SITE UPDATE - June 30, 2019

In-Game Artwork: 35 new sets; 49 additional sets updated

NEW!! - Download via Google Drive

Fixing old stuff

Today we have more sets being updated than actually new artwork sets. Let us get right into it.

hydef has more Game & Watch updates for us. First, we have the following new files: Balloon Fight, Chef, Climber (Crystal Screen), Fire Attack, Octopus, Parachute, Popeye, Turtle Bridge, and Zelda. In addition, all of the other Game & Watch games have also been updated. Among other fixes, you will notice is that the game cases look more realistic than the previous versions here. I also went through and updated all of the credits in the LAY file for each game; I am hoping I got them all correct finally. (If you donated a game, you get credit for donating the artwork; if you did the actual scanning or cleanup of the artwork, you get credit for that). If I missed anyone, please let me know.

I still have older stuff on my end from other users that I need to get caught up on. First, we have King of Dragons, with complete artwork for the marquee, bezel, and control panel, thanks to Lord Hiryu from Arcade Forever. Much of this was thanks to pencil drawings contributed by Buyatari at KLOV, which were then traced and colored in. Very amazing work on this one. We still do not have the instruction sticker that goes with this version of the bezel today; hopefully it will turn up later at some point.

We have a few submissions from UDb23 today. First, he cleaned up the existing bezel instruction card for Choplifter. With that, I remembered an old thread on KLOV that included a partial scan of the bezel from Nondrowsy. From there, I was able to complete the bezel for this one. That same bezel also covers My Hero and Wonderboy. For Wonderboy, I also cleaned up the bezel instruction card, provided by tormod.

Also from UDb23, he cleaned up the Sega cocktail instruction card for Frogger. I wanted to help make that shine a bit more, so I recreated the rest of the components needed, so that the artwork view looks like a real Sega cocktail table from that time.

Robcfg was kind enough to send in a real nice scan of his V.Smile pocket handheld. I cleaned it up a bit more, and the buttons are all clickable in the Artwork View.

More stuff from Comboman's previously completed artwork. He added realistic control panels with the arcade shifter to many driving games. I started with Outrun. He did a great job with finding good pics of a bezel and control panel. From there, I fixed the aspect on the bezel, so that it would be the right size for a 4:3 game, and did some touchups on the control panel to clean things up here and there. The marquee is courtesy of the BYOAC / CAG artwork, with additional touchups by both Comboman and myself. For the flashing start lamp, I liked the version that Nightvoice did, so that is also in there. For the Cabaret view, I also added the map onto a marquee topper that that version of the cabinet came with. This cabinet had a different control panel, though, so no update on that yet.

After doing Outrun, it only made sense to use the same elements for Turbo Outrun, as one of the options back then was to convert an Outrun upright to Turbo Outrun. Just had to change the start button to a green button, along with Nightvoice's flashing lamp to green, and add the Turbo sticker above it. No marquee unfortunately at this time. You want to make sure that in the dipswitch settings, you set the Turbo button option to Start Button, so that it works correctly.

Spy Hunter was next on the list. The CPO comes courtesy of the BYOAC / CAG artwork again, with the rest of the control panel elements from Comboman. After starting on Spy Hunter, though, I noticed a couple things. One... the lamps did not pop like I would like them to. Two... there were mistakes in the bezel that I never caught when we first added Spy Hunter. The bezel mistakes have been fixed, and the lamps look a lot cooler now. I also added the marquee, for both the upright version, and the cockpit version, courtesy of BYOAC / CAG artwork. (both use the same bezel and control panel). As if that was not enough already, during some browsing around, I saw that there was a Spanish version of the bezel artwork. It is not completely perfect, as this was done basically with one photo, but I think it came out pretty good. Made the Start button Spanish also. Was not sure if the CPO would be different or not also, so I have not touched that yet. If anyone else has ever seen a Spanish cabinet, get some pics so that we can confirm.

After that, I started finishing up Turbo. Comboman found a good pic of an upright control panel. I replaced the gearshift handle, added the sticker to it, and added the sticker in the steering wheel. The original artwork file had the tachometer sitting in the bezel area, which was simply incorrect, plus, when I first created that, it was a VERY long time ago, when I was not as good at Photoshop, so that had to be fixed. I redid the whole tachometer, so it is more accurate in regards to font, colors, and geometry. In the real cabinet, the upright simply had the Control Panel, the cockpit version had a different Control Panel with the tachometer built-in, and the gearshift was down near the seat on the left hand side. I took Comboman's existing Control Panel and tweaked it to match as best I could the cockpit version, and from there, setup both the Upright and Cockpit views correctly. And thank you to Nightvoice for setting up the start button lamp in his version, so I could copy the LAY file code from there.

Once Turbo was done, I figured I would add the flashing Start lamp to the other games in the Turbo driver: Subroc 3D and Buck Rogers. That did not work out, though, due to not having source material that I was happy enough with. But in doing so, I now was not happy with the current Subroc artwork. The sight in the middle of the screen was always "off", and I have seen pics of it where it is lit up red. I just cannot find any video of the actual game in action, so not sure how it really appears in game. For now, I changed the sight to the red version, but left the original in the file if necessary for later updates. In regards to the score bezel above the screen, I noticed some things were off when comparing to actual cabinet pics, and as this was one of the artworks that was simply carried over from the old artwork system 16 years ago, I redid the artwork for it, and I think it looks a bit better now.

For one more from Comboman, we have Ripcord, scanned courtesy of TrevEB. Only thing I changed is resizing the ripcord handle to align with the bezel, similar to the real cab.

We have a couple new things from a new contributor, Mr. Retrolust. First, we have bezel artwork for Truxton, redrawn based on existing pics. We also have a different version of the bezel and instruction card for Shadow Dancer.

Many, many years ago, gregf purchased a backdrop for Tornado Baseball and dropped it off at my house for future inclusion in MAME Artwork. I never got around to it, mainly because at that time, I was still teaching myself stuff on how to cleanup artwork well, and was not confident enough yet to tackle the job, so it sat in my garage for a while, but I never forgot about it. As years went by, I finally got to the point where I felt I could do a good job on this one, but I had a new snag; how to get the picture correctly, when in the original cabinet, it had a blacklight on the display, giving it a whole different look. Ended up being simple enough... I went out and bought a good blacklight, one of those long, skinnny ones, like a fluorescent tube. Waited until after sunset, so it was dark outside, set everything up in my bedroom, turned off the hall light, closed the door, turned off the room lights, and it was completely dark. Turned on the blacklight, took a bunch of pics at different angles, and picked the best one. So now Tornado Baseball has backdrop artwork. Double Play uses the same backdrop, just without the stickers for the scoreboard, so that also has artwork. Somewhere down the line, I also picked up a backdrop for Extra Innings, so that also has artwork (hit all the letters in MIDWAY to extend your gameplay). There was still one more Midway baseball game left from that time, but I did not have the backdrop for that one. I tried editing one of the other two backdrops to match, but the end work did not look natural when I was done. Then one day when going through some older pics of stuff, I found that at some point, I had taken a picture of an Extra Bases somewhere. Using color matching in Photoshop with one of the others as reference, the result came out pretty good. Not as good as the other two, but acceptable for the time being. You need to make sure to set your dipswitch to a black and white monitor to use the backdrop artwork correctly.

I have a bunch of stuff from Etienne and other members that frequent the Dragon's Lair Fans website. For today, we have the marquee for Star Wars Trilogy. The game is not completely working at this time, but I love this marquee.

I updated Cheyenne by mistake, forgetting that it was already done the last release.

The View names in the Gameboy file were updated to be the actual names of those color version back when it was released. I am not happy, though, with the current regular Gameboy view, so that is going to be updated next update.

Almost eleven years ago, I first setup artwork for the various Beatmania games. Again, this was back when I was still new at stuff. Long story short, the artwork was setup incorrectly, and has been wrong all this time. smf was kind enough to point out to me some time ago that lamps were done incorrectly. The current artwork, both the left and right lamps flash blue for any keypress. The way it was supposed to be, the left lamp is for Player One, the right lamp is for Player Two. It flashes blue if you hit the note correctly; it flashes red if hit the note incorrectly. The speaker lamps flash based on the rythm of the current song. I had never noticed before he told me that, having never played the game, and still learning at this. Unfortunately, getting good pics of a machine turned into a very long waiting game. Finally, I found an arcade that had a machine in very good shape, and I was able to take good pictures at. The artwork for all games looks WAY better than before, and works correctly. The marquee between the speakers is still faked, using the title screen as a basis, but I put more work into them this time, so they look closer to the actual marquees than the previous versions. All existing artwork has been updated, and we now have artwork for the games where it has been missing for some time: 7th MIX, Club MIX, and THE FINAL. I also put the artwork for the two hiphopmania games in their own file.

In working to finish up replacing the remaining files from the old MESS artwork page, we are ever so close; we are down to thirteen after this update. I moved over the existing artwork for mdndclab as-is, originally done by Bad A Billy. Updated the computer artwork for trs80 and pro128. Also updated the artwork for mac128k and macplus, but I guess these drivers do not currently work, so hey, at least the artwork is now there for when it does. Updated the four Sharp Pocket Computers; all four also have working clickable artwork. Tomytronic Tron has a fresh artwork file also. Also, for the Thomson computers that are currently done, I added back in the old artwork, reason being that the author of the MAME driver is the one who specifically created that artwork, and I am assuming it was for good reason he wanted it. No reason to throw it out just because the new one is "shinier," so it is back in as an option. When we update the remaining Thomson computers, same thought process will hold.

On the console side of things, first we have artwork for Sega Game Gear. The site where the original rendered file was hosted is no longer around, or available on archive.org. From there, SteelTigers adapted it and finshed it up into fantastic artwork, along with four alternate color variations. All buttons are also clickable in the artwork.

We have more Gameboy artwork, based on the work by BLUEamnesiac over at DeviantArt. As I was adding in the artwork, I noticed little things that I had not seen the first time around, so I had to spend a good bit of time fixing things for each version. For the Gameboy Pocket, the fonts for Select, Start, A, B, ON, OFF have been corrected, the GAME BOY pocket logo has been corrected, and the font and graphics for POWER have been corrected. For the Gameboy Light, corrected the fonts for Select, Start, and the On/Off switch, plus fixed the orientation of the Select and Start buttons and the Nintendo logo, along with the POWER font and graphics. For the Gameboy Color, fixed the font for Select, Start, and COMM, the size of the Nintendo logo, and the POWER font and graphics.

In total, there are eleven variations of Gameboy Pocket, three of Gameboy Light, and seven of Gameboy Color. As I wanted to add something special, I also added in a special edition of each Gameboy type. For the Pocket, I added the Hello Kitty version. For Light, I added the Pokemon Center Tokyo version. For Color, I added the Pokemon version with Jigglypuff and Togepi. Trivia note: the colors in the C-O-L-O-R part of the Gameboy COLOR logo are the five colors that the handheld was first released as.

The Gameboy Light has a color overlay to try and match the effect of what the screen looks like with the light on, based on various pics and videos that I could find. As there is no separate file for the Gameboy Light at this time, that artwork is built-in to the Gameboy Pocket artwork file.

That is it for today... I was hoping to have the Gameboy Advance done along with the other three, but the things that need to be fixed in that one are going to take a bit more work. I have reached out to someone who at one point had a bunch of GBA stuff done for another area of the internet, but things happened, and it never got released. I am hoping he answers back and will have second thoughts. Also hoping to have the old MESS Artwork remaining to be zero by next release. Vectrex will be done if I ever get that last missing piece (hint hint). See you soon.