Mamewah- removing border from snaps

[Stormy151]

How can I remove that ugly white border around the screen shots?  I was checking out Stuzza's site and saw in the emu config what looked like a "noborders" switch where you tell it what folder the snaps are in, but when I try doing it, Mamewah gets an error and shuts down when I try to run it.

I don't know if this has been addressed before, but I did a search and didn't find this topic.

Thanks in advance.

[SirPoonga]

I HATE THOSE SNAPS!

Here's your answer.
http://crashtest.retrogames.com

[stuzza]

Sorry if that is a bit misleading on my site.  The "noborders" you are talking about is simply a folder on my computer in which I have the Screenshots that Sirpoonga has linked to above.  There is no such thing in Mamewah to remove borders.

[Minwah]

Sorry for the dumb question, but where do these 'white border' snaps come from??  I have never had any myself, and from hitting F12 I have never had the problem (haven't done that for a good few versions tho).  Does MAME add the borders in recent versions or something?

[Magnet_Eye]

Those snaps are the ones you get from..say, the MAME32 page. I dunno why they have borders on them.

[Minwah]

Those snaps are the ones you get from..say, the MAME32 page. I dunno why they have borders on them.

Oh right, that blows  

[Stormy151]

 

Boy is my face red!  I guess I could have figured it out if I'd opened one of the snaps in Photoshop.

It all makes sense now.  Thanks!

[Jakobud]

No one has ever ever ever been able to figure out why those jackass's put the huge white borders on those snaps.

Crashtest's snaps rule though!

[Howard_Casto]

I figured out why... have you seen mame32?  It's icons, layout and general style is tacky and cluttered.  They had to put UGLY borders on the snaps so they would match.  

[JoeB]

I run mamewah at 368x240 on a real arcade monitor.  As you can imagine, those borders look a lot bigger than a border on my 25" monitor.

I ended photoshoping them out off the ~150 games I have on my machine.

If you spend a few weeks going through thousands of games picking your favorites, whats a few hours with photoshop afterwards to make it perfect?  

[Stormy151]

I got new snaps from crashtest.  They sure are purty!  Thanks SirPoonga for straightening me out.

While I have your attention, I'm not fully understanding the whole "Artwork #1 Filename to Replace with Romname" thing.  What I gather from the readme, is that it will replace a certain file name with the rom name for use as a snap.  When I take screenshots in Mame, it attaches 0000 to the end and saves it to the snap folder.  The readme says I can use ? as a wildcard where the rom name appears.

So if I understand correctly, I have to enter the path here- so it would be C:\MAME\snaps\?0000.png.  This doesn't seem to be working.  Does the filename MAME generates use the rom name or the game name?

ALSO- MAMEWah doesn't seem to be using all of the snaps.  I have snaps for 1941, 1942, 1943, 1943 Kai, 1944 but I only get a screenshot for 1941, and 1944 in the FE.  They are named the same as the rom name.  What's the deal?  

EDIT- I figured it out.  What a maroon I am. :p  I was looking in the OLD folder that had the snaps with the white border where I had snaps for games that weren't in the "no border" snaps folder, and wondering why they weren't showing up.

The rename screenshot thing, I figured that out too- it does it AS you take the screen shot.  I thought it went through and changed file names for snaps you'd already taken.

So, thanks for putting up with me.  

[Minwah]

The rename screenshot thing, I figured that out too- it does it AS you take the screen shot.  I thought it went through and changed file names for snaps you'd already taken.

Yep, for MAME you don't really need to use this option, since it names the snaps correctly anyway - it only adds '0000' etc. if the snapshot already exists.

[Magnet_Eye]

I figured out why... have you seen mame32?  It's icons, layout and general style is tacky and cluttered.  They had to put UGLY borders on the snaps so they would match.  

Ah man...that was slightly uncalled for! Yikes!  

[NoOne=NBA=]

There are batch converters that you can use to remove the borders, but I don't recommend going that route.

You have to select the vertical pics and horizontal pics separately (and manually) before running them, which is really time consuming.

[Howard_Casto]

Guys, I'm sure he appreciates your help, but we've already given him a solution and he's using it.  Crashtest, duh!  Converters and other methods just waste time.

[)p(]

In Emulaxian you can't even have those white borders...
I auto remove those borders because I used to use them before Crashtests set came along...
I am also still puzzled why he added those borders for mame32 to the pics themselves and not to the rect that shows them inside mame32...

peter

[Howard_Casto]

In Emulaxian you can't even have those white borders...
I auto remove those borders because I used to use them before Crashtests set came along...
I am also still puzzled why he added those borders for mame32 to the pics themselves and not to the rect that shows them inside mame32...

peter

Because peter, that would make too much sense.... take a white shape object and wrap it around the picture box takes 2 secs to code and save countless hours having to put the border around the snaps manually.  Like I said, that would make too much sense

[Stormy151]

You know what would be cool?  An app that auto removed or cropped out those white borders, and resaved the png file.  Then I could use all the white border screens that I have that crashtest doesn't.  Is such a thing even possible?


Seriously though, thanks everyone.

[papaschtroumpf]

There is a program that does  that. can't remember its name though

[Stormy151]

Found one!

It's called clipic.  But it only works for .bmp images.  So I downloaded a converter to convert the png's into bitmaps, then ran the clipic to remove the borders, then converted back.

Took some work (and a quickie DOS command line refresher course!) but it worked!  Now I have border-free snaps for 95% of my games!

Thanks everybody again, for your great help!

[Howard_Casto]

You should have downloaded crashtests snaps... not only are they borderless, but they have better "action" shots, clone and parent roms have different shots, the snaps are in the proper aspect ratio (unlike the mame32qa snaps that just make all horizontal 3:4 and all vertical 4:3)  and there are matching title snaps.  

I think we've ragged on the mame32qa guys enough, but I'll stress this one last time... For the most part their artwork collections aren't worth downloading.  There are almost always higher quality alternatives available elsewhere.