Vertical screen theme

[emphatic]

I'm gonna use GameEx on my laptop just to play vertical shmups and thought I'd give it a go creating a vertical theme.

I'm gonna do it for my native resolution of 800 x 1280 (vertical) and would like to know what resolution would be fitting for an arcade monitor?

I might as well create one for that too. It should be interesting for some folks, right?

Is there currently a setting in the Theme Editor for editing a vertical theme? Headkaze?

Emph

[Tom Speirs]

I'm gonna use GameEx on my laptop just to play vertical shmups and thought I'd give it a go creating a vertical theme.

I'm gonna do it for my native resolution of 800 x 1280 (vertical) and would like to know what resolution would be fitting for an arcade monitor?

I might as well create one for that too. It should be interesting for some folks, right?

Is there currently a setting in the Theme Editor for editing a vertical theme? Headkaze?

Emph

There's no setting to make a vertical theme, you just have to make the width and height of the theme vertical. Therefore 800 x 1280 instead of 1280 x 800. The lowest it can be for GameEx is 640 x 480. The resolution should be set to 1280 x 800. You can put the orientation ini setting in theme.ini manually.

Note: I have not tried this, but it should work.

[emphatic]

Thanks Tom. However I can't even get GameEx to rotate at all on my laptop. I have an ATI Radeon Mobility 9700 with Omega drivers if that's somehow an issue. I have set GameEx to rotate 90 degrees by default since I plan to only play vertical games on this machine. But it does not rotate. Nothing happens if I press [TAB] either. Also, each time I start GameEx the loading screen shows, then the whole app is minimized, showing my desktop instead. I did remember reading a topic title sometime about "minimize on startup". Will do a quick forum search for that... It really is frightening how fast you forget how stuff works when you shy away from the whole MAME thing. Or am I getting old?

Thanks

Emph

[Tom Speirs]

Sorry, I forgot too, by default rotation wont work at a resolution above 800 x 600. It probably says something to that affect in the log. Its not hardware based rotation so its too slow at higher resolutions. Sorry.

[emphatic]

Okay. I'll try to run @ 800 x 600 and see what happens. Thanks a lot.

Edit: Yes, that worked. And I'm using backgrounds @ 1280 x 800, so it does look great even at a non-native resolution.

Emph

[emphatic]

Well, I got it to work finally.

Emph

[bkenobi]

...and it looks great!

[emphatic]

I've made a small video of my Theme if someone is interested. It has a very nice "field layout", i.e. the snaps/imgs are large and the gamelist has lots of room.

http://rapidshare.com/files/96710168/Verti...ontend.avi.html

Emph

[amos_82]

Those screens look fantastic!

Great work Emph!

[iano]

Brilliant Emph !

[emphatic]

I've dropped the "one screen per each game" idea I had initially (see post # 6) because I wanted to use GameEx in-built MAME list generation instead of setting each game as a single emulator as this is way too much work. As this skin is for modern shmups first and foremost (CAVE, Raizing/8ing, Psikyo), I might work up a more generic background that suits the objects layout (gamelist, preview field) and works with all kinds of vertical games (just something plain and pretty). More tweaks are needed and then there will be a release. The theme will also include a .psd-file so people can do their own backgrounds.

Emph