Question on virtual bezel found in some games

[aust_txv]

Greetings,
Been a while for me...everything is working.

After updating from mame.6x  something to mame.7x and .80 Using win98 and emu-loader. What's up with the virtual bezels found in some games ? For example X-men:Children of the Atom.

I certainly can appreciate the work that went into adding these bezels to mame.  Yes it does make the game look more realistic, but the games are smaller on the screen...

Is there a command to remove the bezels ?  Or am I going back to mame.6x.

Thank you for your time,

Tom

[Jakobud]

If you look in the mame.ini you can find the variables you need to change for that part of the artwork.

[aust_txv]

Very good. Will do. Thanks for the help.
Tom

[Lilwolf]

you can just delete it also.  Its in the artwork directory.

btw... some of the bezels are really needed for games (armor attack, golly ghost, ect).  So turning them off kind of kills some games.  Delete the bezels you don't like.

[aust_txv]

>>btw... some of the bezels are really needed for games (armor attack, >>golly ghost, ect).  So turning them off kind of kills some games.  Delete >>the bezels you don't like.

Will do.  I like the bezel in the vertical games, but can live without them in the horizontal games.  

Thank you for your reply,

Tom

[Howard_Casto]

What lilwolf said isn't entirely accurate.  A very few games, like lunar lander do need bezels enabled.  But unless I'm mistaken the games he mentioned need overlays and underlays enabled.  You can turn off individual artwork elements instead of just turning artwork completely off.  

[Tiger-Heli]

Greetings,
Been a while for me...everything is working.

After updating from mame.6x  something to mame.7x and .80 Using win98 and emu-loader. What's up with the virtual bezels found in some games ? For example X-men:Children of the Atom.

I certainly can appreciate the work that went into adding these bezels to mame.  Yes it does make the game look more realistic, but the games are smaller on the screen...

Is there a command to remove the bezels ?  Or am I going back to mame.6x.

Thank you for your time,

Tom

If you are using the latest EmuLoader, you can just go into the Emulator Setup screen and change them there.  You also can turn them on or off for each specific game by right-clicking on the game name and selecting "settings - individual game" or some such.

For vector games like astdelux, try enabling the over/underlay and "Crop" which makes the game fullscreen.

Also, Sir Poonga has a hack for vertical games which makes only the bezel in the gamefield display, like this
http://www.fraggersxtreme.com/arcadepanels/crop43.jpg

The hack is included in NoNameMAME, but not supported by EmuLoader.  It also slightly changes the aspect ratio of the games, but it looks good, IMHO.

[aust_txv]

Good stuff !  
Thanks,
Tom

[killbill]

Hi,

I have a question about this.  I am running commandline Mame through Mamewah.

After deleting the virtual bezel for an individual game out of your artwork folder in Mame, do you have to do any kind of hardware stretch to get the game screen to take up the full screen?  This question is in regards to the horizonal based bezeled games, like Metal Slug 2-4.

Thanks.

[Tiger-Heli]

Hi,

I have a question about this.  I am running commandline Mame through Mamewah.

After deleting the virtual bezel for an individual game out of your artwork folder in Mame, do you have to do any kind of hardware stretch to get the game screen to take up the full screen?  This question is in regards to the horizonal based bezeled games, like Metal Slug 2-4.

Thanks.

Short answer is No, it will be full screen.

Moderate answer is you need HW stretch turned on, but if the non-bezel games were full screen, the bezel ones with the bezel deleted or turned off will be FS as well.

Long answer is you really shouldn't be "deleting" the virtual bezel, you should be either disabling it in the mame.ini file (run mame -cc from the command prompt if you don't have one) or on a per game basis in the gamename.ini files.

[killbill]

Hi Tiger,

Thanks for the answer.  I won't delete the bezels then.  Basically, i want to leave the vertical game bezels up, but disable the horizonal ones.

This may seem like a lame question, but where do I find the individual gamename. ini files within Mame?  

[Howard_Casto]

You don't, you make them.  

[Tiger-Heli]

Hi Tiger,

Thanks for the answer.  I won't delete the bezels then.  Basically, i want to leave the vertical game bezels up, but disable the horizonal ones.

This may seem like a lame question, but where do I find the individual gamename. ini files within Mame?  

What HC said . . .

Basically, you will need to create a C:\MAME\ini folder, then edit your mame.ini file (use Notepad) so it has an entry for

***
### Windows path and directory options ###
inipath                 C:\mame\ini
***
That is probably commented out now.

From here you have 4 options:

1) If you are using a front-end like Emu-Loader (or any major one) it should have a "Individual Games Settings" tab (or similar) which will create the .ini file for you.

2)  In Your MAME.ini file, near the bottom, you will see entries for:
***
### Mame CORE misc options ###
artwork                     1
use_backdrops         1
use_overlays            1
use_bezels               1
artwork_crop            0
***
Now, this allows all artwork for all games, but we don't want bezels for MetalSlug 2-4 (mame name, Arrrgh, you must be using an older MAME, closest I see is "MetalSlug 2 super vehicle 001/II" which is mslug2 in mame. So . . .
Copy your MAME.ini file to the C:\MAME\ini folder and rename it to mslug2.ini, delete all entries except the following and change to:
***
### Mame CORE misc options ###
use_bezels               0
***
Note: The "###" line entries are optional.  You can also use this method to change any other MAME setting on a per-game basis (for example, if you want a wider beam in Tempest than Battlezone, if you want scanlines in one game but not others, etc.

3)  Opposite of above - you can edit MAME.ini so it says:
use_bezels       0
then create individual gamename.ini files for your VERTICAL games to turn them ON.

4)  You could ignore all the above, set MAME up to use bezels, and then copy your horizontal game artwork to a C:\MAME\artworkhor folder that MAME won't recognize.  (I just don't like the idea of deleting stuff that you might later want and not be able to find, but this avoids that).  This won't work if you want horizontal overlays but not bezels, however.

[killbill]

Thanks so much for the help.