4K Vertical Overlay Community Contributions

wao!! beautifull amazing!! well of course, you can use it Thank!!

4 Likes

I have it basically together. I will work on getting another PC here set up so I can actually play test these and provide configuration files this weekend (I hope).

Raw overlay file is here: Outfoxies Overlay

And here is a link to the full resolution bezel:

Outfoxies bezel

@Orionsangel, feel free to use as always :slight_smile:

And thanks to @walter.farmacia for sharing the very cool control panel!

7 Likes

I have this overlay working with MegaBezel, but I still need to figure out the right way to package these up for easy consumption.

I also seem to have trouble getting a screenshot that looks right when captured in HDR mode. If anyone has a solution for that let me know. The overlay looks beautiful on my TV but the screenshot in RetroArch came out blank/black, while the Windows screenshot has strange brightness levels in the bright areas of the marquee:

Here it is off the TV, thought it appears darker than this in person:

7 Likes

Turned out amazing! @ArsInvictus and @walter.pharmacy

EDIT: almost forgot… been so busy. I created a Retroarch / vertical overlay / megabezel installation, setup and configuration tutorial. Instructions are in subtitles. I eventually hope to add some other languages which is partially why subtitles made sense. Also, it’s hard to get quiet for voice over with young kids around.

Only issue is the subtitles are breaking randomly. But I think I know the fix… :thinking:

Just wanted to thank @HyperspaceMadness for megabezel! Also thank you @Duimon for your work. I’m sure there are others involved, but I am still new and learning names.

5 Likes

Hey @far327, I did see that video on YouTube and watched it before I set my overlay up, thanks for investing so much of your time into this project!

Check out this post: MagicHat's OrionsAngel Mega Bezel MAME Arcade Setup by @MagicHat though. I think @HyperspaceMadness has set up a structure where we can actually configure the overlay in the shader configuration, and it can help with automatic placement of the bezel, and set up defaults for where no overlay exists.

So we wouldn’t use the RetroArch overlay directory, we’d just package everything up with the shader.

This seems like a convenient way for people to install the overlays and would likely reduce the effort for us to package them up.

Let me know what you think!

5 Likes

You can use GeForce Experience/nVIDIA Shadow Play for screenshots but I’m not sure if you have an nVIDIA Graphics card.

1 Like

Okay cool, so this is good because when setting up overlays to take advantage of @HyperspaceMadness additional reflections on the rest of the cabinet art (cpo etc…) you also have to load through the shader menu and no longer the menu in overlay feature in retroarch. So it just means a whole new process. Which is GREAT! But also…. A lot of work to come.

Good thing you are back :laughing:

I am in progress of making a Star Wars Trilogy overlay and will use this new process for it.

1 Like

I do! I’ll give that a shot!

1 Like

Let me know how it goes, I’ll work on setting that up here too. It would be good if we can come up with a common directory structure for all these overlays so it doesn’t clutter things up on people’s machines. We had been doing that with a vertical-overlay parent directory name in the past. Maybe we can do the same for the megabezels?

A vertical folder would be a good idea. I think Mega_Bezel_Vertical_Packs would be a good option.

2 Likes

So, it does capture it correctly as a .jxr file. And if I open it in Windows Photo it looks correct. But if I export the jxr file as a jpg or png, or open the jxr file in Chrome the luminance is off again. Do you do anything to tone map the files before you share them?

EDIT: Nevermind, I found a little utility that can do it automatically, it can be set up to watch the capture folder and convert them all as they come through too, which is nice: https://github.com/brion/hdrfix

3 Likes

Thanks for sharing the GitHub link. I’ll try that one out.

Both of those overlays turned out nice! I’m on board with a singular folder structure for future and updated overlays.

3 Likes

The .jxr file consists of both an hdr file in jpg format and a properly tonemapped sdr file in jpg format.

The SDR/HDR file is used according to whether or not HDR is switched on in Windows.

I think the Windows Game Bar HDR capture generates an actual tonemapped .jpg .png file as well.

I can share another app which is supposed to assist with the tonemapping and viewing of those files.

If you could extract the SDR image from the .jxr file captured using the nVIDIA Shadow Play method, that might look pretty decent.

1 Like

Yes, the Game Bar seems to be the easiest method. It’s actually producing a tone mapped png alongside the jxr, which is nice as it’s also lossless. I’ll just use Game Bar to take the screenshots going forward. Thanks so much for all your help @Cyber!

1 Like

I don’t have a really long history in the community like many of you but when I look at the “traditional” method of putting an overlay together vs wrapping it all up into just the shader config itself, I think it should be the preferred method going forward. Of course this is just my own opinion and it also plays a factor with me being relatively new in this scene (year or so) I’m not “set in my ways” like I bet many of you have become over the years getting use to a method.

Getting the image brought into the config via the shader itself is less moving parts to work with and simplifies the install for others who download your work to use in their setups. It also opens the door to have a set “standard config” in the eyes of the original person who releases something to others. It locks that config in place but it also allows for an easy method for others to further tweak any game they want beyond what the original person put together. @HyperspaceMadness really simplified this. Once I dove in on this and saw it first hand, it was a no brainer in my eyes to use this method to package up all of @Orionsangel art in this format. It was a shit ton of work but that was mostly because I was “playing catchup” with his project to get all of the 165+ games in this format. But once you get caught up, doing additional future ones is easy.

4 Likes

Well said, and I agree.

That being said, there is still a need for overlays on SBC’s and under-powered computers.

Having custom aspect parameters in the overlay *.cfg file (Like MAME *.lay files) would greatly simplify overlay distribution for Retroarch. It is odd that MAME, Rocketlauncher, and EmulationStation all use coordinates in the *.cfg (Or *.bezel) but RA does not.

2 Likes

A quick note on “…automatic placement of the bezel (image)”. That was my original plan as well with Orions work. The problem is, once I tested that out I discovered the placement isn’t 100% perfect on many of the games. It’s not HSM fault it’s just the nature of the beast with the actual image being used and where the calculations come in based on the video area of the image. Many games looked just fine with the auto fit but many were also bugging me seeing one side with a thicker bezel then the other. I ended up just accepting the fact that I was going to customize the fit for every single one if I wanted it more how I wanted the bezels. But I was OK with that because you still have that option available if you went that direction while also doing individual customized ones. Plus that great feature that auto loads the generic cabinet for any game that hasn’t been customized yet. It’s a great system HSM put together!

2 Likes

True. I got caught up in the mindset of “MEGA Bezel is the standard” so much that I forget there might be hardware out there that isn’t the smoothest once you bring that into the config. But for any modern hardware out there MEGA seems to be #1 to get into your config if you can. And if your someone working on a project with your eyes on using the MEGA bezel, then this type of config becomes pretty attractive in my eyes vs the old overlays method looking forward. The hard part is playing the catch up game on old work!

1 Like

Yeah, I use low powered computers myself sometimes and I can’t use the MegaBezel at all on those. I do wonder if @HyperspaceMadness could add an option based on some of the less demanding shaders and without the reflections etc, so we could still use the megabezel as a more universal distribution mechanism?

I think RetroArch did support .lay files as well at one point, but I think it was removed? I don’t know where it stands now.

It would be nice to have something in RetroArch that is as simple as lay files for the consumer, and the megabezel is one option to get there.

It would also be nice if the megabezel could support alternate image files, and have a way for the user to switch between them easily, perhaps as a shader parameter? For instance, we have coin door, CPO, alternative art, small screen, large screen variations in many cases. MAME lay files let you bundle the variations together and the user can just flip between them in the Tab menu.

1 Like

There are actually 8 image layers available in the Mega Bezel. (Background, Device, Device LED, LED, Glass, Decal, and Top.)

They all share the same parameters and the intent defines the layer order.

For a single image overlay you could have up to 8 different images and adjust visibility (Opacity) as you wish.

The Potato have no reflections and only one image layer. It is essentially just a border shader with the Mega Bezel scaling and CRT shader features. I don’t think they will load on a Pi4, but I have had them running on a GTX 750 with 2GB of VRAM. Probably work well on a legacy Intel iGPU.

I assume @HyperspaceMadness could put some kind of scale only shader together that could be prepended with a CRT shader. (Given enough interest and incentive. :grin:) But I think adding the aspect coordinates to the overlay CFG would be a more universally accessible feature.

1 Like