4K Vertical Overlay Community Contributions

Truxton 4K Vertical Bezel

Shots here with the latest version of @HyperspaceMadness’s amazing Reflection shader (using guest Venom)!

3 Likes

These vertical overlays are visually stunning, really!

I don’t know if I would feel comfortable using them, though.

I like the “regular cabinet” tilted screen position, and I doubt it would be feasible with this kind of setup.

1 Like

Actually the TV is indeed tilted back like a cabinet (though I’m not sure the exact number of degrees) and has a layer of plexiglass as well so it is pretty authentic.

It took a shot so you can see the angle here. Both control panel and monitor are slanted.

7 Likes

Yeah, I know; 10 years is a little too much :slight_smile:

The good thing is that this type of art can be easily automated, so horizontal and vertical monitor games can be batched each game with its correspondent marquee, and just a default art all around the screen.

Just a tip in case you want to have all your MAME games like this, but don’t have the time or resources to customize the bezel of each one.

1 Like

Yeah, I hadn’t considered automating the marquee portion. I’ve been planning to create a generic overlay for horizontal and vertical games anyway, but was going to just create a generic marquee.

How would you get the artwork for the marquees? From something like the launchbox games db?

I’ve had a hard time getting good quality marquee artwork online and have even paid for actual marquees I can scan in for some of my favorite games.

1 Like

Yes, nice, indeed.

But, yes, I’m used to much more slanted cabinets, and the marquee would be a little too far from me, but I guess you can’t have everything.

The best setup would be with 2 monitors. One, slanted, for playing area and the bezel and one for the marquee.

I wonder if retroarch is able to manage this kind of setup, with the recent improvements in the layout system.

In case you are thinking about automatizing your layout generation, let me know if my tool can be of any help. I was just going to test it on your vertical layouts, just to see if it works with that orientation, too.

1 Like

You are working at 4k res, so a lot of the current sources might be low for your standards, nevertheless, there are some places that you can get the marquees from.

  1. http://kdo-perso.info/medias/46/marquee/mame/
  2. http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=148204.0
  3. https://www.arcadepunks.com/marquees-digital-marquees-cab-2
  4. https://drive.google.com/drive/mobile/folders/0B7hRdDVO-K2_Q3hQbVBYTDlPemM
  5. https://www.arcadeartwork.org/index.php?/category/37

Hope the above stuff helps in your quest :slight_smile:

Don’t know the program you are using, but if you are working with Photoshop and need any help with the automation process, let me know.

3 Likes

This is very helpful! It will take me some time to review all these, but it will definitely help me locate better scans and art for my work!

Yes I use photoshop and I am welcome to you helping me out with automating some file generation for these. What I’m thinking is I would find all the marquees of reasonably good quality and generate the files automatically for those. Then for anything where there is no marquee or the quality was too poor, I can create a default generic overlay.

I can go back over time and update the ones I want to work on myself in more detail and higher quality, but it would get a large library of reasonably good vertical overlays out for consumption very quickly!

Let me review these and I will reach out to you to work out the automation process. Thanks again!

Yes, I’ve been meaning to spend some time figuring out my directory issue with Pyhon on my mac, I just have been more focused on creating new designs (because that’s more fun than scripting/coding to me :grin:). I’ll see if that works, but your tool would definitely help with the automation that Kondorito mentioned here.

Remember that MAME now has fallback artwork, meaning that you can have a generic horizont.zip and a vertical.zip artwork packs, and when no artwork is found, MAME will display those; there is no need to create each artwork for each MAME game with the same generic artwork inside :slight_smile:

3 Likes

But you still do for RetroArch. Well, you could in fact configure default overlays for cores or folders, but I’m afraid it won’t work with shaders since you need fine adjustments for the viewport size.

Have you tried using absolute paths? Unfortunately I won’t be able to code on my Linux machine for a while so I can’t test if the tilde character home directory alias is correctly expanded now.

I surely understand that design is funny and will always of course produce more beautiful results than scripting, but being a coder I find creating scripts funny, too! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Scripting overlays using templates could be useful for prototyping, though. Or maybe to produce overlays for games one does not really care or there’s no original material to work with.

1 Like

I haven’t tried absolute paths but I will give it a shot this weekend and let you know. I’d definitely need this to do any large automated overlay generation like @Kondorito is suggesting. Also, let me know about the vertical layout test, as that would also be needed to make this work :slight_smile:

Among the many straitjackets I’m subjected to while I only have access to my work stations, dropbox and other file sharing networks are locked, so I can’t download your bezels.

I could download the original VCabinet template and use that for a test, though.

I tried resizing it to 1920x1080 to use it on my laptop in full screen and it worked.

I used command:

python retromanager.py -c …/config.ini generate_all “MAME 2016” gyruss -rm outer -tx 1920 -ty 1080

(after, of course, exporting the template as a flat png and reneming it to gyruss.png)

Unfortunately, I have no idea on how to take a snapshot of the game running in retroarch including the overlay (any combination of alt, del, shift and or/print gave no useful result) so you have to trust my word for the moment. :stuck_out_tongue:

EDIT: I noticed that the viewport detection does not honor the padding parameter as it’s supposed to do anymore. Probably I broke something. This means the game screen currently overlaps a bit with the bezel on the edges, where it curves. i’ll fix this as soon as possible.

2 Likes

Sinistar in 4K Vertical format

3 Likes

That’s the picture I wanted to see. The cab from the side. It’s hard to gage what’s going on in the other images. It almost seems like it’s being projected on a wall, but that’s maybe because it has a light in the back. You should consider doing a video on this cab sometime showing your vertical bezels. It’s a sweet setup!

3 Likes

NBA Jam 4K Vertical Overlay

I put a lot of time into trying to recreate the original side art design of the arcade cabinet for this bezel. I think I got pretty close:

Large screen version:

Bezel reflection shader effect courtesy of @HyperspaceMadness and can be found here:

[HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader! - Feedback and Updates](http://HyperSpaceMadness Mega Bezel Refection Shader)

4 Likes

Centipede 4K Vertical Overlay

3 Likes