MAME 0.181 full wheels (minus casino), genre art, databases 1.0.0

This is going to be long, there's a lot to cover.

First of all, credits and thanks. I couldn't have done anything without the resources already available to me as a result of all the hard work by the community. There are too many people to name, and I don't even know who all to name, so please, just consider this pack as my way of saying 'Thank you,' and trying to give a little something back.

Thank you to brolly and phulshof for the incredible MAME 0.181 database that all this work is based on, and phulshof also for maintaining an unofficial MAME wheels pack, that saved me a ton of time. Thank you to krakerman for doing many of the wheels in that project. Thank you to the Rocketlauncher devs for answering all of my dumb questions, helping me fix problems, and for making such an awesome piece of software. Thank you to the HyperSpin devs, for giving me an awesome new hobby. Thank you to the creator of Don's HyperSpin Tools, without which I would have given up on this project a long time ago.

Now, onto the download.

The primary goods you'll find in this download are a near complete MAME 0.181  working games (the 9815 games list), 'parents only' logos collection. The only genres that are not complete are 366 Casino and eight Utility ROMs. Everything else, including Mahjong, is done. I have no plans to ever do Casino. The work is too great, and the payout is too small. A lot of the existing logos in that genre also need resized/edited and in some cases completely redone to look better in the HyperSpin Wheel. That is not happening either. I just don't care. 

I started out with just the official MAME wheel set. All of the logos that I have added to that set are one of 3 things.

1. A crop of a flyer, marquee, logo I found online (always tried to make sure it was authentic), or title screen shot, preferably in that order. Sometimes the title screen was still favored, because the quality of the preceding options wasn't the best, or wasn't a substantial improvement.

2. An edited version of someone else's work. It was very important to me that the logos actually look good on the HyperSpin wheel. The canvas size and the location of the logo on the canvas were edited with HyperSpin in windowed mode while I made on the fly adjustments. I tried many times to make sure sequels lined up with each other as you scroll the wheel. I also used drop shadow, stroke, and outer glow quite often to make the logos more visible.

3. An unaltered download of someone else's work.

I have altered or added 931 logos total. That number seems awfully high, but I'm basing that off of the date the files were modified. I have included a database called 'Other Games,'  (just tap the genre key/button and select it) for anyone to look through and do a quality check. I think the number that I have personally added/altered is closer to 500-600. I have saved all the added/altered files, in most cases, right after extracting the logo from a title screen, before any resizing occurred, in the form of .psd files. So if anyone of greater talent wants to do some custom work with the logos, I've already done all the legwork and extracted them. They can be found in the 'Media\MAME\images\wheel\modified by me\photoshop files' folder.

There are 8,082 wheels in this collection. Obviously a lot of them are clones. I didn't find out until way later into my project that I can set up HyperHQ to make clones use parent wheels, and by then, I was already commited to finishing the job of having individual files for the following publishers: Atari, Bally, Capcom, Cave, Data East,  Gaelco, Irem, Jaleco, Kaneko, Konami, Midway, Namco, Nintendo, Psikyo, Sammy, Sega, Seibu Kaihatsu, SNK, Taito, Tecmo, and Williams. In many cases, clone games for those publishers got their own unique wheel art, if they happened to have a unique name from the parent ROM.

I did all of this for my Atari Classics, Capcom Classics, etc. wheels that were independent of MAME. Then after I was done, I decided to just go ahead and see what else I could do to improve the MAME wheel. I finished up missing artwork for most genres, then came to the forum and found phulshof's unofficial MAME wheel project, and got to work with his set, doing some edits and quality control, and also re-doing many of them (I couldn't verify authenticity for some, and the quality was too poor for others).

The quality now, in my opinion, is very good. What it is not: There are no redraws, professional looking, flawless, perfect logos, like you'd probably find in the 'official' thread. However, I have put quite a bit of effort into making sure everything is sized, proportioned, and spaced in the HyperSpin wheel. I have very amateur-ish photoshop skills, but I have fixed many logos, e.g. a logo with an object obstructing it, the top of a logo being cut off, etc. So while I am not sure if what I've done is quite up to 'official' standards, I can say with confidence that the work I've done is going to be acceptable to most, and I'm basing that on the art that already existed prior to my work.

I used 400x175 as a size limit for most games. However, as many of the 'mahjong' logos were quite vertical in nature, I allowed 400x300 (124 games total, everything else conforms to the 400x175 standard). I didn't want to lose quality smashing everything down. Some of them were very skinny, and exceeded 500 width, but I didn't shrink them down any more to lose quality.  This was only a total of 8 games. kot.png is 706x76 for example. 

Other things in this download include many custom genre databases, and genre wheel art to go with it (I didn't do a majority of the genre wheel artwork or genre backgrounds artwork, credit goes to the community). I'll discuss a few of those here.

Main wheel: The main wheel has a complete set of parents only, minus casino, rated red games with sexual content, electro-mechanical, and utility. A handful of select clones have been added. I wanted 'Pac-Man' as well as 'Puck-Man.' I am a huge Capcom Vs. series fanatic, and to me, X-Men Vs. Street Fighter version 1, 2, and 3 are three separate games. So all the versus games have one of each version. I chose Data East's "Two Crude" over "Crude Buster," because that is what I remember playing, being from America. There are a handful of other examples (very few) that I can't think of right now. This database has all of the non-used ROMs from the complete MAME database (16,000 games) disabled, with the enabled="0" feature. So if you happen to use Rocketlauncher fades, and a game is chosen from a genre wheel database not found in the main wheel, it will still display relevant information, like year, publisher, rating, etc.

From the Genre wheel.

All Games: Takes you back to the Main wheel. It really serves no purpose, other than a sort of 'starting point.'

Publisher genres:  Atari, Bally, Capcom, Cave, Data East,  Gaelco, Irem, Jaleco, Kaneko, Konami, Midway, Namco, Nintendo, Psikyo, Sammy, Sega, Seibu Kaihatsu, SNK, Taito, Tecmo, and Williams genres have full wheel art. Clones are included for all of these. No filters for any publisher genres, so you may find 'adult' or 'casino' themed games in them, if a company made some.

Other publisher genres (Neo Geo MVS, CPS2, Sega ST-V, etc.): These databases are simply taken from the official hyperlist, and then ran against phulshof's MAME 0.181 list, with all of the renamed games re-added by me. A few games in these databases are missing wheels, simply because the game has 'non-working' status. No plans to change that.

Nintendo Classics: I took the official Nintendo Classics Hyperlist, merged it with all working Nintendo games from phulshof's list, and added all the missing games running Nintendo Vs. hardware, and all the missing Playchoice 10 and Super System games. Even though other companies published said games, they were released on Nintendo hardware, and I consider them 'Nintendo' games.

Complete Mame 1: All working MAME games. No filters.

Complete Mame 2: All MAME games. No filters.

Parents Only: All working MAME games, parents only. No other filters (contains Casino, electro-mechanical, utility, and 'adult' games, unlike the main wheel - that is the only difference here).

Top 100: A completely subjective list of classic arcade games, favoring the old school 70s, 80s, and early 90s.

Themes: Every game that has a theme.

By year: I have made databases for games by era, typically 5 year periods, like 1980-1984, 1985-1990, etc. Parents only.

Other Games: All of the wheel art that I have edited. If you don't want it, just edit the genre.xml file, and remove the 'other games' line. I included this only to get feedback on how the new wheels look.

Every other genre from here on out is 'parents only,' and have mature rated red games (with sexual content) filtered out of them. These games have their own genre, called 'Mature,' if you want to play them.

Two Player Games: Self explanatory

Multi Player Games: 3 or more players.

Action, Beat'Em Up, Gun, Sports, etc.: Your typical genres. The only thing missing is electro-mechanical, and utility.

Casino: All of the Casino games, including ones without wheel art.

Mature: All games with sexual content, in it's own genre, separate from the other genres. If you don't want this, you can edit the 'genre.xml' and delete the 'Mature' line.

Handheld games: I grabbed this data from a MAME 0.177 database set. These games are MESS ROMs, and are the handheld games, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (handheld), Contra (handheld), and also has Gameboy and other MESS systems. You will need MAME's artwork files to make some of the handheld games display properly (TMNT and other Konami handhelds will explicitly state that the machine is non-working, even though it is. You just have to hit 'tab,' and go into the video options, play with the bezel/display options). If you choose Gameboy, or another system capable of loading mutliple games, you will need to press 'tab' to bring up the MAME menu, and go to 'file manager,' and select a game from the 'software list,' assuming you have all of that. This genre has no wheel art, except for a few like Gameboy. I have no intention of changing that, as this is a frivolous and unnecessary genre (but fun to play around with, nonetheless).

MESS: A handful of 30+ consoles (including some handhelds) that MAME/MESS emulates. Included in this pack are wheel arts and videos for each console, all properly named and ready to go. Any system that you choose from this wheel, you will be required to press 'tab' on the keyboard once a system is loaded in MAME, go to the file manager, and load a game from the 'software list,' assuming you have one. Also, for systems with full keyboard emulation, like Commodore 64, and MSX2, don't forget you have to first press the 'scroll lock' key to enable UI functions like the 'tab' menu. This was a completely unnecessary addition, obviously most people are not going to want to load games this way. But there are advantages. 1. A way to easily use MAME as an alternate emulator for a few consoles, to see what it can do 2. If you have cheat files, MAME has many cheats for many different consoles, particularly NES, all easily accessible from the 'Tab' menu once configured. It's a lot of fun. It's like having a built in Game Genie. The cheats will only work if you loaded a game from the software list however, hence, the advantage.

 

That about covers it. This is my 'ultimate MAME setup,' it is the result of many months of work, I hope you all like it.

Depending on how well this is received, I have my 'ultimate NES' setup I am considering uploading, complete with a ridiculous number of custom genre databases and artwork.

Edit: Bakuretsu Breaker logo was displaying too large, I just uploaded an edited version of it.