Windows front ends, do any support 240p out?

[dabone]

Ok, I've got all my emulators running correctly, but I haven't found a front end that I can figure out how to run in a 240p mode.

Prefer attractmode or emulation station, but I'm flexible.

Progressive looks great. Interlaced is ok in games, too shaky in static menus.

[dabone]

Sorry for the newbie posts, search being broken in the forums currently make finding answers a little difficult.

I followed a walkthru to install crt emu driver and it only installed supermodes, and ignored the user modes, so I only had super resolutions.
Finally adding in the user_modes.ini allowed my to select low res 4:3 resolutions for the desktop, and now I've got both attractmode and emulationstation working under 320x240.

[meyer980]

If you want to ensure your Attract Mode frontend looks nice in specific resolutions, you can create your own theme pretty easily. I've done it numerous times with this too: http://goodiesfor.me/attractmode/builder/

[psakhis]

I have emulastation with a 450x270 resolution with snes mini theme. For my needs it's perfect.

[oliver]

I asked myself the same question recently.
I switched from Mala to Attract Mode. The "basic" theme works ok at low res. Not sure if there is a better one though.

[keilmillerjr]

I asked myself the same question recently.
I switched from Mala to Attract Mode. The "basic" theme works ok at low res. Not sure if there is a better one though.

PICKnMIX works well at low resolutions and can be found on my attract fork.

[oliver]

Tried it but i prefer the basic Attract mode layout.

[keilmillerjr]

Tried it but i prefer the basic Attract mode layout.

Try coding one!

If you have an idea or mockup for a layout that works well at low and high resolutions, let me know!

[Zebidee]

I am in this exact same situation.

I've been using MameWAH on arcade CRTs like forever, and I love it's simplicity and practicality. But MAMEWAH hasn't been supported in years and keeping it going is like a constant battle. There are serious bugs in the latest versions that will likely never be resolved, can only be worked around. To move on I need to find something else/better.

Trouble is that I can't find a more modern FE with the same/similar qualities. That doesn't mean I'm not impressed - there are some very nice FEs out there, doing cool things, but they all seem oriented towards big LCD screens and higher-end PCs than I am using (still using core2duo E7600 for mine!).

Of all of the modern FEs, Attract Mode seems to be the best because a) very open-ended b) good community, well supported c) open source and d) already has some themes that would look good on CRTs. Downsides of AM include: no portable GUI layout designer (there is one that is website based, but not supported anymore), no resolution-switching (AM simply runs in whatever desktop resolution you are running), and a J-shaped learning curve for designing your own layouts.

I'm going to have to climb that learning curve soon.

[cools]

I can understand the use case for having AM switch resolutions, but if you're dropping into the OS that frequently... Create a keyboard shortcut to launch ArcadeOSD and be done with it.

Attract Mode is *the best* frontend for a 240p cabinet bar none. There's nothing else that comes close, and fwiw if you use MAMEWAH lists you can import those. Any of the built in layouts should look good in low resolution, as will Keils (and mine). There is an essential trick - use a 640x240 desktop resolution rather than 320x240. Text will be much clearer!

Layout editing: if you want to do something that's MAMEWAH equivalent that's as basic as it gets, probably 8-10 lines of text that's very well documented. Going more complex, you're into full programming mode and it's as good as the amount of time and effort you are able to expend.

(I care little for frontends/layouts with bells and whistles, animations and transitions that slow down the process of selecting a game)

[psakhis]

I don't want to question, but why Attract Mode it's better than Emulationstation for 240p?

Emulationstation with appropiate theme it's perfect with a lot of features, for example:
* Videos and music in the front
* Filters / Collections / Auto collections (last played, etc.)
* Favorites
* Stadistics (player count, timeHour lastplayed, ratings, etc.)
* Emulator / Core for system or game
* Fast! With SSD's loads in a second
* Kids options...
....

[cools]

Better for 240p - not really the question. They can both output usably at 240p.

AM has everything ES has and more (bar Last Played directly, but I think I know of a way to do it). Its filtering/collections system is vastly better and its layout engine can do anything you can imagine (provided you can program it).

Both of these are what sells it for me. There's been endless chat over the years about filtering MAME ROMs to get rid of rubbish, clones, mahjong, mature stuff - and loads of tools to make lists for this that can be loaded into whatever front end or extract only those ROMs. With Attract Mode there's no need, you can set up the filtering directly in the front end and every time your MAME version updates it will automatically update all the metadata and filters without needing an extra tool.

Subjectively - every other frontend has an ugly layout. Every single one - except maybe AdvMENU's tile mode back when that was an option. ES is okay... but doesn't work on a vertical monitor.

I should really do a video of how mine is set up one day... http://forum.attractmode.org/index.php?topic=3387.0

[psakhis]

I manage all my collection with Launchbox, pretty good for scrapping and order all systems. I don't want to have clone roms or mahjong, etc in my filesystem....

I programmed a pythoon script for autogenerate gamelist.xml files for ES, create media folders etc. For me it's ok. If in the future will exist a better frontend only i need to do it's a other pythoon script to migrate to it...but Launchbox it's the base.

[Zebidee]

I'm already committing myself to migrating from MameWAH to AM. As part of this I have setup dual-boot arrangements for the arcade PCs (basically XP64 for mameWAH based, Win7 for AM-based in future) I'm currently setting up. Another reason why I've put XP64 on these machines is CRT-emudriver compatability issues with older video cards (I'm using some old Radeon X300-X1050 video cards in them). But that is off-topic.

Cools: In terms of my use case for having AM, switch resolutions is not about convenience navigating the desktop. Rather,  it is that I like to play some games (that aren't part of Groovymame, like PC games or WinUAE or whatever) in specific resolutions and I would like to be able to launch them from the frontend. One way to do this is to set the resolution at the frontend's platform-theme-page, then the game uses that resolution when you launch it. I haven't tested this with AM, but I can imagine there are a lot of games/platforms that won't want to run in 640x240, or won't look good in it anyway. I expect that some games will be fine but others will have problems.

Even if the games support stretched resolutions, sometimes I want to play games in modes with 256 or even 288 lines or whatever. Managing variable game resolution requirements within a single AM install that uses a single video mode now gets more complicated. Even taking this into account, I like to choose resolution for each platform's theme page. To make things even more funky, I like to use my frontend to do more than just play games.

For example, I also use MameWAH to launch music & video clips from my home collection. My wife loves having my cab in the living room of the house for this reason. For the videoclips (all low-res but good quality) I like to choose a low-res interlaced mode like 768x512 768x576. It looks great for video, but would look a bit "meh" for games! But I assume I'd have to settle for the one-resolution-that-rules-them-all in AM

So that is my usage case for AM autoswitching resolutions, but I don't expect that to happen soon.

A workaround is to launch an external app like "changecreenresolution.exe" from a pre-emulator command line to change the res before the game is launched (and a post-emulator command line to switch it back), but I haven't experimented with this enough to know if it is viable.

So those really are the issues for me with using AM - and, to a large extent, moving to Win7 too. Oh and that AM doesn't have a portable GUI-based layout designer (every TV/PVM I've worked on is a bit different in terms of viewable screen area and tolerance of different resolutions, and I always like to tweak my layouts in-situ for this reason).

Q: Can ArcadeOSD be launched from the command line with parameters to switch to a specific resolution? What would be ideal is to be able to do something like this as a pre-emulator command:

arcadeosd.exe -switchres 320x256@53

[psakhis]

I change desktop resolution with DISPLAY CHANGER II program. https://12noon.com/?page_id=641

[Zebidee]

I change desktop resolution with DISPLAY CHANGER II program. https://12noon.com/?page_id=641

Thanks for that, was thinking about using DC2, glad to see it's been working for you