MAMEWorld Forums - MAMEUI & IV/Play - Re: Why can't 'hide romless machines from available list' work in MAMEUI?

As to your 1st question, I'll let someone more knowledgeable explain...

For the 2nd,
I asked about that years ago & was told it would be a major overhaul kind of thing. I've been meaning to talk to Vas about it with the recent artwork modifications he's started implementing lately to see if it's something that can be addressed. I just haven't had time to do it yet...

Here are my observations & work arounds...

-If it's a simple artwork file only, rename your artwork folder & take your snapshots. This works on a lot of them & it's easy to get around.

-If it's a hard-coded item in MAME that you want removed you have to go through & remove that from the src before you compile the code. Even if you turn artwork off in the video options, that will still show up no matter what unless you remove & re-compile.

-There is another way around this that takes a little less work, but will not work for the hard-coded aspects. This leads us to the lay file in the artwork file. When MAME loads your selected machine it searches for an artwork file in the appropriate folder & then loads it according to the lay file contained within. Whatever view is presented as the 1st view seems to be what MAME considers as the "Default". So if you have the "Standard (4:3)" as the 1st in your list of views you'll be fine. But say you have "Button Lamps" as the 1st view, then that's what MAME sees as the default. Even if you change the view to "Standard (4:3)", MAME thinks that it still needs the button lamps because that's the Default. It may render it without them on screen but when you take an internal snapshot MAME reverts back to that Default view but with the current game data. (Think save state, just with a different screen render...same current game variables just different output image...) This is also true of the hard-coded ones too & why they have to be removed before compile, otherwise MAME thinks that they need to be drawn on every screen, like a "pre-default".
Basically you need to go through & change all the lay files to where Standard (4:3) is the 1st in the list of views & you'll be fine for naked screenies!(or at least for a lot of them. Now if everyone would put that 1st in their lay files we could all live in perfect harmony & none of this would be necessary but alas...)

I'm sure it could be done but I'm not sure how difficult it would be to change MAME to take its internal snapshot from the video output & not the way it is doing it now or maybe just to implement the current artwork view, not the originally read default view to get the screenshot.

Well that's enough of that for now, it's probably more than you wanted anyway...

(If I am wrong on any of these someone please enlighten me! I'd like to know... And of course some of these things may have changed since I last attempted them especially in light of the recent changes...)

While we're here, the other thing I'd like to see in regards to screenshots & artwork would be that all of the artwork be kept outside of the MAME file itself. I think that MAME already looks for an artwork folder & a lay file to begin with. That way if someone doesn't want the extra things they don't have to download it 1st of all, rename the file or the whole artwork folder itself & it's gone. EZ as that... (Not to mention easier to manipulate for editing.) Does it save that much space to include that info in the executable instead of a separate artwork zip? Or save time? Or what are the other reasons for inclusion? Just asking, don't know...I'm sure the Devs have many reason why...

Maybe that helped a bit? Thanks for reading....

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