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CPWizard v2.63 Released
headkaze:
Glad you tested that feature for me. Okay it seems to me I will have to add an option to "Create vertical bezels for vertical games" and just swap the width and height for them. Since I do have access to a variable which tells me if a game is vertical or not it should be relatively easy to fix that.
Yeah I haven't done much about the other issue as I've been working on other projects. Will get back to you on that one, but first I think I would like to sort out the vertical bezel thing.
TheShanMan:
Sounds great. I've been effectively without CPW for so long now that to get ANYTHING working will thrill me, even if it's not my first choice.
Do you think you can support either a much larger list of resolutions or allow specifying a custom resolution for the bezels too?
headkaze:
--- Quote from: TheShanMan on July 11, 2008, 10:24:15 am ---Do you think you can support either a much larger list of resolutions or allow specifying a custom resolution for the bezels too?
--- End quote ---
No problem I just thought noone would want to go over 640 x 480 for bezels. That will create a really massive artwork folder too even zipped lol. Yeah but easy enough to add that.
I think adding 1024 x 768, 1280 x 960 and 1280 x 1024 should do it. BTW did you know that 1280 x 1024 is not 4:3 aspect ratio? Shouldn't you be going for 1280 x 960?
EDIT: Okay mate, can you try this attached exe? It should add those resolutions as well as allow you to use the layout size. Select the "Rotate For Vertical" option which should flip the coords.
TheShanMan:
I did realize that but never gave it much thought. I wonder what mame does in that case - taking a vertical game for instance I imagine it results in thin black bars on the left and right, but since they'd only be 32 pixels wide maybe I just have never noticed. I'll have to try switching to 960x1280 and see if it looks different. Of course, if there are any horizontal games that originally had a higher resolution, like 1024x768, then they wouldn't run on my vertical setup.
I will definitely try it out when I get home today (or maybe I'll do it remotely while I'm at work!). I have a friend (and family) that's coming over for dinner tomorrow, and we used to play Area 51 a lot, so he'll definitely get a kick out of my arcade machine, and getting the bezels working would certainly add to the experience!
Oh, and I thought about the size of my artwork folder with larger images. I didn't think to see how big it is with 480x640 images, so it will be interesting to see how big the folder is after I try 1024x1280!
Thanks!!!
TheShanMan:
I just tested it out, but I'm still getting the vertical stretching of horizontal games. I'll try playing with the settings a bit unless you think I'm doing it right. My settings are:
Resolution: Layout Size (which is 1024x1280)
Include Vertical
Rotate for Vertical
It works great for vertical games (well, at least for donkey kong - didn't try anything else yet). If I can just get past these stretching issues, I think I'll be quite happy with the bezel approach. Seems like it would be much less prone to problems than running CPW resident.
And the output was only about 1.85 GB, which I can definitely live with!
EDIT: I can reproduce the stretching problem with vertical games on a horizontal monitor (my desktop system). This was using resolution size 1280x1024 rather than Layout Size. I'm starting to investigate if I can get it to work properly by editing the .lay file (I don't know much about these yet though).
EDIT 2: I figured out the problem. The screen bounds are being calculated incorrectly. Since I'm debugging this on my desktop rather than my cabinet, I'll use a vertical game on a horizontal monitor example, though obviously it should translate to horizontal games on a vertical monitor too. For centipede, it defined the screen bounds like this:
--- Code: ---<bounds left="140" top="0" right="1140" bottom="1024" />
--- End code ---
That's not a 3:4 aspect ratio! It should be:
--- Code: ---<bounds left="256" top="0" right="1024" bottom="1024" />
--- End code ---
That makes it 768x1024, which is 3x4. When I try the edited layout, the game works fine when showing and hiding the bezel. 8)
One extra question: If you exit a game when a bezel is up (i.e. when paused), the next time you start the game the bezel is showing even though it's not paused. Is there something that can be done about this? There doesn't appear to be a command line parameter to hide bezels other than the option for enabling/disabling bezels - maybe you can add that to your bezel diff >:D. Alternatively, do you think that's something an app could do by detecting the exit state with the output system? I think that would also require a mame patch to support telling it to hide bezels, much like your patch to support telling it to unpause. I'd like your thoughts on either one of these approaches to making sure the bezel isn't showing at startup, though a solution is certainly not critical at this point. My wife would be mad at me for saying this, but perhaps if that's not something you're interested in doing, I could work on that and give it to you as a helper app that comes with CPW or with the bezel diff.