HELP PLEASE - HLSL with Mame 0.184 (DRIVING ME NUTS)

[naeyaert]

I would appreciate some help please. 

I'm in the process of building a MAME arcade cabinet and I've spent days with a problem I can't solve.

I have installed Mame 0.184 on my system and it "appears" as though HLSL is functioning by the fact that I get a screen with scanlines and it looks OK and all the SLIDERS appear when I hit the "~" key.

However, I would have assumed that I could edit my mame.ini file with the HLSL settings I want (like cubic_distortion) to make the screen look like a CRT monitor.

When I manually change the settings with the "~" sliders I see the screen bulge and I get the distortion effect.  When I exit Mame and relaunch the game, it reverts back to a normal screen.  Which is normal I know as the slider settings are not saved.

However when I edit my MAME.INI file and go down to the HLSL settings and change the setting for cubic_distortion to 0.2 (the setting I like) and run MAME, nothing happens.

It's driving me NUTS!!!!

I have all the direct 9 etc files installed etc.

My LOGIC is, if the sliders are showing the effects on the screen and the game plays with the sliders set using "~" then how come the .INI file gets ignored?

What am I doing wrong?  Please help (for my sanity).

Thank you - Rob

[gigapig]

Do you have more than one ini file? If you have horizont and vertical then they are used in priority to the mame.ini.

[naeyaert]

5 hours ago, gigapig said:

Do you have more than one ini file? If you have horizont and vertical then they are used in priority to the mame.ini.

No not that I can see in my main MAME folder (\hyperspin\emulators\mame).  I only see the mame.ini / plugin.ini and ui.ini files

 

As mentioned, when I run Mame and play with the sliders, they all seem to work.  I just cant get Mame to read the .INI file with the edits I have put in to get it look how I want.

 

Any help greatly appreciated.

[gigapig]

So you don't have an ini folder just the mame.ini in the  root?

[naeyaert]

14 hours ago, gigapig said:

So you don't have an ini folder just the mame.ini in the  root?

Yes I have a mame.ini in my mame directory (\hyperspin\elumators\mame) - where the mame.exe file is and I also have a mame.ini file in the \hyperspin\elumators\mame\ini directory

when i edit either with the hlsl settings they never get applied.

am I doing something wrong?  should I delete one of the ini files?  where should the ini file be?  

cheers

[gigapig]

Do you have any other ini files in that folder? As I mentioned, others will take priority over the mame ini.

You can watch my guides on HLSL & GLSL if you click my signature below.

[naeyaert]

On 4/17/2017 at 7:42 PM, gigapig said:

Do you have any other ini files in that folder? As I mentioned, others will take priority over the mame ini.

You can watch my guides on HLSL & GLSL if you click my signature below.

Hello again, OK I think I may have solved my problem but I'd very much appreciate your views on this.

I did a fresh install of the latest MAME (0.185 I think) and I noted a few things.

(1) That there was a mame.ini file in the install directory by default (the same directory as the .EXE file)

(2) That under the INI directory, there was a sub folder called "presets" which had a number of ini files in this called 'gameboy.ini', 'lcd-matrix.ini', raster.ini' etc etc

 

I noticed that Mame also created a mami.ini file in the 'presets' directory and I also checked that my mame was pointing to the INI directory.

 

What I noticed was that even after I deleted the .INI file from the install directory (where Mame.exe lives) and made sure that the only mame.ini file was in the 'presets' directory, mame would still not recognize my HLSL settings in the INI file until I deleted all the other files mentioned above (gameboy / lcd-matrix, raster) etc. 

 

Once I made sure these files were gone and the ONLY ini file was the mame.ini file, it all burst into life.

 

Is this normal?  Sorry for the stupid question but it took me a long time to realize I needed to get rid of there other files.

 

Can you please confirm?  Many thanks for the advice.  Rob

[gigapig]

7 hours ago, naeyaert said:

Hello again, OK I think I may have solved my problem but I'd very much appreciate your views on this.

I did a fresh install of the latest MAME (0.185 I think) and I noted a few things.

(1) That there was a mame.ini file in the install directory by default (the same directory as the .EXE file)

(2) That under the INI directory, there was a sub folder called "presets" which had a number of ini files in this called 'gameboy.ini', 'lcd-matrix.ini', raster.ini' etc etc

 

I noticed that Mame also created a mami.ini file in the 'presets' directory and I also checked that my mame was pointing to the INI directory.

 

What I noticed was that even after I deleted the .INI file from the install directory (where Mame.exe lives) and made sure that the only mame.ini file was in the 'presets' directory, mame would still not recognize my HLSL settings in the INI file until I deleted all the other files mentioned above (gameboy / lcd-matrix, raster) etc. 

 

Once I made sure these files were gone and the ONLY ini file was the mame.ini file, it all burst into life.

 

Is this normal?  Sorry for the stupid question but it took me a long time to realize I needed to get rid of there other files.

 

Can you please confirm?  Many thanks for the advice.  Rob

I'll try to explain how i think it works. 

As you know from the files you deleted mame will read ini with different names. These are read in a certain order, so if you want specific setting for a game your ini file  will be named the same as the game ROM.

You can be a little less specific and use the driver name for a group of games or less again with the screen orientation. 

So for example this might be the order mame reads the ini files.

dkong.ini (example name )

"drivername".ini

Vertical.ini

Horizont.ini

Vector.ini

Mame.ini

 

All the above will need the bgfx, hlsl or glsl settings in them or the shader won't show. Some ini files can also contain less information, so i guess the other info comes from your mame.ini (example, look at the monochrome vector ini)

Personally I have a few game specific ini's, vector ini and the orientation ini's, I don't use the mame ini.

[naeyaert]

1 hour ago, gigapig said:

I'll try to explain how i think it works. 

As you know from the files you deleted mame will read ini with different names. These are read in a certain order, so if you want specific setting for a game your ini file  will be named the same as the game ROM.

You can be a little less specific and use the driver name for a group of games or less again with the screen orientation. 

So for example this might be the order mame reads the ini files.

dkong.ini (example name )

"drivername".ini

Vertical.ini

Horizont.ini

Vector.ini

Mame.ini

 

All the above will need the bgfx, hlsl or glsl settings in them or the shader won't show. Some ini files can also contain less information, so i guess the other info comes from your mame.ini (example, look at the monochrome vector ini)

Personally I have a few game specific ini's, vector ini and the orientation ini's, I don't use the mame ini.

Ok I think I get it now. What threw me was that hlsl looked like it was working due to scan lines showing up etc once I set mame to 3d3 video mode and turned hlsl on. What wasn't working was any of the distortion effects (to make the screen bulge like a CRT). I put wacky exaggerated settings in like 2.0 in the ini file and nothing worked (yet the name sliders worked). Once I blew away the other ini files it all of a sudden worked. I've lost most of my hair now :-)

I've been playing around with glsl shaders (crt goom I think) to try and replicate the arcade look.  I notice these shaders under glsl don't have any settings so I assume they can't be tweaked as much as hlsl?  I note that hlsl seems to grind my machine a bit where the glsl plays fine.

 

Any suggestions to get a perfect CRT setting appreciated .

 

thank you also for the help. Really appreciated.  Rob

 

[gigapig]

34 minutes ago, naeyaert said:

 

I've been playing around with glsl shaders (crt goom I think) to try and replicate the arcade look.  I notice these shaders under glsl don't have any settings so I assume they can't be tweaked as much as hlsl?  I note that hlsl seems to grind my machine a bit where the glsl plays fine.

You can tweak the GLSL shader in the .fsh file but you need to no what you doing with the code. I had to comment out a line to turn off the curvature on triple screen games like Darius; that's as far I dare go.

If you have a few hairs left the try BGFX, but I still prefer GLSL, no need to tweak anything just set up three ini files, one for Horizontal games, one for vertical and one for vector. Looks good and low overhead.

[naeyaert]

12 hours ago, gigapig said:

You can tweak the GLSL shader in the .fsh file but you need to no what you doing with the code. I had to comment out a line to turn off the curvature on triple screen games like Darius; that's as far I dare go.

If you have a few hairs left the try BGFX, but I still prefer GLSL, no need to tweak anything just set up three ini files, one for Horizontal games, one for vertical and one for vector. Looks good and low overhead.

So you prefer GLSL then?  I agree with the comment that you just turn it on and it goes.  I may be fretting about the 'look' too much but I copied some hlsl settings off a youtube video I saw and side by side it doesn't look a whole lot different but the HLSL did look a little more colorful / richer etc (slightly).

[Metalzoic]

I didn't read all the posts just your first post, but from what you said you're probably changing your settings in the wrong ini.

You can make HLSL look great, but it changes so much you almost have to start over re-doing it everytime you update MAME. I use GLSL for almost all games now and only use HLSL for the games that don't work right with GLSL (many Williams games like Arch Rivals, Spy Hunter, Rampage etc... although maybe that's fixed in the latest MAME version)

[naeyaert]

Gotcha. Off to tweak away...

 

really appreciate your help. Take care

[griffin518]

13 hours ago, Metalzoic said:

I didn't read all the posts just your first post, but from what you said you're probably changing your settings in the wrong ini.

You can make HLSL look great, but it changes so much you almost have to start over re-doing it everytime you update MAME. I use GLSL for almost all games now and only use HLSL for the games that don't work right with GLSL (many Williams games like Arch Rivals, Spy Hunter, Rampage etc... although maybe that's fixed in the latest MAME version)

Just for the record, HLSL hasn't been touched in at least 13 months/versions.  The files in my sig still work the same in 0.185 as they did in 0.172.