Awesome! Can’t wait to see them and start using them in my overlays 
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I’m afraid all I have to offer is enthusiasm. Absolutely enjoying folllowing the discussion here, creatives!
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Ha ha, yeah the light is getting dimmer the farther down we go 
I do think it’s possible to do something like this, maybe a script that Launchbox runs before running retroarch which would change or create a shader preset from a master preset file and change out the texture paths. I just think we’d need to think on it to make sure we’re making something that isn’t brittle and easily fall apart, or hard to install which makes it so almost no one will use it.
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Haha, quite!
Yeah, no one wants that!! - looking towards a solution to make it easier to make the implementation of your shader and these overlays more user-friendly needs to be painless, won’t necessarily bother any of us if its left as is, but hopefully talking about it might deliver some inspiration 
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haha, I’m sure i speak for everyone in saying you’re absolutely most welcome along for the ride @benlogan! enthusiasm has a lot of mileage in a hobby like this, Ultimately we’re making this art for everyone to enjoy!
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Yeah, I’ve been inspired, and as I can’t get to work on my cab at the moment, I’ve been thinking. I have something, maybe not elegant, but should be possible to set up. 
It’s just that Retroarch is so complicated and confusing, like the fact the screen setup is not part of the overlay file. Config files are linked to romname bla bla. But if this is what we have we have to figure it out. And when things change(Retroarch, lay integration, hsm shader), we look at it again.
Anyway if anybody has info/input just pm me.
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Edit: doh
I agree and I dont want to discourage talking about any of these ideas, I’ve always found that inspiration and possible solutions often strike when talking about these things that don’t seem possible at the time. Considering the first time someone suggested I autogenerate the bezel, I was like “Hmm, Can I really do that?”!
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yep, I can get a bit carried away with things like that sometimes, a subconscious nod towards authenticity/what makes something believable is part of my bread and butter i.e. ‘selling’ something that’s fake as real - I’m always trying to make the art look like it was when presented on the cabs I remember, not just displaying the art for the sake of it, so as its the whole presentation some of that comes along for the ride, but only intend it subtly ( as I said, sometimes, like with the coindoor, i push it into photo-real so I have a good place to start pulling it back into something i like in an overlay, remembering i’m looking at it on its own appearing from nothing in total isolation lol) always happy to be called upon it if things are going too far.
Less IS more.
- and if anything is ever too reflective etc just shout and I’ll try and re-supply, turning down, off reflections and softening them is just a few sliders away for me
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indeed, most of us can use one shot of the overlay and that’s it without unpicking the set up and committing fully to another view! I run coin-ops PvsA on 2 of my cabs too but for some reason while .lay’s work great to drop in all sorts of extra visual treats for one layout, i cant switch the views!
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haha, I knew what you meant - probable over communicated in that reply 
yeah, amazing what something so incidental can lead too! we have allot to thank person for it seems!
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Im running coinops next and converted it to run on portrait monitor, also put different version of MAME on it( as an alternative) and haven’t found any problems doing that. And I now have the ability to change the bezels in MAME, but I use Retroarch because of the HSM shader, only a couple of games are in MAME directly in my vertical bezel playlist. (Outrun, space invaders kind of thing)
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ah, planning to do this when i have time! i think the best of both is a good, happy medium! Glad you have it sorted @Briball
Don’t forget that you can load the MAME video layouts in RetroArch, though it’s only with the GL driver. Extending that to other drivers would be a fair bit of work, but probably not that much more than reinventing the wheel through the overlay system, which was designed around touch controls for mobile devices rather than cosmetics (hence the lack of cosmetics-focused features).
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Hi @hunterk, so do you think there won’t be much work on improving the overlay system configuration to make this easier for both creators and end users to set up? I think that the @HyperspaceMadness bezel shader works best with Vulkan (correct me if I’m wrong HSM) and might not play well with the mame layouts. One of the big reasons I (and others) are using retroarch is that shader and the better shader support in general.
One very small (well, seems small to me) would be to allow the setting of things like the video x/y/h/w coordinates in larger than 1 pixel increments, or allow the value to just be typed in. It’s pretty tedious to sit and hold the arrow keys while it moves 1 pixel at a time. Maybe not such a big deal at 1080P, but at 4K, it can take minutes to move the screen into position through the UI.
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I’m not sure about this, the shader runs fine with GLCore, even though it seems to run some faster in Vulcan, but it doesn’t run in GL. I haven’t use the retroarch mame layouts even though I contributed to the bounty so I’m not sure if it runs in GLCore or only GL.
I totally agree on this, when I used to use this it would be take quite a while, maybe it could be set to 4
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or perhaps just hold the shift key to do increments of 10 or something?
that would be a huge time saver!
@hunterk I know it was designed for a different purpose, Any changes to speed up the overlay screen options like these would be most appreciated by all of us
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I’m certainly not against making the feature better and more useful. We do have to decide what are the best ways to do that, though, and whether those changes are just turning it into the video layouts (or, possibly, just a worse version of them).
Someone recently wrote a python script that will scan through a png file and identify the transparent parts and put that into a config override. I’m not sure that’s something we can do or whether it’s even universally desirable (for example, I’m not sure how it affects different resolutions; we wouldn’t want to make it better for some people while making it worse for others).
Would one of you guys like to open an issue on the RetroArch track on github? That way brainstorming doesn’t get lost in this thread.
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Sure @hunterk, I can log the issue tomorrow. I think it’s probably 2 different issues, one around just changing the video settings more easily, the other about configuring the overlay file coordinates.
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@PapaShine I just want to second the suggestion of shift key and or Ctrl+shift is 100. Or double click to bring up numberkey input. But something like this would be a big win. @hunterk.
On the automated side great if it works, I can think of some that would cause issues maybe. Like Popeye dig dug, but it would maybe get you close, then just some minor tweaking.
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Final Star Force 4K Overlay
This is the last game in the Star Force series, released in 1992 and produced by Tecmo. The marquee here was a NOS pickup from eBay, and only required minimal touch up. The original cabinet had no dedicated bezel art, just two vertical instruction cards. I was only able to locate scans for one of the two cards, if I ever find a copy of the other I will update the overlay. I threw together a custom design for the bezel.
There is a moire pattern that shows up on the marquee but doesn’t show up on my monitor, just the TV, so I haven’t been able to fix it. Let me know if you have the same issues.
Custom bezel and instruction card are on the dropbox:
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