How to use digital benzels/art work to overlay black borders in MAME?

[Hippox89]

Hi. I like to play MAME games in their correct aspect ratio on my 16:9 LCD display, and so naturally there's black borders. However, for games with a ultra-slim width, like Galaga88, I like to know if there's a convenient way to add digital benzels/art work as overlays to cover the black borders. I'm using MAMEUIFX64 on Windows 8.1.

I've actually already managed to accomplish this task myself, but in a very, very inconvenient way.



This is taken from a live game of Galaga88 from my 16:9 LCD display, it's not just a concept image!

How I accomplished this was first to find a image of the cabinet benzel art that had been made digital and in a high enough resolution. Then I had to photoshop the image in two separate pieces, one piece for each size of the black borders with an exactly matching size. So now I had two images that could overlay the black space on either side of the screen. Next I had to make Galaga88 run as a borderless window instead of fullscreen - and I then added the two images as their own windows and then set them both to 'always on top' so to be able to cover the black borders. I actually also had to add a black overlay underneath whole desktop to cover the taskbar from appearing at the bottom.

Now, I'm sure you sense how huge an afford this was besides being super inconvenient to set up. So my question is, is there a better, more convenient  way of accomplishing a similar result? Thank you!

[yotsuya]

Research .lay files.

[Hippox89]

Thank for the reply. Anyhow, actually while I was waiting for a admin to approve my post, I came across 'mrdo.mameworld.info' and was able to figure it all out. I think this thread can just be deleted as not to take up forum space.