Arcade update

So, I've started building my arcade again. Recent set backs have included:

 A nice big scratch down the side of the case. I just need to respray it.

 Hardware problems, the motherboard and screen have been in storage for 2 years and don't go any more. I've got a replacement board from an old work computer, but no screen yet.

A framebuffer issue with advmenu. The driver for the old board seemed to have a compatible framebuffer driver, but the current board doesn't. I did extensive research but was unable to find a solution.I believe the solution may be to either use svgalib or use an xwindows driver to allow advmenu to display. What I've done instead is install groovyarcade (after trying the advance CD distribution, which I couldn't compile). I've set up groovyarcade with all of my settings files, installed fceux and updated advmenu to the most recent version.
 Even on groovyarcade, you need to run advmenu under xwindows (using the 'startx' command) as it has the same framebuffer issue. I'll test it out with svgalib and see if I can figure out how to get advmenu going with windows, as a window manager.

My Cardboard Rift/Moculous/Boxulous

My Cardboard Rift/Moculous/Boxulous

So, I have a cardboard rift which I am going to use for Skyrim (I'm very excited!)

I bought a google cardboard from the internet. It needs modification as I wear glasses and they get smushed when I am wearing it. Just some padding to keep it off my face should be enough.

To get Skyrim on my phone, I've used:

This is mostly cribbed from this post, with Trinus VR replacing Kainy
https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/2bo4jx/google_cardboardbased_diy_rift_works_with_amd/

Trinus VR (http://trinusvr.com/) plus the android app: (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.loxai.trinus.full)

I'm just using the free version at the moment, it gives an hour of use for free.
The interface is kid of ugly, there was a version before called Trinus Gyre which looked much better, but whatever. Trinus has built-in screen splitting, so no need for a screen splitter such as Tridef. It also doesn't play the audio through the headset, so it will play through the computer speakers or headphones instead. Trinus will let you play over Wifi or USB connection. I haven't experienced any latency with it yet.

I played with the mouse input with Trinus (which involves turning off the Windows application, changing the option and then turning it back on) but nothing worked.

To get the mouse tracking woking, I used FreePie (http://andersmalmgren.github.io/FreePIE/) and this script:http://pastebin.com/GUVfrbu7

I had an issue with the mouse not moving when FreePie wasn't focussed, but running it as admin as per this post (https://github.com/AndersMalmgren/FreePIE/issues/40) fixed that nicely.

I have yet to play an actual game of Skyrim, but its looking pretty promising.

Other applications to look into ( I tried these, I liked Trinus and Freepie best, they were simplest):
Tridef: screen splitter (https://www.tridef.com/cart/product.php?productid=3)
Kainy screen broadcaster (http://www.kainy.com/)
Riftcat screen broadcaster (https://riftcat.com/)
vireio screen splitter (http://www.mtbs3d.com/new-vireio-site)
Kinovr kind of worked, but would only run backwards

Update:

I have played skyrim, it's quite good fun! Some tips:
Set your interpupillary distance. I found the video quite blurry until it was changed.
The resolution isn't great still, so I'm going to have a play with the compression settings, it's currently (roughly) 75%.
Use a mouse. I thought I could get away with a mouse replacement, but at least in skyrim I still needed the mouse for autocentring/centring the screen, as well as using the mouse buttons.
I also will need some foam, as the Google cardboard squashed my glasses into my face. I also have the 2nd version of the cardboard, so I taped over the conductive button.

On the road again...

Wow, so I'm back onto working on my arcade box again. I've painted the cabinet (except I've made a huge scratch down the side plus not spraypainted the top of the underside, oops).
 On the plus side, the keyboard and joystick still work. I've redone the wiring so its no longer all tangled up.
I've found the hard drive and creaked out, because my install is no longer on it, and I thought all of my configs and files were lost! it turns out I'd installed windows 10 on the drive so I could get MarI/O to work. But now I have to reinstall debian and copy over the config files again.
 And then check which key does what, so I can fix it all up. I'm not actually sure I got that far, having a quick look at the advancemame config, it all looks wrong. Hmm.
 However, another bonus is I got the marquee printed up, and it actually looks pretty good when it is installed in the case! Plus I have (really ugly brown) rubber feet for the unit, which I purchased from a hardware shop. Yay me.
 I'll have to make sure I take an image of the hard drive, so when it dies I can redo it more easily. The other option I was exploring was making a bootable USB. The current motherboard I'm using is so old it won't boot to USB (but it was free, so who cares, right?)  This way I can update it easily with new ROMs when I like, or do patching or remove ROMs I don't like etc...

Blender + Freestyle

I had to download a new version of Blender yesterday. Blender has had Freestyle integrated since 2.50.

I've found some Blender files on Blendswap.com which have freestyle styles. However I can't register an account (you need one before you can download). The blend files are here: http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/18954

more  models here:
http://www.blendswap.com/search?term=freestyle


There are some tutorials for Freestyle here:
http://metalix.co.nz//?s=freestyle

This is the forum for BlenderArtists on Freestyle
http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/18954

Freestyle node editing in the Blender Wiki
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Freestyle/Python

Mame arcade cabinet

The Cabinet

When I started this project, I decided the cabinet should be made last. If  I couldn't get the sticks and buttons, or get the actual software running, then all I would end up with would be an empty case at the end. Getting the bits to fit would be easier.

In planning my cabinet, I considered a couple of different designs: stand up, cocktail cabinet, and barcade. I decided on barcade because it was small and portable, and I could put it on a stand to make it a standup if i wished (though realistically, it's too small). I would have loved to have made a cocktail cabinet, but I wasn't sure I could get the glass for the top.

 I also considered a couple of materials. I do woodwork, so I thought of wooden panels, or using plywood or MDF. We've got some spare MDF , so I used that.

Here is a picture of the cardboard version I made to make sure all of the bits would fit, and also that I could make the parts fit on the MDF I have.



I used these approximately these plans to make my cabinet pattern. However I didn't put the curve in.
http://www.koenigs.dk/mame/eng/stepweecade3.htm

Here are some other plans for barcades.

http://bartoparcade.katorlegaz.com/

A cocktail cabinet  plan (Japanese style):
http://dannygalaga.com/mame.htm

http://members.iinet.net.au/~things/ihs/cocktail/index.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20050311053639/http://www.oblate-spheriods.demon.co.uk/mame.htm

Roms and screenshots

Of Roms and Screenshots

I downloaded my Roms from a  torrent site. It had large number of ROMs from different systems (dreamcast, megadrive/genesis, master system, playstation  etc). However many of the the MAME ROMs didn't work with the version of MAME I had in Puppy linux, nor with the MAME version from Debian.

However, downloading the most up to date ROMs for MAME would be onerous, especially given the low datacap I have. There are 28 thousand games in the current release for MAME. This means 29 gig of ROMs, and about the same in CHD files. CHD files are extra information for the ROM files, eg graphics and music. Sorting through that number of ROMs to get only the few that I really wanted would be crazy, so I'd need to get them another way.


So what I've done instead is pick through the ROMs which work and then re-download the ones from my wishlist. I was considering getting Space Ace and Dragon's Lair, old school laser disc games, but I haven't added them yet. I have the rom files, but not the video files. It could be fun creating a video disc game of my own ( there are editors out there, I don't think it would be hard) but I lack the time and inclination at the moment. Daphne is the emulator for those games.

For my other roms, there are other emulators which I could have used, especially the for the NES, which has quite a variety, but as I said before, these are the ones which worked with all of my roms. 

I only picked 2d systems with a limited number of buttons, since I have four fire buttons and  two other buttons. Unfortunately this excluded the Super NES. I did have a spare 3d card, but since I was testing the setup on a different system (by adding the hard drive to my current computer and rebooting into the harddrive) I decided I couldn't really test it effectively. I've got the setup down now, so if I really wanted to add some more emulators (and buttons) I could.

So I have:

Gens - for Megadrive/Sega Genesis
Fceaux - NES
osmose - Sega Master System
mame - arcade
Gngeo - Neogeo

As stated above, many of the ROMs I had downloaded for MAME didn't work. I had a wishlist of games to get, and so I tried downloading them from a couple of ROM sites.
 The best one I found was http://www.mamest.com/ You can search by game name, ROM name, or the names of files within the zip file. Thats really handy if you have a ROM which isn't going, and you need to download another file to fix it.

Verifying ROMs

MAME and some of the other emulators allow you to verify your ROMs. You run the command against the ROM directory and it will spit out a list of ROMs which will run, and ones which wont. It even gives you the names of the missing files. However, it *doesn't* tell you which ROM file which contains those files though. So, if you have a game called "safety dance" based on "stair dancer", it'll tell you need the file stairdancer.bin, but not that its in the "stair dancer" parent zip file. Thats where the website comes in. It makes fixing games really much easy.

Snaps: aka screenshots or previews

I got my screenshots for the previews from a variety of web sources. I needed to rename some of the files to match the rom names, otherwise advmenu doesn't pick them up.  Here is the (very ugly) script I used to rename the misnamed files.

I downloaded my sega megadrive screenshots from here, and  the NES ones too I think? It looks quite comprehensive for many systems.
 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8xuhgxahhk6pfk4/umSNUhRGC0

I got my NeoGeo  screenshots by leeching this site (mostly because I wasn't sure the above site had them)
 http://www.neogeosoft.com/?section=artwork&filter=mvs

I leeched this site for the Sega Master System, though many of the files needed to be renamed.
 http://www.vgmuseum.com/

For MAME I used  Hitf12:
http://www.mameworld.info/hitf12/

An ugly script to rename Rom files

This is a bash script to rename snaps (screenshots/previews)  to the corresponding ROM file. it easier than tediously doing it manually.

Be warned! It may be buggy. I basically got it to the state where it would read the snaps and the ROMs. You can go back/forward in the ROM list, and skip back/forward by 10 in the snaps list. It displays one ROM and 10 snaps, you choose from the list which one to rename by typing a number from 1 to 10.

I'd strongly suggest running this against a copy of your snaps directory, and only copying it over once you verify the images are correct.





#!/bin/bash
#rename the file, then increment the lists?

#Neo Geo
Filename_Array=(/Roms/NeoGeo/roms/*)
RenamingThese_Array=(/Roms/NeoGeo/snaps/*)

##variables
#counters
Filename_Start=0
Rename_Start=0

skip_amount=10
array_end=$[${#RenamingThese_Array[@]} -$skip_amount]

function rename_files(){
echo
echo ----Original Rom File ----
echo ${Filename_Array[Filename_Start]}
echo

IFS="^"
a=$Rename_Start
b=$[Rename_Start+1]
c=$[Rename_Start+2]

d=$[Rename_Start+3]
e=$[Rename_Start+4]
f=$[Rename_Start+5]

g=$[Rename_Start+6]
h=$[Rename_Start+7]
i=$[Rename_Start+8]

j=$[Rename_Start+9]

names=(
${RenamingThese_Array[a]}
${RenamingThese_Array[b]}
${RenamingThese_Array[c]}

${RenamingThese_Array[d]}
${RenamingThese_Array[e]}
${RenamingThese_Array[f]}

${RenamingThese_Array[g]}
${RenamingThese_Array[h]}
${RenamingThese_Array[i]}

${RenamingThese_Array[j]}
next5 back5 previous_rom skip_5_roms)
echo ----Rename File ----
echo Press any other key to skip renaming the image file

PS3="Choose an image file (1-$skip_amount) to rename:"

select varname in ${names[*]}; do
   if [[ -n "$varname" ]]; then
       # chop off the filename from $varname, and from ${Filename_Array[0]}
       echo ${Filename_Array[Filename_Start]}
       echo $varname

       if [[ $varname = "next5" ]]; then
        Rename_Start=$[$Rename_Start+$skip_amount]
        if [[ $Rename_Start -gt $array_end ]]; then
      echo $array_end
      echo $Rename_Start
          echo "Reached the end of the list of images"
      Rename_Start=$array_end
    fi
    break
       fi

       if [[ $varname = "back5" ]]; then
    Rename_Start=$[$Rename_Start-$skip_amount]
    if [[ $Rename_Start -lt 0 ]]; then
      echo "Reached the start of the list of images"
      Rename_Start=0
     fi
    break
       fi
   
       if [[ $varname = "previous_rom" ]]; then
    Filename_Start=$[$Filename_Start-1]
    if [[ $Filename_Start -lt 0 ]]; then
      echo "Reached the start of the list of images"
      Filename_Start=0
     fi
    break
       fi

       if [[ $varname = "skip_5_roms" ]]; then
    Filename_Start=$[$Filename_Start+1]
    break
       fi      

       # get only the file name of the file
       FILENAME_AND_EXTN=$(echo ${Filename_Array[Filename_Start]} | rev | cut -d"/" -f1 | rev)
       FILENAME=$( echo $FILENAME_AND_EXTN | cut -d"." -f1)

       VARNAME_AND_EXTN=$(echo $varname | rev | cut -d"/" -f1 | rev)
       EXTENSION=$( echo $varname | cut -d"." -f2)
    #EXTENSION=jpg

       # get the path of the destination directory
       ONLY_PATH=$(echo $varname | rev | cut -d"/" -f2- | rev)
       echo mv "$varname" "$ONLY_PATH/$FILENAME.$EXTENSION"
       mv "$varname" "$ONLY_PATH/$FILENAME.$EXTENSION"
       #increment files to process
       Filename_Start=$[$Filename_Start+1]
       #Rename_Start=$[$Rename_Start+1]             
       # start over   
       #function rename
       break
   else
       echo 'skipped renaming file'
       echo $Rename_Start
       Filename_Start=$[$Filename_Start+1]
       break
   fi
done

#echo $Filename_Start

rename_files
}

rename_files