IN-GAME ARTWORK

If you are happy with black bars on the sides of games then you could probably just enable fullscreen in RA and be done. If you want to use that space to display some nice art then you have a couple of choices.

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MAME is a unique system in that respect as well because it maintains it's own artwork. If you want to use it you can simply place the "artwork" folder in the MAME root folder. It's focus is on real artwork though. Many of the best arcade games never had any artwork. No custom control panel, not even a marquee sometimes. Using it will basically leave a bunch of games with black bars anyway.

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Using RL bezels is a viable method. A much more comprehensive list can be obtained this way. However the bezel creators themselves have different "styles" so the end result is having wildly different bezels per game.

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RA overlays are another option. They work in a similar way to RL bezels except one uses an ini and the other uses a cfg so they are not entirely compatible. Many of the same bezels will be available in both formats though.

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For this build we will actually be using a special shader that will take care of this as well. I am of course talking about the HSM Mega Bezel Reflection shader. It is still in a "beta" state. As a matter of fact he mentioned some big changes coming that will make it easier to use will happen when the next version of RA is released. So it's not available in the repo yet. You'll have to get it from the libretro forums. It's just too good to not use!

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*** A new RetroArch (1.9.1) has been released. With it came a bunch of changes to the shader system. The HSM shader has also been updated to use these features so a new guide will need to be written here. I just need to find the time. Things should be a lot easier now than what's outlined below though. For now it's best to refer to the original creators threads on the Libretro forum:

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HSM-Mega-Bezel-Reflection-Shader

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HSM Reflection Shader Graphics -Duimon

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*Presets with graphics are super easy to load now, ignore the rest of this page and follow the instructions in the links above.

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DOWNLOAD: HSM Mega Bezel Reflection shader

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R:\ARCADE\RetroArch-1.9.1-Win64\shaders\shaders_slang\

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It should extract the shader itself and all it's own presets to a "bezel" folder in this location. We'll also need some graphics to swap out the default textured background image:

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DOWNLOAD: HSM Graphic Repo by Duimon

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R:\ARCADE\RetroArch-1.9.1-Win64\shaders\Duimon-Mega-Bezel

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You can technically place these anywhere but we will be editing a path later so it will be easiest to just keep the graphics in the same location as the original. I will be using the images in the "Logo" folder. I am not a real fan of the "night" versions, they may appeal to some. Place images of your choice directly in the "textures" folder.

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Now let's have a look. Fire up RA, load the MAME core and then one of your favorite games. Press F1 and scroll down to "shaders". When you turn it on, a whole list of options will appear. The first of which is "Load a shader preset". Select that and navigate to the Duimon-Mega-Bezel folder. At this point you might be tempted to ask what the best shader is. As usual in this hobby, there is no correct answer for this. In a nutshell, it is impossible to accurately emulate a CRT tube on modern TV's and Monitors. Each of these shaders use different techniques to achieve aspects they see as pleasing. It's a healthy mix of "how the technology actually worked" and "how I remember it looking". Some people used cheap 15" TV's, others had PVM quality Sony monitors. Some people connected their consoles by composite cables, some used an RF adapter. Some displays come set to color temp of 6500k, another at 9300k, yet another not calibrated at all. All of this stuff affected what was actually shown to us. My memory of what it looked like may not be anything like what you remember. Beyond all going for a slightly different look, each shader has it's own parameters you can further tweak to your liking. I suggest trying all on various games.

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My very un-educated 2 cents? I think Dr. Venom looks great on any horizontal game right OOTB. Unfortunately it doesn't look that great on the classic vertical games. This creates another dilemma unique to MAME since it outputs at various resolutions. We will need to use different shader presets on a per game or per content basis. On most systems, every single game was made to output at the same resolution so one core shader preset will work fine. 

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"Content" shader presets work on specific folders. So you would have to sort you rom folder into several folders: "Horizontal" and "Vertical" for starters, but you could also do things like Vector and "Dual-Screen". Then applying a content preset will automatically assign it to all similar games. I would like to go this route eventually but I am just not ready yet. For now I have applied the Dr. Venom preset to the whole core and will save individual game presets for every single game making changes as I see fit. I know this is very time consuming to do but having individual presets for each game will allow us to use game specific graphics later on. For now I will just be using a basic "MAME" background.

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** Important note about saving core presets. You MUST go into the parameter settings and change a setting (any setting) first! If you don't do this, the preset will not save all the parameters in it, just a link to the original preset. And this doesn't quite work. I suggest changing something that doesn't affect the image like "Frame - Thickness". You can always change it back later.

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So just to re-iterate the steps:

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1. load the MAME core and any game

2. press F1, scroll to "Shaders", enable and apply the "DrVenom" preset

3. scroll to "Shader Parameters", change "FRAME THICKNESS" value from 7.00 to 7.20

4. Backspace and scroll up to "Save", then choose "Save Core Preset"

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You should now be able to close and open any MAME game and the shader should load. If it doesn't, you might have to navigate to:

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R:\ARCADE\RetroArch-1.9.0\config\MAME

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Delete the MAME.slangp and go back to step 1 above.

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All right, let's spend some time changing that textured background. This is most trouble for MAME obviously since we are creating presets for every game. It just means we will have to change paths in every single preset where as most systems you will just have to edit the one core preset. I don't mind putting in the work to get things how I want them though. In the end everything will function great!

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Now the Duimon repo we grabbed earlier has some fantastic artwork to use with consoles and MS-Dos. However there is nothing in there for MAME. He does have another repo with some oddball stuff in it that has 2 png files that we can use.

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DOWNLOAD: MAME background

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R:\ARCADE\RetroArch-1.9.0\shaders\shaders_slang\bezel\shaders\HyperspaceMadness\textures

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Grab the MAME_Horizontal.png and MAME_Vertical.png (right click and "save as"). Don't worry about the .cfg files.

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Like I mentioned already, this will be a lot faster if you have a "fast" way of splitting your roms up into horizontal and vertical folders. Nothing is an obvious way of doing this. If anyone has any ideas, please share.

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For now, I will just load games 1 by 1 from RL. Each time editing one parameter (Frame - Thickness like above is a good one) and then saving a "Game" preset. Then navigate to:

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R:\ARCADE\RetroArch-1.9.0\config\MAME

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There should be .slangp in here with the name of the game you just saved. You'll want to edit this file in regular old notepad. I tried editing with Notepadd++ but it did something to the formatting and the file would no longer be usable by RA. Unfortunately when you open in regular old notepad the words just wrap around and it can be hard to get a clean look at it. There are 2 spots that refer to images that we need to edit: