SITE UPDATE - December 29, 2019

In-Game Artwork: 46 new sets; 48 additional sets updated; 34 files removed; 62 files temporarily removed

One more update before the year is over.

First, the tl;dr of why hydef's artwork has been temporarily removed: the artwork is amazing, but I have not had enough time to update this site as he continues to update many of the already completed titles. It is better that I link everyone to the most current versions of the artwork, rather than have an old version here, and the newer version somewhere else. I will keep the extra newspost on my frontpage, along with a current copy of the DAT file, so that everyone can stay up to date.

For those that have been around for a few years, a while ago I collaborated with this one guy who ended up screwing me over by taking artwork that I had scanned, cleaning it up, promoting it on his website, then not sending it back this way, and even actually printing copies and selling it. He even sold a second copy of Space Harrier this year. Live and learn, I guess. Since that time, he has been banned from multiple arcade and emulation websites, yet somehow, he is still active on a particular one today. Hopefully he has learned his ways by now. Anyway…

Space Harrier is done!! I have waited soooo long for this. The deluxe cabinet version of Space Harrier is my all-time favorite arcade game ever, and we finally have full artwork for it in MAME. The marquee we have now turned out way better than the version the other guy did, thanks to the efforts of muddymusic. When you get a chance, go ahead and check out Arcade Art Shop to check out the quality of more of his work. We have a couple more things coming from him in the next update.

Back to Space Harrier… upright artwork is complete for both US and JPN variations. Thank you also to the awesome photos made available by Jodo over at the UKVAC forums, and from Stefano CSW over on Flickr. Also thank you to Vas Crabb for transcribing the text from the JPN version of the instruction card, so that it could also be added.

Atari's Destroyer and Sky Raider both now have full artwork. Thank you to TrevEB for scanning the background artwork and taking pictures of the cabs, and to Comboman for cleaning it up and putting it all together. I did a little bit of extra work on the cabinet artwork, shifter, and trigger button, which are all animated now. The volcano buttons for these, and the other applicable games below, are courtesy of SteelTiger.

Tournament Table and Pong Doubles both have artwork, recreated by Comboman.

The Ladybug bezel has had its colors adjusted. Again. Thank you to Comboman for getting it started in the right direction. After going through tens of pics all over the internet, I think this is finally correct. If you happen to look yourself later and compare different pics, you will see what I mean. While we were at it, might as well add the marquee and the control panel also. I cleaned up the marquee, courtesy of the BYOAC/CAG artwork. Thank you to Nightvoice for recreating the control panel and buttons.

Thank you to Comboman for originally tackling the artwork for Atari's original Breakout. Unfortunately, the bezel needed to be redone because, among other things, the scan suffered from scanner skip, which plagues many of the files from the BYOAC/CAG artwork. Hopefully I can do a write-up on this for the next update to explain the situation, so that people that are using these files to reprint artwork for their real cabinets are aware of the problem. I ended up re-cleaning the entire bezel and marquee, and am now happy with it. Against our usual rules, the bezel and marquee for this game in the artwork set is full-size, ready to print. I would much rather people use this version, than the version that is currently floating around everywhere else. To complete the artwork for Breakout, Comboman recreated the control panel, the start buttons are courtesy of Nightvoice, and the volcano button is courtesy of SteelTiger. I hit some snags on the cocktail version of this, so that will come out next update.

After being made available on zorg's site for so long, UDb23 put together the artwork for the Williams version of 1942. Thank you to 7146aaron for providing the bezel artwork, and for Andykmv for scanning it. Thank you to TheShanMan for providing and scanning the marquee and instruction card. To fix up the rest of the artwork, I fixed the colors up a bit on the Romstar bezel, and added the Romstar marquee, courtesy of the BYOAC/CAG artwork again. The control panel for both versions will be completed at a later date.

UDb23 also recreated the bezel for Taito Volleyball, based on multiple photos, and also cleaned up the marquee, courtesty of the BYOAC/CAG artwork.

After looking at 1942, we took a look at the other games in the series. We added some fun widescreen artwork to both 1941 and 19xx, based on a couple flyers. After looking 1943, it needs to be redone; the current version has some colors that are off, and is actually missing quite a bit of detail. Unfortunately, time ran out, so that should come out next update.

UDb23 redid one of the bezels for the DECO series of cabinets. This had previously been done a while back, but after comparing his version to the current version we had, I noticed that his was symmetrical (all four fourths of the bezel are exactly the same), while the existing version was not, so that has been replaced. After that, we looked at the other version of the bezel, and it needed fixing also, along with some color correction. Thank you also to Nightvoice for recreating the control panel for this, along with the buttons. The version with both the bezel and control panel is now the primary view in the artwork set, while the other bezel is the secondary version.

Something we noticed a while back; the bios decocass is the parent for all of the DECO Cassette games in the MAME driver, which means that the artwork available in the artwork decocass is available to all those games. Rather than have thirty-five copies of the same file, the artwork sets for the thirty-four individual games have been removed, and only the file for decocass remains. In the future, when we add artwork that is specific to one of these games (e.g. the marquee), then the file for that game will be added back in. At the end of the day, this makes it easier to keep things up to date.

Back to the DECO bezel that UDb23 redid, that bezel also applies to Mad Alien and Tomahawk 777, so those have both been updated.

Still not finished, UDb23 recreated the bezel for Crazy Balloon, and cleaned up the marquee available from the BYOAC/CAG artwork. From that same artwork, he also cleaned up the marquee for Sky Soldiers, and also the bezel we scanned for that same game.

Finally, he also finished cleaning up the bezel for Exidy's Crash, which was scanned by TrevEB. Thank you to Comboman for noticing the Bertolino version available at The Dragon's Lair Project. That version has now been added, thanks to vectorization by Spinnhacker. The bezel for Smash, which was previously in the Crash artwork set, has now been moved to its own artwork set.

Thanks to Comboman for noticing that the marquee in APB is animated. I borrowed the marquee from krakerman's version of the artwork to update that here.

Mr. Retrolust continues to send stuff our way, while updating his own work over at the LaunchBox forums. Thanks to him, we now have bezels for A.B. Cop, Alien Storm, and Racing Hero.

The Taito bezel for Space Cyclone was completed some time ago, but before the game had a driver in MAME. Now that it is, we can add the bezel.

Back to variations on the Radar Scope bezel, both the Nintendo upright version of Space Firebird, and a clone of that game, Space Demon, use different color variations of that same bezel. Both have now been added.

Now that Sega's Star Wars Arcade is working in MAME, it seems only right to add the really cool control panel artwork. Man, how I wish I had kept all the pics I took back when I was working on the Control Panel project. The final version of that pic was only 1000px wide. I did what I could for now; if anyone happens to live in vicinity of the Galloping Ghost Arcade, they have the game there. If you are really good with a camera, I would love a newer version of this pic, at the same angle, just way better resolution, if possible.

Small updates to the Star Wars Trilogy artwork and Asteroids Deluxe artwork.

Earlier this year when creating the current generic artwork, I had found another cool starmap pic from NASA's website. Turns out this looks really nice as widescreen artwork in Asteroids. We will add it to other games on the next update.

Also noticed that the flyer for Tempest looks really cool as a bezel, so that has been added. Thank you to Dan at Flyer Fever for the scan of that.

Back when Toys to Life games were still the rage, there was a game called Lego Dimensions, which I spent probably hundreds of hours on, and yes, I have the complete set at home. One of the DLC sets for that game was called Midway Arcade and was really cool, in that it was like a follow-up to Midway Arcade Origins, but all of the artwork in the game was lego-ized. Now that it is no longer for sale, here is the artwork files ripped from the game, to be used in MAME. For the complete list of games affected, you can check the Arcade Compilations page. Note that for Spy Hunter, the artwork for the High Gear was a bit, um, klunky. It looked bad, switching gears, and is noticeable in the real game. That has been fixed, and the fixed version is what is used in the current artwork, but the klunky version is also in the file, for those that would like to experience it. Notes included in the LAY file.

While doing other miscellaneous cleanup, we noticed that there were three more games added to the United Amusements PC Engine driver. The artwork for Blazing Lazers has been updated, and also copied over for Alien Crush, Keith Courage, and Pac-Land for that system.

We are getting closer to moving over and/or replacing the final files from MESS Artwork, so that Stiletto can finally retire the site. Today we have replacement artwork for to7, t0770, to8, to9,and to9p for computers, along with small updates for mo5, mo5nr, and mo6. For game consoles, we have artwork for a2600, famicom, fds, genesis, nes, sms, snes. The genesis artwork is currently only the Nomad handheld. We will add the actual console artwork next update. All console artwork updates thanks to Evan Amos.

The sets a1000n and a500n have been renamed to a1000 and a500, so that they are the parent set.

Thank you to John IV, Robbbert, and Tafoid for reporting and testing some artwork errors found in ccmk1, ccmk2, and ebases. These have all been found and corrected in the updated files.

Chess games have seen renewed interest this year. Thank you to hap for helping update the artwork system so that chess board and pieces can be used in external artwork again. For today, we have fdes2100d, with artwork supplied courtesy of Volodymyr. Hopefully we can add artwork for more chess games going forward.

Added artwork for the following Tiger handheld games that hydef does not have artwork for: taddams, tddragon3, tgaiden, tinday, tmchammer, and trobocop2. Between this site and hydef's artwork, that should cover all the artwork available on Sean's temporary site. If I missed any, please let me know, and we will get that corrected next update.

With these updates, we are only missing three sets left from the old MESS site. Commodore 64, which I already have planned for next update. Gameboy Advance, which I was hoping to receive from someone a couple months ago; I will have to reach out again. And Vectrex. uman has done an amazing job on redoing all of the overlays in hi-res quality, and I have them all here ready to go. I am just waiting for the hi-res pic of the Vectrex system that he has, so that we can complete the artwork.

Finally, for some fun stuff, I noticed a while back that Nightvoice created specific artwork files for some HB MAME games. There are a lot of games I do enjoy in HB MAME, so I thought I would give it a try, and add artwork for a few of these. The bezel for vecbtime was done by Nightvoice. He also did a bezel for Rainbow Donkey Kong. Inspired by his, I did mine slightly different. Also created bezels for galagax (1942 mixed with Galaga), mrdigdo and newdigdo (Mr. Do! with Dig Dug sprites), and stapper (Tapper with Simpson's sprites). Thank you to Robbbert for adding a couple of the games from the Model 3 Tesla, you can play missilet and mmadness while sitting in your car, enjoying the view. Also added the Spice Girls Tiger handheld, courtesy of Pangent Technologies.

Phew! That was a lot. If you are still with me, we have some site updates to talk about.

I reorganized the artwork table on the download page a bit. Removed the column for the LAY files, as it is pretty redundant to have now, and it freed up some room. Added a couple columns to define Artwork type, and redefined this where necessary for all 1400+ artwork files. For a complete explanation of the Artwork Type, Artwork Effects, and Category, you can check the Artwork Category page. Finally, moved the download column from the far right to the far left, and it looks and feels better there. I also figured out a way to create a copy of the Table Header down in the footer, so as you are scrolling down past the top of the table, you can still view the Column Headers at the bottom, so things make sense. It lines up "mostly correct" on my end, depending on the window size. Please let me know if it looks way wonky in your browser.

That will do it for 2019. I know I keep saying it, but I hope to get to updating this site more regularly, real-life work permitting. I was able to get a bunch of stuff out of the way with this update, so I am hoping that will actually be possible for 2020. I also have to get back to scanning more of the artwork I have sitting here, as I promised UDb23 some of the stuff I have sitting here today.

I will add the link for the Google Drive folder for this update tomorrow. *EDIT: DONE*