Thanks, HSM… I was speculating, in the rolling scanlines thread, whether having it integrated in MB would improve any of the little problems people were having (like the black bar I think you mentioned). Just curious if you are seeing anything like that in the prototype?
1 Like
The only issue I’ve encountered personally was the darkened Bay which travels up the screen or status stationary. Hunterk put on an additional parameter to adjust where the bar is placed on my the screen, so I’ll include this feature.
6 Likes
Question: Does MegaBezel support animated gifs for the background layer, and is it possible to have a left and right background layer? I want to have burning torches and other things on the wall beside my monitor.
Here’s an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7leUXeT8fcI
I was able to do this using a combo of Retroarch + OBS, so the torches are only visible in recordings/stream, but not inside Retroarch.
Just a heads up on timeline for this. I have realized that do some stuff to make sure it doesn’t kill performance.
Basically I need to get as many passes as possible to only generate a new frame for the only the first subframe and copy the output for all subsequent subframes.
Unfortunately no we can’t load GIFs into retroarch. The only thing which we could possibly do at some point is to have some sprite sheets where we could play the sprite sheet back as animation
5 Likes
Sounds challenging! 
2 Likes
Ah, that’s cool. Thinking more about this layering in animated backgrounds would complicate things considerably with keeping game latency down., etc., due to all the passes required–which we want to keep to a minimum!
The torches would be distracting playing, anyways, and layering them in with external programs to record sessions works well enough.
The World needs to know of these great efforts at CRT preservation. 
All those tubes are gonna stop working someday, after all.
1 Like
Could you please tell me how you got the shader to align? I’m also having the same problem. I’m seeing 2 bezels. I am using Launchbox with retroarch for my mame games, and whenever I use the megabezel it shows 2. I want to resize it so that it will coverup the bezel from launchbox/retroarch. Here’s what mine looks like.
Looks beautiful, would it be possible for you or someone to make a 4k version?
This is interesting. I’ve used this extensively whenever I wanted to adjust the screen size when in integer scale mode. It also works well when you want to adapt the viewport to fit different display resolutions.
Is it no longer useful or redundant? Also could there be a name change instead if it’s still actually useful but just has counterintuitive naming currently?
It looks like you are using one of those older overlay images that has the bezel included in the image. You either have to photoshop the image to remove it (hard way) or change the bezel settings to hide the megabezel generated bezel (easy in settings but then what’s the point of using megabezel)… or… you can download some megabezel friendly overlays (that’s what I’d do).
edit Oh wait… you could also probably set the layer priorities in the megabezel settings so that the overlay is a layer behind the bezel and then position the megebezel generated bezel over the bezel image in the overlay. That’s kind of a wanky, hacky solution, but wouldn’t be too hard.
2 Likes
That looks like an overlay + the bezel, so you have two options:
-
Resize the horizontal scaling/positioning of the overlay to meet the bezel borders.
-
Rescale the bezel to meet the overlay borders.
The added problem, here, you have, is that overlay “bezel” is artwork, so you’ll likely need to do some photoshop/paint.net editing to remove that fake bezel, leaving only the cabinet artwork.
2 Likes
What about this. I make a new overlay image in photoshop so that it fits over the megabezel? I can just use some of the many example png images included in duimon’s and cyberlabs bezelpack to use as a template. I want to get the most screen real estate for my game. I don’t like bezels that are too small and don’t make use of the available screen real estate. I like to see as much of my game as possible.
The bezels in the screenshot I provided is from the bezel project. They are set to automatically download whenever I import a ROM in Launchbox. What I don’t like about those overlays is that they include the bezel as well in the overlay. I want to be able to keep the overlay, but remove that ugly bezel and use the one from megabezel instead.
Would the best way to do this is how I described above?
How can I use these megabezels with my own overlays? For example, I made a custom overlay in photoshop that I would like to use. How can I incorporate that with these beautiful bezels with reflections? Also how can I set the overlay to use a particular bezel preset such as MBZ_1_xxxxxxx.slangp, etc. I want to be able to set it per game and per core to use its own unique preset.
I have a set of presets that are designed to use The Bezel Project resources.
The repo can be found here.
Installation instructions are on GitHub in the form of a displayed README.md which is installed along with the presets.
It can be read offline using this viewer.
Here is a shot of 1944 using the MAME preset.
2 Likes
Thank you so much! That is exactly what I’m looking for! Wow. Perfect!
1 Like
You are welcome. I’m sorry it took me 2 days to respond.
Just make sure to follow the installation instructions very closely so you don’t break your settings. 
1 Like
Will do! One more question. Do you know if we can mix and match overlays from one pack with shader presets from another?
For example. I would like to use your NES overlays but with some of the default shaders that come with Retroarch, such as the CRT ones, etc. If this is possible, how can I do this?
Just fyi, I posted this pdf on the LaunchBox forums that show how to remove the TV surround from the Project bezels.
2 Likes
If you look at the preset in a .txt editor, at the bottom (usually) it will show the path to the image. You can just change the path to a different image. In the megabezel settings there are a boatload of adjustments you can do to the images. You will probably be making your own bezel set before you know it.
2 Likes
We need to take care to diferrentiate between an “Overlay” and a “Shader”. (The Mega Bezel is a Border Shader.)
It is easy to confuse the two since the end result is similar.
Using other standalone “Shaders” with a Mega Bezel pack isn’t possible.
Using other “non-border” shaders with an overlay is one of the original ideas behind overlays.
I have an overlay repo that mirrors my Mega Bezel pack’s graphics here. (In the “logo” folder.)
Here is an example overlay.
I also have a guide here that includes methods to accurately define overlay coordinates.
The coordinates are not the main focus of the guide, so you’ll have to read through some of it to find the info.
FYI, the README.md for the repo gives coordinates but they are outdated and refer to a much older set of overlays. (I will update it eventually. 
)
The guide also has instructions for creating an overlay *.cfg and setting up one or two “curvature” shaders.
5 Likes