Playing Mame in borderless windowed mode for magical auto bezels

[griffindodd]

I've been searching around a little to find potential solutions for this and figured I'd share what I have so far in the hope that others can chime in on this subject.

Scenario: You have a widescreen monitor and you want to play your games in their original aspect ratio, but you don't like having black bars with nothing of interest on the sides of the game. Now you could use the bezel system that some people have set up for sure, but what if, like me you have a rotating monitor, the bezels won't work for that and they are also a lot of work to set up for each game.

My thought: Make your desktop background into a generic patterned bezel and then run games in a borderless, maximized window with a maintained aspect ratio in the center of the screen. This way the generic background bezel shows around the game edges where the game doesn't use the whole desktop. You could even make an animated video desktop and have that showing around the edges of the game.

So far I have seen a few people talking about solutions.

Here's an AutoHotkey script that can be configured to do the job... http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/17306/how-to-force-maximized-fullscreen-mode-in-any-game

Here's a little app called 'Games Window Relocator' http://gwr.orekaria.com/

Another called Shiftwindow http://grismar.net/shiftwindow/

I haven't had time to try any of these methods yet, but I was just wondering if anyone else had managed to run Mame in a borderless window using the maximum screen height/width for the game's aspect ratio while still being able to see the desktop in the unused areas.

[Nightbring3r]

Couldn't you create a bezel image that's way bigger than you need in both directions, create a layout file for it, set your view to bezels on and cropped, and then just make a copy for each rom?

[drventure]

Couldn't you create a bezel image that's way bigger than you need in both directions, create a layout file for it, set your view to bezels on and cropped, and then just make a copy for each rom?

+1

It's not that hard to create layouts in mame that can accommodate things like this.

http://mamedev.org/devwiki/index.php/LAY_File_Basics_-_Part_I

[Howard_Casto]

Well it's not quite that simple.... vertical games would need a different bezel, as would games with dual monitors or other wierd setups (mirrored display ect).  But just using mame's artwork system is still a heck of a lot simplier than using some rigged method.  Your are going to run into issues with games that use the mouse if you run mame in windowed mode as well. 

And you know Mr. Do has a HUGE artwork collection over on his site.  Download em.... set the display mode to "cropped" and you would be suprised how many contain a layout that will fill the screen, even when rotated.

[griffindodd]

Thanks for the info.

I have a pretty good collection of 0.146u4 with Flyers, Marquees, Snaps, Artwork, Titles. Question is though how do I audit them properly? I used CLRMAMEPRO for my ROMS

[Howard_Casto]

Mr. Do has a dat for his art on the site.... it should work just fine.  I don't think you'd really need an audit though.... either you have the art file or you don't.  It's as simple as that.  Unlike roms and such, they don't get renamed or moved around a lot.  The parent rom for Mortal Kombat 2 is always going to be called mk2, even if the roms themselves move.  So the art files name is always going to be the same.

[drventure]

Mr. Do has a dat for his art on the site.... it should work just fine.  I don't think you'd really need an audit though.... either you have the art file or you don't.  It's as simple as that.  Unlike roms and such, they don't get renamed or moved around a lot.  The parent rom for Mortal Kombat 2 is always going to be called mk2, even if the roms themselves move.  So the art files name is always going to be the same.

I did not know that, but that's really good news! I was wondering about that in contemplating an update to the latest Mame (I'm still back on 1.29).

[griffindodd]

Ok sounds good, I have 852 Artwork Zips that I think are Mr Do's collection so I'll give them a go when I finally get my computer for the cab built. I want to use the bezels on the bottom screen which rotates for vert/hori games and hopefully display marquees, flyers and control panels on the second monitor which I was hoping to do with CPWizard

[Howard_Casto]

Mr. Do has a dat for his art on the site.... it should work just fine.  I don't think you'd really need an audit though.... either you have the art file or you don't.  It's as simple as that.  Unlike roms and such, they don't get renamed or moved around a lot.  The parent rom for Mortal Kombat 2 is always going to be called mk2, even if the roms themselves move.  So the art files name is always going to be the same.

I did not know that, but that's really good news! I was wondering about that in contemplating an update to the latest Mame (I'm still back on 1.29).

Well keep in mind I'm talking artwork files, not flyers,marquees, ect....  They are slightly different.  If you only get them for the parent rom, then you are ok, but art for clones cand be moved/renamed if if differs. 

Example: 

Lets say there's a game with the romanme "game" and it's supposed to be the most recent revision (rev4) of the rom.  It has "copyright game.inc" in the title screen.  Later a 5th revision is released... the difference is "another game" has bought out the company and now the title screen read "copyright another game.inc"  Well mame always makes the latest revision of a game the parent, so the old game.zip  gets renamed to gamr4.zip and the newly found rom is named game.zip.  If you don't update your title snaps the wrong copyright notice is going to be in the snap, because it's for the old revision 4. 

Those are the kind of issues you might run into and in all honesty, it rarely matters.  I just didn't want to mislead anyone.

But progretto does all the frontend art files now and he does a great job of keeping them organized.  You can download brand new sets from scratch in under and hour or two.

[drventure]

Hey Howard

Would you know who handles cabinet images?

One side project I've started is to clean up all the cabinet images that I've scrounged together so that they're all clean PNGs with transparent backgrounds and clean edges so they look good when displayed in mala with a non-black background.

I'd hate to duplicate any work someone else might be doing though, so if there's someone that's coordinating an effort like that, I'd love to throw in if possible.

[Howard_Casto]

Progretto does all images now afaik.  Pretty sure he does them by himself as well so I bet he would appreciate some help.

One suggestion though... while I agree 100% that cab images with transparent backgrounds are the way to go, some fes/apps flat out won't support them.  So what you would want to do is make the "matte" color of the image black, so it'll show up like an old-fashioned cab image on those applications. 

I think there is a way to set that in photoshop... but I'm not sure how.  Anyone?

[headkaze]

If you make the background transparent it's easy enough to write a batch file to add a black background using something like ImageMagick. I think most FE's support transparency these days though.

[drventure]

Yeah, that's one of the main things I wish LoadMan had some time to resolve in Mala, is supporting alpha channel images.

Did not know about ImageMagik though. That's an interesting solution

[Howard_Casto]

If you make the background transparent it's easy enough to write a batch file to add a black background using something like ImageMagick. I think most FE's support transparency these days though.

You would be suprised how many people still use stuff like mameui and mamewah. 

Technically speaking the image packs have always been for mame32/mameui, so if they look bad in it, I doubt they'll be accepted.