Bezels revisited

[troy]

I have been using gameex for over a year now, and this may be a newb question, but please hear me out.

I had to completely replace the HD of my cabinet, which meant my settings went as well. After months of fiddling, I finally got my cabinet, Slik Stik and everything working almost perfectly.

Except the bezels dont work. I only get the GameEX bezels.

I read in this forum to "disable bezels" but that just gives me a black screen.

Can someone tell me the lazy-mans guide to enabling bezels in mame.

One of the downsides of all the tweaking of settings is that I have artwork, emulators, etc all over the place... Im not sure which mame is the installed one sometimes. But I think I have it all installed and pointing towards one installation.

What I can't figure out is how in MAME I activate bezels. Do I add something to my mame startup string in the GameEX configuration?

Maybe Im missing something really really easy, but one of my projects this weekend is to figure it out! Its frustrating having people over, they try something like Golden Tee and they can't see the bezel with the slice/hook graphics that used to be on there.

Any help is appreciated... if I figure it out I'll post on here. That (besides my new YouTube issues, and suddenly not being able to play karaoke midi) are the only problems left.

Thanks,

Troy

[Adultery]

Under advanced MAME settings in GameEx advanced config, you need to add the bezels option into the command line. I don't know the exact switch off hand, but I think it's -bezel. Should be in the MAME readme in the doc folder. If you have generated an ini for MAME, the option should be close to the bottom. Make sure you also add the file path in if its not the default artwork folder.

Keep the GameEx bezel option off (but it sounds like you already did this).

[troy]

I got it to work.. i dont quite no how. Turns out I dont have a galaga bezel so thats why that one wasnt appearing (it was the one I was mainly testing)

There is a galaga bezel in the artwork folder, but it must be corrupted.

Anyway, what I DID do was manually edit the mame.ini file (as suggested) and I did a bunch of other things... any one of them could have fixed it.

One side effect is the bezel/transparent graphic of the game name is now at the bottom of the screen and i have to turn it off manually on every game now. But I can live with that.

But its fixed for the most part!

[troy]

Is there a way to turn off the Gameex, game name, stars, manufacturer, etc graphic at the bottom of the screen when playing a game that is using the default gameex bezel? If I have a custom bezel I can turn it off, but if it is using the gameex bezel, it turns off the bezel AND the info at the bottom.

I just dont want the bottom one with all the game info and gameex logo.

[Adultery]

That is generated based on the Attract Mode feature. If you turn that off, you turn off Bezel.png in the GameEx config. Unless you're using the actual bezels on a per game basis, I don't think you can disable that particular thing.

[headkaze]

The attract mode bezel's (with the game info at the bottom) should not be messing with the standard bezels used in MAME when you play a game.

When GameEx goes into attract mode it sends the following command line option:

-bezel -artwork_directory artworkgameex

The "artworkgameex" folder is where the attract mode bezels are stored. The default folder MAME uses is simply called "artwork" and that is where you should be placing your custom bezels.

In your mame.ini file you should have

artpath                   artwork

As well as a folder in the root of your MAME folder called "artwork". There are two separate bezel options in GameEx as per the attached screenshots.

If you want custom bezels set GameEx's "Use Bezel" option to "Don't use Bezel" then just make sure the following option is set in mame.ini

use_bezels                1

Then MAME should use the bezels you have stored in the "artwork" folder.

PS You can leave the attract mode bezels on and they should not interfere.

[troy]

I don't think im using attract mode, but the logo, rom info and rating still show up at the bottom. I will check. thanks.