consoles are my real concern because they look horrid, do console system roms have the same naming changes as mame? or would i easily be able to update my mess version to use hlsl with the current roms i have

I don't use mess, I would simply copy some roms over to test whether they work.

[PL1]

arent i correct by saying the rom set needs to match the mame version?

That is almost always the best option.

The entire ROMset won't become obsolete if the versions don't match, but you will lose the games/drivers that have been changed/dumped/re-dumped/renamed between the two version numbers. (Check the What's New files here)

There may also be a change to the CHD file format.

If you're planning on using v0.147 ROMs with an HLSL version of MAME, I'm pretty sure that will yield an unacceptable number of broken games/drivers.    


Scott

[aldub516]

well thank you for all the above saves me a lot of time of playing with mame.ini and other dumb stuff, if my version just doesnt support it.. Im going to toy with the newest mame/mess just for the console stuff and see what happens, but this was all of great help and time saving. thank you

[aldub516]

yamatetsu, can u possibly help me with the batch file to test the roms?

[aldub516]

so. i downloaded mame 161, replaced the ini with the one that you supplied and added the missing art file.. and still, hlsl does not have any effect?

edit- and while it doesnt matter at this point, my mame was 149, not 147 as previously stated

[yamatetsu]

yamatetsu, can u possibly help me with the batch file to test the roms?

Go to your MAME folder and then to the ROM folder. Open a DOS window/command prompt. Type

dir /b >roms.txt

 This will create a text file named roms.txt in the roms folder. This file is a list of all your roms. Mail it to me and I'll send you the batch file.

[yamatetsu]

so. i downloaded mame 161, replaced the ini with the one that you supplied and added the missing art file.. and still, hlsl does not have any effect?

That is strange. I downloaded the official .161 version a few minutes ago, copied the ini into the MAME folder and the file into the artwork folder - HLSL works.
On my cab I'm running a nonag version, which also works.

[aldub516]

so i just downloaded the newest version of mame, 182, and fired up the program. Nice ui.. loaded up my roms. started playing with the settings. I dont see a mame ini created but assume its now done within this ui setting? either way i found the video options, tried a few combos by changing video to d3d and using hlsl, then gl with open gl enabled.. i get absolutely no hlsl effects whatsoever still. Id assume if my pc couldnt handle it, it would show some sort of display? and not just ignore the hlsl? i cant even get scanlines or anything simple.. perhaps im missing something?  i dont know all too much about the mame video settings and all that, only what i can tell you is the type of pc im using and my settings :\

and thank you yamatestu, i will get on that file for you shortly, i appreciate that

[B2K24]

It's still required to have mame create the mame.ini This is easily done on Windows 10 by going into your mame folder and clicking File/ Open Command Prompt then execute mame64 -cc

Since you stated in your OP that your graphics card is crappy, you don't want to mess around with D3D and HLSL. It's better for you to change video mode to bgfx and then once you launch a game press TAB/Slider Controls then change Windows 0 Screen 0 Effect to crt-geom or crt-geom-deluxe. These are designed for low resource usage and I've heard from people that it works even with a modern CPU and no video card at all or built-in video.

Once you get the mame.ini made you can transfer settings into it so you won't have to manually do this every time you launch a game.

[aldub516]

hey thanks for that suggestion. worked like a charm, but provided pretty mean lag right away. Perhaps the pc just cant handle it. I really want to focus on mess and see what i can do with that.. mame looks pretty good as it is, consoles look horrid and id like to sharpen those up even a little bit. Maybe ill look into a cheap video card but this pc is a small form and might be hard or impossible to upgrade the gpu

[Hawkeye71]

Hopefully I can just resurrect this thread.

Can anyone assist. I want to use the 10 year old MAMEUI32 - 0.122 and its fully working set of Roms in Hyperspin/Rocket Launcher

I did set up with the Mame PUI64 but only half the roms work. I appreciate roms are MAME dependant but i'd really rather not download a fresh set when the ones I already have have worked fine for many years.

It refuses to play the roms inside RL due to 'error - Unknown option no HLSL_enable'. I cannot see any evidence anywhere of being able to change or switch off the HLSL. Ive seen mention the location is on a MAME.ini and you change from 1 to 0 but there is no such location in that .ini. Doesnt even have a folder labled HLSL like the Mame UI64 does. Does anyone know where my RL is getting the instruction to check the HLSL status and thus fail it from?

Is this just too old for Hyperspin? Did it not have this HLSL back in the day?

[Robbbert]

0.122 is very old, long before Hyperspin or HLSL.

My advice is to UPDATE your MAME (or MAMEUI) to at least 0.185 (later ones have some crashing issues).