I certainly don’t mean to necro an old thread, but this is by far the most accurate thing I can find from my googling. Can someone please direct me (and anyone who may come after me) to the docs that explain how to use MAME Layout (.lay) files with Retroarch? I’m running v1.9.0 if that helps.
Thanks, and I apologize again for the necro.
The easiest way, I think, is to take one of the zip bundles and load that by going to settings > onscreen display > video layout > video layout path and navigate to the bundle. It only works with the GL driver, so stop by settings > driver and make sure that’s what’s selected. However, it’s worth noting that MAME recently changed their artwork format in a non-backward-compatible manner, so if you’ve downloaded it very recently, you’ll have to check and see which version it’s supposed to work with.
Thanks, @hunterk. I’m (trying to) use these with mame2016: https://sindenlightgun.miraheze.org/wiki/Mame
Do I take your response to mean I should only try to use ‘Sinden Bezel pack for MAME 0.224 and below’ with Retroarch? If so, that would certainly explain why I’ve had trouble so far. 
Edit: It turns out that wiki has a Retroarch-specific page I didn’t find until after I posted this response: https://sindenlightgun.miraheze.org/wiki/Retroarch – It looks like these instructions may be older, but in any event, only cover the use of their border graphics, and not the full overlays like in MAME. Which is sad because I much prefer their overlays with their border included… but it looks like those might just be incompatible with Retroarch right now? 
Yes, that’s exactly right.
However, You should also be able to use the MAME cores’ built-in artwork support for the later format if you’re using the up-to-date MAME core. This usually isn’t recommended because it’s very low-res (that is, the artwork renders at the games’ native res, be it 240p or whatever), but that shouldn’t matter for these basic colored borders. So, possibly something to fall back to if you can’t get it working right with the frontend-based video layouts
EDIT: I just noticed that you’re using MAME2016 core, which would definitely use the older artwork files, as well.
Your response and my edit overlapped.
Is this code snippet an example of the non-backwards compatible format?: https://pastebin.com/3jHdkdUF
I pulled that from their pre-0.224 MAME overlays archive. I can’t get these to work either, so it may just be that they don’t offer a compatible overlay set for Retroarch yet.
Odd. What I did was zip up the contents of one of the folders in the archive and put it in the overlays directory with the filename matching the name of the rom. I then selected the overlay zipfile in the retroarch menu but, while it lets me select it, it doesn’t display it.
What steps did you take to make it work?
I didn’t do anything to them, just navigated to and loaded up the ‘lay’ files. FWIW, I had used a ‘snap’ package (I’m on ubuntu linux) at first and was getting a black screen, but it worked fine when i switched to a native build.
Weird. I made sure I’m running gl, and when I try to select the lay file directly, Retroarch 1.9.0 crashes without throwing an error.
