Wow this is looking awesome, I also leaned toward #2 although it feels like maybe the bottom of the control panel cuts off too close to the bottom of the screen, like maybe there should be a little more dark ledge there? I’m not sure maybe it depends on how it sits next to the physical CP on the vertical setup.
This makes me wonder if this would be a cool effect for the Mega Bezel to have a lighting pass for the light coming from the screen, and modulate this from the screen brightness 
That would be very cool to implement @HyperspaceMadness ! - and thanks for the kind words 
- it would really make a diffferance to have light from the screen affecting the brightness of the CP a little -would love to see you take a shot at that. Also the speaker panels would be another place to drop a bit of light if that doesn’t work out.
Cheers @Thoggo! Yeah, not practical for every game for sure! once I have the assets built it should be pretty quick to create the CPO’s - main time consuming bit (as always) is getting a nice clean scan or drawing a new one like this - all the lights, cameras and basic layout are done (nearly!) if you have one you want me to test send it over, maybe your smashtv overlay?
I actually prefer the left, just don’t like the shiny bar you have there at the bottom, but it feels more natural from a perspective standpoint to me.
Agree that the right version will show more CP artwork, but for the Neo Geo CP I think I’d favor the left.
@ArsInvictus I actually agree, the left one caught my eye first, for the Neo Geo and some cabinets where the art is not as important, that viewpoint looks cooler.
@PapaShine If you wanted any others to experiment with, I have a few that I had good art for, though most of the ones I’ve done started with a less-than-optimal photo source that would be harder to translate to 3D. Gauntlet II, Rampage, Magic Sword, Journey, a few others would work, not all of them are quite the same cabinet style. In most cases I’m using a photo source that’s already in perspective and I have to recreate significant parts of it, sometimes pretty radically, so it would be harder to work with, though not impossible.
Volfied 4K Vertical Overlay
For those not familiar with it, Volfied was basically a sequel to the arcade classic Qix. It’s not one I was familiar with but it actual seems to be a bit of a cult classic. Versions of this game were released to most platforms back in 1990, including Amiga, Genesis, PC Engine, PC, etc. The Genesis version was called “Ultimate Qix”.
I was able to find a new old-stock copy of the marquee that was basically in perfect condition. I threw together a simple design along the same lines of the marquee and used the vertical ship motif as much of the marketing material and manuals used the same. After much google searching, and soul searching, I was elated to find a copy of the instruction card in an old arcade manual PDF file.
Enjoy!
Love this line. End result is fantastic. Can’t wait to have time to load some of these recent beauties up!
@PapaShine great work alway like those small details, and hard to say which one, but to me the left feels better the right plays to much with perspective to me. I was playing with the lighting on my boothill as it had a real light inside the bezel. So had the shadows coming from there. It works really well to solidify it all. And it works on yours to. But that is something we would do in Photoshop. I like the idea of having a repository of buttons and joystick at different angles and colours, but just black and white would be fine as you can get colourize the white. Oh and ball and oval tops maybe. I think I will be coming round to dimming my bezels, seems to be the consensus thats the way to go. But with a little tiny bit of a hotspot🤪
Also with the first one it also leaves space for the front part of the cpo where some had the player buttons alpineski or moon patrol as example.
And @HyperspaceMadness are you kidding me, if that would work that would be so cool. Would you be effecting the highlights or some other shader wizardry. So Then the bezels would be in the shader and not as overlay I presume. As I still have to play around with that, still on old version.
Anyway can’t wait to get on my cab soon.
So cool, never knew there was a sequel to qix, one of my favourite. That’s why I did that bezel myself. Will definitely have to play this.
Very nice job Papa, can you upload for testing ?
Thanks @BlackTiger! (love that game btw!) sure - I’m going to make a tweak to it and share it, also I’ll Tag everyone everyone who’s commented/fedback if they fancy doing the same.
Great, thanks for your feedback @ArsInvictus, looks like we’re all on the same page, I think the overall tilt (as per the coin door) is important for perspective and that ‘flattened’ perspective is a great trick that you can only really do in 3D since all the source photography is at various close up perspectives - it will make layout in PS easier too.
@Dreamstate, just thinking about your comments on how more details stop it feeling as “real” and realising you mean it doesn’t feel like you’re looking at a real object where the vertical screen is, more that your looking at a photograph of a real object presented on a screen, is that right? so the perspective is obviously a give away when it crops at the sides, and making sure the whole presentation feels augmented to the screen you’re looking at might be a key MO; feels and looks like the actual cab but never over-realise it and break the flat perspective rule?
if I’m ever likely to use this view I don’t want to feel like it’s just a photo of a cab, and again to your point about wrestling with brightly lit objects in photoshop, that’s probably the entire point of this so aim to steer clear!
@Briball, glad your softening to the darker lighting, i love it and it just sells the marquee and CRT look so well. I hear you about perspective, really helps to play with ideas on this stuff. (I like it in isolation though, but not so keen with it cropped and dropped into an overlay!)
Yeah, any area that we want affected by the shader would need the images for that part in the shader.
@PapaShine For the lighting I think the way it would give the most realistic result would be to have the base image have no light from the screen , then we have a separate image which is a lighting pass from the 3d application which only includes white light from the screen. Then the shader would modulate this. And we can definitely do this for the CP and speaker panel. I’ll have to wait until after the next version of retroarch is released to do something like this because it has the fixes I put in to up the parameter and texture limit.
We could have an additional method which generates something directly through code without images but it wouldn’t be as accurate and feel as 3d.
Fantastic @HyperspaceMadness , that’s a really REALLY exciting prospect, opens up some lovely possibilities!! The amount of times I’ve looked at your shader and wondered if that was possible, but assumed it would be out of scope.
I’ve experimented with animated png’s for marquee light flicker in the past, which looks ok, but it’s a fairly subtle effect unless you have it blinking all the time and wasn’t happy with the limited blend modes you can set up in the XML!
If retroarch complete the integration of the mame .lay files (which I believe they still plan to down the line) then there is a possible route to you pulling in the ‘cp_lightpass.png’ from the game name art folder I assume? How crazy would it be to drop a highlight pass in for all the overlay details that would have light hit it, that would breath a whole next level to your shader on a vertical screen 
Let me know when you might get around to some R&D on that, if there’s anything I can supply to help test it.
Cool, yeah I’ll ping you when I start looking into it I think it’s totally doable within the shader if we can supply the right textures.
Right now I’m trying to focus on simplifying the retroarch shader preset saving & loading so a preset can have only a reference to a master preset and the user changed parameters & textures so its not required to create copies of the whole presets and have them spread like a plague. If this works well, it could replace the use of a config file for the screen placement and scale, because the shader preset you would save would only have the placement adjustments you made and a path to the master shader.
About pulling textures from the mame .lay system, this isn’t possible at the moment, but maybe at some point in the future we could find some way to do this, it’s tricky because from my understanding they are two completely separate systems, but it would be awesome to be able to leverage the .lay system for switching out textures.
Please do, would love to collaborate on that with you 
that all makes good sense, I imagine it can get a little unwieldy at times retrofitting something like that shader into retroarch, so worth it though - stellar work!
Re: mame folders and .lay files, yeah something for the future perhaps!
I wondered if there might be a way to include some metadata in the Overlay .PNG itself (EXIF) which you could pull in for screen coordinates? the string would only need to be 4 (upto) 4 digit numbers for x, y, w, and h? just a thought!
It’s a good idea, but unfortunately I’m pretty sure there is no access to any file info at all inside the shader, all we get in there is an image buffer where you can sometimes get the resolution but often not. So one possibility might be to encode something in the alpha of a 4 pixels the percentage of the screen from top left (You probably only need the center position and the height since the width is calculated from the aspect ratio). But this doesn’t seem super user friendly, but maybe still useful 
We can also do a sample search through the image to figure out where the hole for the screen is, I’m not sure of the performance vs accuracy implications of this though.
@HyperspaceMadness/@PapaShine, love the innovation here!
In terms of the screen coordinates, I’ve never understood why that data couldn’t be included with the config file we use to define the overlay itself, rather than in the video config settings for every game? It seems like this should be a fairly straightforward thing from a coding perspective? Do you or @hunterk have any idea of the feasibility of something like this?
Those could at least be used as a default and then the user could override those values in the video config section on a per game basis.
Ideally we could scan the overlay PNG file to automatically find the transparent X/Y coordinates but I believe we reached out to @hunterk on this a while back and he said that the code modules that perform these activities aren’t integrated well enough to support that. Even if we did that though, I think we would need an ability to override those values as different bezels have oddball shapes that don’t precisely align to a 4:3 image.
@papashine, I’ve been looking at the left options you put into Metal Slug and have to say, while i still prefer the coin door, this angle and the quality of the overall look makes the CPO view much more natural to me.
Lots to work out on that @HyperspaceMadness, for now its a huge asset regardless, and any extra is icing on the cake.
Without meaning to throw us all down a rabbit hole on this, i wonder if there’s any mileage in a front end tool the user can run on their desktop to ‘inject’ the overlay and a possible light texture into retroarch, dropping the files into the locations and passing anything over the shader can use before launching retroarch propper?
@ArsInvictus, happy to hang up the towel on the coindoors for a bit and focus on CP stuff if there’s a consensus, shake it up a bit! - let me get some test overlays ready and perhaps we can take a look at that going forward?
Hey @PapaShine, you’ve created a good selection of coin doors already, but the only two that I really do wish I had available is the Stern and the Nintendo one used on Donkey Kong etc. After that I think I’m good with you switching to focus on CP’s more going forward. It would be nice to sort of finish that project off and then I’ll have everything I need for any future overlays in the coin door style.
Ok, Done your right, don’t want to leave it hanging like that and those would be good to finish - both are 80% done anyway!
