MAMEWorld Forums - MAME Artwork: Official - Re: You know how when you get a REALLY cool idea...

> You can actually set it in the mame.ini to be off (just like today with bezels,
> backdrops, and overlays).

Hmmm.. current mame.ini shows:

artwork_crop 0
use_backdrops 1
use_overlays 1
use_bezels 1

Is there a combination thereof that would render the bezel etc. but not the marquee? Sorry if I'm totally missing something.. I probably am. :-)

> BTW... you mention a 16:9 monitor; it looks wicked cool on one, rotated 90 degrees,
> filling up the whole screen

I'm sure! Sounds cool.

> And like I said, there's more to it than what looks obvious at the moment

I imagine that once MAME includes hardware 3D rendering, the full solution would be to create a playable 3D model of the game with control panel, bezel, overlay, marquee etc. Sort of like what 3D Arcade is doing, but in a playable, in-game sense. Perhaps more like Future Pinball or a modern driving game than 3D Arcade, come to think of it. And you could zoom in either manually or automatically to crop out certain parts of the cab for different purposes (as in the example above: hotkey to only show the bezel but crop out all above/below).

Going crazy with fun/fluff brainstorming ideas here, but with a step further than that, the upcoming HLSL effects could be added in to the screen portion, where each cabinet gets the appropriate "settings" in accordance with the game's original monitor. Bezels could appear with a darker gamma than the game screen since none of them were ever "backlit" as they appear today. Many game screens such as Donkey Kong could be sunken into the cabinet, away from the bezel as they had originally appeared...

Ok I'll stop.

But I do think you're right on the money that there's a lot of seriously cool stuff to consider here.