How to change the colors of the Mame UI screens?

[drventure]

I'm talking about the bluish screen that comes up when you hit tab (when you're actually running a game).

Is that even possible?

I found this chunk in ui.h

/* handy colors */
#define ARGB_WHITE            MAKE_ARGB(0xff,0xff,0xff,0xff)
#define ARGB_BLACK            MAKE_ARGB(0xff,0x00,0x00,0x00)
#define UI_FILLCOLOR         MAKE_ARGB(0xe0,0x10,0x10,0x30)
#define UI_YELLOWCOLOR         MAKE_ARGB(0xe0,0x60,0x60,0x10)
#define UI_REDCOLOR            MAKE_ARGB(0xf0,0x60,0x10,0x10)


And it +looks+ like the UI_FILLCOLOR is used for the menu background, but I'm not 100% sure.

I found how to customize the font used (covert a TTF to BDC file and name it ui.bdc), but no luck with changing the color of the font.

According to the mame notes, custom Font was added back around .31 and custom menu colors in .36, but I have yet to find any mention of actually setting custom colors.

Any ideas or am I just totally missing the obvious?

[Ummon]

That's....not something I even thought of.  Play around with values, I guess.

[EwJ]

I'm talking about the bluish screen that comes up when you hit tab (when you're actually running a game).

#define UI_FILLCOLOR         MAKE_ARGB(0xe0,0x10,0x10,0x30)

And it +looks+ like the UI_FILLCOLOR is used for the menu background, but I'm not 100% sure.

A red,green,blue value of 10, 10, 30 (as it looks like it's showing for UI_FILLCOLOR) would give a dark blue (if these are r,g,b, values)
You could try changing it to maybe 60,0,0 - see if it turns reddish to verify.
 
What did you want to change?

[drventure]

Oh, I was just looking to change it from the bluish color it is now to more of a goldish color, that would be more in keeping with my cab.

If it was just an INI setting, cool, but I'm not sure I want to go hacking the source just for something like that, then I'd have to maintain the odd version.

[EwJ]

If there is an obvious place to adjust these, I'm missing it too.
Maybe someone will chime in.

[Ummon]

Not that I know of. But I'm betting the value thing is as you said, EWJ. Look up the charts, and there you go, dr. Just record the original values. Also, you could request a UI feature for that of the devs.

[Ummon]

Hey, check this out:

http://mrdo.mameworld.info/mame_artwork_supp.html

FONTS
With the release of 0.107, MAME now has support for different fonts in the User Interface menu. Simply take any .BDF font, name it to ui.bdf, and place it in your MAME directory, and you're good to go.

As a mainly Windows, user, however, I had never heard of BDF fonts (they're an X-Windows thing as far as I can tell). Anyway, I found this neat little program that converts TTF fonts to BDF, called otf2bdf. To make the font show up decent enough, you need to make sure to convert it to a big enough point size. I used the following commandline when converting the ones below:


C:\>otf2bdf -p 48 fontname.ttf -o ui.bdf
Below are some of the ones that came out half-decent. Just click on the pic, and unzip the file to your MAME directory. More coming soon (or whenever...)