CPWizard v2.63 Released

[TheShanMan]

That did it headkaze! I'm off to try out a few games and see how I like those bezels in there.

As for the choking before completion, I'll do a full rebuild of bezels later when I get a chance and then check the logfile assuming it chokes again.

[TheShanMan]

Well, we're VERY close, but not quite there yet. Horizontals are GREAT, but my verticals are slightly off. Remember our discussion about my non 3:4 aspect ratio resolution (1024x1280)? That's coming into play here. You need to do calculations for BOTH vertical and horizontal screen settings. Setting the screen to l=0, t=0, r=1024, b=1280 causes the game to stretch horizontally slightly (total of 64 pixels, the difference between 960 and 1024). So really for my 1024x1280 configuration vertical games should be setting the screen to l=32, t=0, r=992, b=1280.

One more MINOR nit. I have the burgertime clone "btimem" in my favorites (not sure why I have that rather than btime), and I notice that when I go to the video menu, I have 2 "Show CP" and 2 "Hide CP" menu items. It would appear that clones will always pick up bezels from the master as well as the clone itself? If that's true as it appears to be, it would be nice to generate a "masters only" list of bezels to save on disk space since the clone bezels are redundant I guess.

EDIT: One more thing. I did confirm that those screen values work for btimem by modifying the .lay file. So it's not just a hypothesis. Actually, that's how I noticed the dual bezel for btimem. I went up to try the new .lay file and it didn't work. "What the heck? How could that not work?" I went into the video options and saw the dual listings. First one (the default I guess) was the btimem one, which I DIDN'T modify. That one didn't work. The second one, btime, which I DID modify, DID work.

So I guess if someone really wanted different bezels for a clone than for the master, it's good that apparently the clone bezel gets precedence, and it falls back to the master bezel if there is no clone bezel. So perhaps you could add an option for whether or not to create clone bezels (unchecked by default)?

[headkaze]

Attached is an exe I've added "Skip Clones" you can test it while I'm gone. Will check back here tomorrow to see how you go.

As for the 32 pixel problem, any reason why you don't run in a 4:3 res like 1280x960 instead? I would much rather remove that resolution as an option as it seems to add an irritating exception to the rule. If your determined to go with that res I'll have a look at it tomorrow.

[TheShanMan]

Well I'd have to redo my MaLa layout for one thing, which would result in less real estate there. I don't see why it needs to be seen as an exception to the rule. It's just that you should always be calculating which axis is the limiting axis (i.e. the axis where the screen bounds go from 0 to (max)) and then calculate the bounds for the axis that might have excess. In my case, vertical games will have excess of 32 pixels on each side. For most resolutions, it will have an excess of 0. But either way you wouldn't have to special case the code. It's just that you have to do a calculation rather than assuming the screen is 4:3 or 3:4.

In reality, if you take that approach, not only is there no "exception to the rule", but you don't have to treat vertical and horizontal differently. So it's actually a more general rule than what you have right now I think.

Oh, and it's really cool that you added that clone option! Not only will it save disk space, but it will save time as generating bezels takes a long time normally!

[headkaze]

Okay I could have had that other request working last night in a few seconds. I only had to change a couple lines of code and it does what you want now. The algorithm basically does it all. Sometimes a bit of sleep can help with that

I think the bezel calculations should be okay now. Let me know how it goes for you

EDIT: I notice people are downloading the attachement. This is only the program exe for testing and is useless by itself. If you want to try out CPWizard download it from the official website.

[TheShanMan]

Thanks headkaze! I have it running as we speak. Not sure if I'll get a chance to check the results before I leave for work, but I'll definitely get back to you. Initial check (1942/88games) looks good though. And I'm using the Skip Clones option.

[TheShanMan]

Looks like that's working great. One minor UI thing and one bug:

- The bezel progress bar only seems to increment on created bezels. It ought to increment when it skips a bezel too (due to the skip clone or skip existing options). It looks like it has a LONG way to go when it actually doesn't due to skipping so many. This is very minor of course.

- Remember the KEYCODE_0_PAD vs. KEYCODE_0PAD issue? I've converted mine over to the newer format (kind of forced to by CPW anyway). Well it seems to work great if the definitions are coming from a .cfg file, but for an unaltered keymap where it comes from the built in definitions (i.e. not a game cfg and not the default.cfg), it doesn't seem to work. Specifically, player 4 uses a lot of "PAD" keys but they're all appearing dimmed in games with unaltered keymaps, but games that do have an altered keymap they work fine (in one game I swapped P1 and P3, P2 and P4). Hope that makes sense. If you're confused just say so.

EDIT: for now I went into the default key mappings for player 4 and set them to... the default key mappings to get them to appear in default.cfg (i.e. I didn't change the mappings, just re-entered them). That solved the problem with the "PAD" keys. Still needs to be fixed though.

And other than that, this version did a tremendous job of creating bezels. I checked a bunch of them and they all look great! Fabulous work, headkaze!

This actually has me thinking of creating a bunch of alternate "mini-layouts" to export as images. I think I'd rather see the CPW output than real CP's in my FE. Much more useful for swappable panels since it would give you a preview of which panel you need to install to play the game.

[headkaze]

I'll fix the progress bar next release. That keycode issue is a tough one. I actually looked into that and found out the defaults in inpttype.h are defined the same as how I have them in std.ini for CPWizard. I would like to keep the backward compatibility, but according to u_rebelscum

Note that this change was made in 0.117u3, so for older versions of mame, the two '_' is the way to go.  (I don't know how backward compatible you want CPWizard to be, headkaze.)  Reason for change, now the '_' marks which keyboard (if more than one is mapped), the the number had to be moved next to the 'pad'.

So why do they still have the two '_' in inpttype.h but only one when you create a cfg file in 0.0126? How should I deal with the two different types of keycodes?

[TheShanMan]

Sorry headkaze. Not sure what to suggest on that one... whether it's technically a bug in the mame source or not, it will be perceived as a CPW bug as it's ultimately your issue to deal with .

On a more positive note though, I created a patch to unpause the game immediately before exit which prevents the CP bezel from being left on if you pause, then exit, then restart the game. It should be easy to merge with your bezel diff. See attachment.

[headkaze]

No worries, when I get some time I'll set up a CP using the keypad and install 0.117 to test both versions. Shouldn't be too hard to figure out. I guess I'll just have two key lists one for each version.

Thanks for the diff file, I've combined it with the current bezel patch and will put it on the website soon.

Glad you got the bezels working the way you like, I think it was worth it in the end

Can you check something for me as well, go into Options->Profiles and check for any enabled profiles that are enabled that have exe's that could be running while you run Mame. I had a user that had added a mame profile and it caused a conflict as all the Mame functionality is built in. After he removed his "mame" profile it worked again. Just thought you might have been having the same problem. I have very few reports about CPWizard having problems minimizing/maximizing Mame now, so perhaps it's just a config issue afterall.

[TheShanMan]

Glad you got the bezels working the way you like, I think it was worth it in the end

No question about it!

Can you check something for me as well, go into Options->Profiles and check for any enabled profiles that are enabled that have exe's that could be running while you run Mame. I had a user that had added a mame profile and it caused a conflict as all the Mame functionality is built in. After he removed his "mame" profile it worked again. Just thought you might have been having the same problem. I have very few reports about CPWizard having problems minimizing/maximizing Mame now, so perhaps it's just a config issue afterall.

I have never touched the profiles tab. It has the 2 default items there, but no mame. I might have just forgotten the problem you're referring to, but I'm guessing you mean the unpausing problem that we've never been able to figure out?

[TheShanMan]

headkaze, I discovered that the bezel for kangaroo is incorrect. Apparently whatever source of information you use for determining whether it's a vertical or horizontal game has it wrong. The bezel is created as though it's a horizontal game, and therefore when I pause, the game gets squished to be 1024x768 instead of staying 1024x1280.

What is the source of information? I imagine I should send a correction to whoever is the maintainer of that information or something.

It's really too bad the bezel specification doesn't allow for unspecified screen parameters. Then you would never have to worry about horizontal vs. vertical, or calculating screen parameters. Maybe you or I should create a diff and submit it to mamedev. Your turn!

[headkaze]

This is how I calculate if it's vertical from Mame's xml output

Code: [Select]

if (gameNode.Displays.Count > 0)
    Vertical = (gameNode.Displays[0].Rotate == 270);
Here is the display info for kanagroo

Code: [Select]

<Display Type="raster" Rotate="90" Width="512" Height="240" Refresh="60.09615" />
So that is calculated as a horizontal game.

[TheShanMan]

That would be the mame xml apparently? Seems like it has inconsistent information. Rotate=90 seems to imply vertical (though you're only checking for Rotate=270?), yet width > height. I wonder why that information is wrong? MAWS lists resolution as 240x512, the opposite of the mame xml. I suppose I could submit it to mametesters. I can do that while you work on the bezel .lay fix - I'm sure you're busily working on that now!

EDIT: Wait a second. I'm looking at the xml info on dkong, and it has Rotate=90 (which you imply you don't handle, and testing confirms) and width > height: w=256, h=224. So I guess I just hadn't noticed until now that some of the bezels are wrong. DK and puckman for instance, yet centipede is right for instance. It seems like the mame xml info is not super accurate, but you at least need to be handling Rotate=90 too.

You'd think that some games would be upside down with some being 90 and some being 270.

[headkaze]

Hmm I wonder why I wasn't checking for 90 degree's as well? Hmm

Okay here is an update with 90 degree checking added. Let me know when all is okay and I'll do an official release.

[TheShanMan]

I checked a bunch more this time and they all seem to be perfect (knock on wood)!

No need to hold up the release for this, but there is one thing that would be nice to have, especially now that you've added the Skip Clones feature. The ability to choose which bezels to make. Kind of like a multi-select version of the preview list.

The reason I mention Skip Clones is particularly for pacman, since the master is puckman but I, like most I'm sure, use pacman instead. It would be nice to see accurate information on the bezel for it, so I wish I could go into CPW and create just that one bezel.

Another example of where picking from a list would be very helpful (perhaps even more so): you change key mappings for a game or two and need to generate a new bezel(s) to reflect the mapping changes.

The only workarounds are either wait an hour while a full bezel set is generated, or hand edit your mini xml file. Obviously neither is great.

EDIT: Duh. Delete the file and use the Skip Existing option. Still would be a nice feature, but not as big of a deal obviously.

[TheShanMan]

Well, I found a basic problem with bezels. For games where you use a non-default video setting, the game is completely unplayable. For instance, Super Punch-out. It has a split screen layout where the main action by default is on monitor 2. If you only have 1 monitor then you have to pick one of the non-default layouts that show both screens on one monitor. Problem is, as soon as you pause or unpause, you lose screen 2, which is the main action.

What do you think, headkaze? Is there something that can be done to handle these scenarios? I don't know if there is something CPW can do to detect these when creating the bezels to make sure the layouts are created properly. Maybe CPW could have some settings for what to do with these games. Is there any way for CPW to know what the video modes are? If so, maybe it could prompt for which mode the user wants to use. I'm guessing it can't know about them though. At a minimum, if at all possible, it would be nice if CPW could flag these games to notify the user that they may be problematic, and leave it up to the user if they want to just delete the bezel or edit it.

[headkaze]

Mame always manages to create exceptions to the rule

You guess is as good as mine at this point, the data I have to work with in CPWizard is contained in MiniInfo.xml. It has a large portion of the Mame xml data in it, including display info, so it might have enough to do something about split screen games.

[TheShanMan]

Cool. Hopefully you can work something out there. I'll be on vacation for a little over a week starting tonight, so don't expect me to respond if you post a test version for me.

[doctorhifi]

Great app!

I seem to be having trouble getting joystick commands(up, down, left, etc.) to show up on the control panel layout.

I'm using 2 U360 joysticks and mame sees these as Joy 1 and Joy 2. For third player controls I've got a regular joystick and mame sees the controls for this stick as Up, Down, Left, Right.

On my CPWizard layout my player 1 joystick labels are Joycode_1_Up, Joycode_1_Down, etc.  But with these labels I don't get any commands showing up on the layout when I do a preview.  If i change my player 1 jostick labels to Keycode_Up, Keycode_Down, etc.  then the commands show up.  Interestingly enough, the button labels for players 1 and 2 DO show up and these are set as Joycode_1_Button1, Joycode_1_Button2, etc.

What am I doing wrong?

[headkaze]

What am I doing wrong?

There are quite a few things you could be doing wrong, so it's a matter of tracking it down.

- Check your mame.ini file is located in the same folder as Mame's exe. If your using a ctrlr file CPWizard reads mame.ini to get the name
- Mame codes have changed over the different Mame versions so I've tried to keep up with it but still haven't got it working for all versions. For now the only way to support some versions of Mame is to edit the Data\std.ini file.

Code: [Select]

P1_JOYSTICK_UP                "KEYCODE_UP|JOYCODE_1_Y_UP_SWITCH"
P1_JOYSTICK_DOWN              "KEYCODE_DOWN|JOYCODE_1_Y_DOWN_SWITCH"
P1_JOYSTICK_LEFT              "KEYCODE_LEFT|JOYCODE_1_X_LEFT_SWITCH"
P1_JOYSTICK_RIGHT             "KEYCODE_RIGHT|JOYCODE_1_X_RIGHT_SWITCH"
If you change these codes to match your keycodes it should work okay.

[doctorhifi]

Thanks.
I'm not using a ctrlr file so I tried changing the std.ini but that didnt work so clearly I'm still not getting it right.  I guess I don't know where to put my mame codes.  Here's what I tried:

Original
Code:
P1_JOYSTICK_UP                "KEYCODE_UP|JOYCODE_1_Y_UP_SWITCH"
P1_JOYSTICK_DOWN      "KEYCODE_DOWN|JOYCODE_1_Y_DOWN_SWITCH"
P1_JOYSTICK_LEFT              "KEYCODE_LEFT|JOYCODE_1_X_LEFT_SWITCH"
P1_JOYSTICK_RIGHT         "KEYCODE_RIGHT|JOYCODE_1_X_RIGHT_SWITCH"
 
changed to:

Code:
P1_JOYSTICK_UP                "KEYCODE_UP|Joy 1 Up"
P1_JOYSTICK_DOWN              "KEYCODE_DOWN|Joy 1 Down"
P1_JOYSTICK_LEFT              "KEYCODE_LEFT|Joy 1 Left"
P1_JOYSTICK_RIGHT             "KEYCODE_RIGHT|Joy 1 Right"

[headkaze]

I meant something like this, it basically has to match your keycodes.

Code: [Select]

P1_JOYSTICK_UP                "KEYCODE_UP|JOYCODE_1_UP"
P1_JOYSTICK_DOWN              "KEYCODE_DOWN|JOYCODE_1_DOWN"
P1_JOYSTICK_LEFT              "KEYCODE_LEFT|JOYCODE_1_LEFT"
P1_JOYSTICK_RIGHT             "KEYCODE_RIGHT|JOYCODE_1_RIGHT"

[doctorhifi]

I fixed it but not by changing the std.ini file.
Turns out something must have been wrong in my mame.cfg because I deleted the default mame cfg, had mame create a new one and then everything worked fine.

One last thing- I'm using two buttons for loading and saving within a game.  The LOAD button is mapped to the space bar in Mame (keycode 32) and the SAVE button is mapped to the R.Shift key (keycode 161).
Seems pressing these while running a game also causes the CPW menu to come up interfering with the ability to load/save.

I don't see anything in the CPW cfg file that points to those keycodes so I'm wondering if you can tell me how to make CPW only pop up when the pause button is pressed.   My pause button is mapped to L.CTRL (keycode 162).
thanks

[cadmium]

I have a question, maybe it's been asked before - I couldn't find it on a quick survey. I'm using the export batch process to generate images and using the patch to show the cp's during pause.

The problem I'm having is that the only cp's that show up during pause are the ones generated by the "bezels" export which generates a zip file with a .lay and cp.png in it. But that only seems to generate a small percentage of the cp's (most cps are blank).

The "images" export creates all of the .png cp's but they don't show up when I hit pause.

What am I doing wrong?

[headkaze]

doctorhifi : Yeah this is a known problem with save states causing CPWizard to show. Hopefully I can get some time to enhance the patch to prevent this from happening.

cadmium: You must export them as Bezel format not png's. When done correctly they will export as zip files and you must place them in Mame's artwork folder.

[doctorhifi]

thanks.  I can live with that quirk.

Your app rocks! 

[cadmium]

cadmium: You must export them as Bezel format not png's. When done correctly they will export as zip files and you must place them in Mame's artwork folder.

When I generate them in bezel format, most of the cp's are blank?

[cadmium]

In my last export batch, using Bezel, Layout Only, 1024x768 and No on Vertical Bezels 2,144 were empty layouts. It appears once it hits a certain point it just stops generating the layouts.

If I do a preview, the layouts show up just fine, but not during the export batch.

Edit. Generating them at a smaller size (640x480) seems to get more (if not all) of them?

[headkaze]

In my last export batch, using Bezel, Layout Only, 1024x768 and No on Vertical Bezels 2,144 were empty layouts. It appears once it hits a certain point it just stops generating the layouts.

If I do a preview, the layouts show up just fine, but not during the export batch.

This problem has been reported from another user and I couldn't locate the actual cause of it. It seems to me like a memory leak or something as it does it after an amount of time. If you run it on a PC with more memory it will probably work. AFAIK The only way around it at the moment is to delete the empty ones and then run it again with the "Skip Existing" option set.

[cadmium]

Actually I tried that and it still didn't work. I'm running 2GB of memory, but it could be a memory leak. Like I said, the only thing that helped was lowering the resolution.

[headkaze]

Actually I tried that and it still didn't work. I'm running 2GB of memory, but it could be a memory leak. Like I said, the only thing that helped was lowering the resolution.

Hmm well I've tested it on two machines that have 1 gig of memory and never experienced this problem. It could be a GDI leak of some sort which is easy enough to do, but I am always really careful when dealing with GDI to avoid resource leaking. Another possibility is the zip library I'm using.

There is also a chance that some sort of error is occuring. I would run off a batch then open up the CPWizard.log file and see if there is any error. If there is it's usually a fairly simple thing to fix. Anyway if you can take a look at that and post the log if there is an error I should be able to get it sorted.

[TheShanMan]

Hey headkaze, back from vacation. Any news on the non-default display setting problem? Remember, it's where games using display settings other than the default 4:3 (e.g. multi-monitor display games where you pick split screen) don't work with the bezels?

EDIT...

I just edited the super punchout .lay file to stack the 2 screens vertically, and now it works great with the cpw image. If cpw can detect multiple screens, then I think it should be able to handle these cases fairly easily. Although I think more options would need to be added (such as only show screen 0, only show screen 1, show both (I imagine it could use the "vertical orientation" setting to determine whether to stack them or put them side by side).

On another note, I also wonder if cpw could support other non-vertical bezels. I created a modified version of the spy hunter bezel to just show the weapons lights at the bottom of the screen (i.e. got rid of the rest of the bezel). Since there is already an "include vert bezel" option, I wonder if it would be hard for cpw to read and use an existing bezel, scaling the cpw coordinates according to the coordinates defined in the existing bezel? If not, no big deal. I can manually update my custom bezel when I export cpw bezels. But if so, I think there would need to be a source directory added to the dialog for reading existing bezels (rather than just overwriting bezels in the output directory). I'd be curious to know your thoughts here.

And on a totally unrelated note, I just set up a PC steering wheel/pedals for 270 degree wheel games. I'm trying to figure out how to enable/disable the pedal images depending on the game's need for the pedals (e.g. spy hunter has no brake, so it should be grayed). Is this possible with a joystick axis, or half axis (the pedals share the y axis, where brake is like moving a joystick down and gas is like moving it up)? I haven't been able to get that working with the joystick codes.

[TheManuel]

Does anyone know if CPWizard imposes any significant CPU overhead while in resident mode but not showing anything?

Thanks.

[headkaze]

Does anyone know if CPWizard imposes any significant CPU overhead while in resident mode but not showing anything?

Thanks.

It takes up memory but no CPU.

TheShanMan: Sorry mate haven't had a chance to look at that issue.

[TheManuel]

Great!
Thank you.

I'm now ready for this part of the project.

This project will never end...

[TheShanMan]

No problem, headkaze. It's not a pressing issue.

TheManuel, you might also want to consider having CPW create bezels for you. That way you don't even have to run CPW in resident mode - it just relies on MAME to show the CP bezel.

[TheManuel]

TheManuel, you might also want to consider having CPW create bezels for you. That way you don't even have to run CPW in resident mode - it just relies on MAME to show the CP bezel.

Thanks. 
I thought of that but given that I adjust controls every now and then and I'm already starting to fill my hard drive, I was hoping I could use the resident mode.  It is also more useful because I can access other files from it as well.
From Headkaze's reply it sounds as if I should be OK.

[TheManuel]

I created a CP sized at 1024x768 but I usually run my games and MaLa at 640x480.
If I want my CP Wizard layout to show up at 640x480, do I have to re-size the original layout image or is there a setting to scale down the layout to the resolution I want to run at?
I know CP Wizard will display at the desktop resolution but I have everything running at 640x480.

Thanks.

[TheManuel]

Never you mind.  I'm a dumbass  .
While testing, I was switching to the desired 640x480 resolution after starting CPWizard so the app did not know the resolution had changed.
By starting CPWizard at the right resolution, it does not matter what resolution the layout is at.