Experienced w/emulation but new to Arpicade/Pi. Some noob questions.

[Mackdaddi]

Hi all, first post here but I’ve been lurking & learning for a few months.

I’m experienced with roms & emulation generally but am new to Pi emulation and arpicade. I’ve been configing my first raspberrry jamma setup for the last while and i’ve figured most things out with some direct help from dee2er (thanks man) but a few things are still stumping me. Any help appreciated.

1-I’m using a full Mame 0.106 romset and advance mame, and arpicade 3.8. Upgrading from scratch isn’t realistic given the config work I’ve put in at this point but I’m having difficulty getting anything to run in any other emulator than advmamame. I’ve dropped some roms into the other rom folders and re-run the startup scans and regenerated the “all games” list, but I can’t even get the additional roms to show up in the allgames list or anywhere else. What could I be missing? I’m thinking something like a menu somewhere to display/activate/show some other emulator content?
My image wasn’t a fresh install. I borrowed an image from a friend and tweaked it, so I’m also looking for any setting I may have missed on displaying or activating the other emus?
Either that or its a rom issue but I doubt that. I can’t even get any roms outside of advmame to show up. (I’m using the nevato theme/layout in case it’s relevant).

2-Also, is there a simple way to see which emulator is running which rom, for checking for the roms I’m trying to get to show up? Is there an easy way to set this per rom? Specifically I’m trying to get Street fighter 3-Third strike (SFIII3 no cd Japanese version) to run, and I can’t even get to see it outside of advmame.

3-I’m pretty new to Linux and to configing the pi at command line level and it’s not my strong area. Is there any simple or GUI based option to get into the cfg files for advmame or the other emulators to change options? I can’t seem to find them anywhere in the file structure on the SD. Specifically I’d like to tweak a few options in advmame like dialing down the pause brightness to about 60%, and one or two other bits and pieces and I can’t see any way to do it easily. I’d also need to do this in any other emus I’m using to have the experience match across all games.

4-is there a standard repository for sound files to be used for the interface noises, clicks, game select noises etc in attract mode? I’d like to set up some GUI noises and I don’t seem to see any way to do it easily. Are there sounds already available in the front end as I can’t find any. I can see where I set them in attract mode but there are no options for sounds to choose from in the dropdown menu. Also how do I take a screenshot? What’s the command in-game and is that automatically set as the game screenshot/attract snap for that rom when one doesn’t already exist? Again, I’m using the Nevato layout for attract mode in case it’s relevant.

5-One last weird issue with attract mode. I’ve set the front end to NOT play sound on any videos, which it does, but on loading and then exiting the game later the sound on the video is again full volume. I’ve tried every setting in attract mode and in the layout, and at this point I’m ready to export and re-render the video snaps to just remove their sound entirely. That’s less than ideal. If it’s a bug it’s a bug, but if there’s anything I’m missing that’s simple it’d be great to know.

Thanks for any pointers on any of the above. It’s been a challenging config but I’m 95% done. It’s a street fighter 2 champion edition cab build converted from a late 1990’s poker cabinet. Am nearly there and am looking forward to just playing it at this point, so am grateful for any help on the last few bits and pieces.

[dee2eR]

1. not sure whats going wrong here. Unfortunately you're on a more than 2 year old version of ARpiCADE so looking into isn't really practical. The rom scanner has been overhauled multiple times since 3.8 came out.

2. press 'e' on a keyboard while whatever game you're curious about is highlighted in the menu. (Assuming this feature wasn't added to Attract-Mode later than the 3.8 release) The edit menu that pops up should tell you all you need to know. CPS3 stuff should work great in FBA, I suspect you will need newer roms than the AdvMAME ones though.

3. not really. You could use the Midnight Commander file browser from the service menu to do it, I guess. From the command line

nano ~/.advance/advmame.rc

is your basic format. Nano is the text editor, the rest is path (absolute or relative should work) and file info for the file you want to edit. 'Ctrl+x' then 'y' to exit and save when finished. Type

sudo reboot

when you're finished editing to reboot, which will also make sue the changes are written to the SD card. Be careful, making mistakes in config files will cause things to stop working.

4. I'm not sure, sorry. Probably no sounds included as I tend to remove large files that aren't useful for space reasons. No reason you can't add your own though.

5. I'm guessing this is to do with your older software. I set Attract-Mode to not use video sounds and didn't see any issue on the current software.

[Mackdaddi]

OK, thanks for the tips dee2er. Much appreciated