4 Player Setup Help

[skeletroll]

Hi all.

I am trying to use the arpicade with the 4 player attachment on my setup.

I seem to be having issue after issue. First, no matter which 4 player arcade roms I use or which version of mame I place them into, I can't get any to show up on the boot screen.

All I see is pacman with the words 'all games'. And when I 'A', it just flashes for a second then resumes showing no games. My roms are tested and work on other retropi systems in my home.

Additionally, the tracking is really bad and there is a green bar artifact to the right. Normally, I would use the knobs on the back of the arcade crt for vertical hold and whatnot. However, this is a multigame cabinet with a jamma swicher. And the current vertical hold works for everything except the arpicade. What can I do about this?

To sum it up, my questions are-
Why don't my roms appear on boot?
Can I change vertical hold and other screen image settings in software? If not, is there a product I can buy to allow this that sits on the jamma edge, or to break out the vertical hold from the back of the crt at least?
Is there a known working .img file for a 4 player setup? It is ok if its outdated or something, I just need to eliminate some of the potential sources of error.

Thanks in advance! Please let me know if pics or any settings screenshots are required.

[dee2eR]

You didn't mention which version of ARpiCADE you have but hopefully any of this helps:

Roms should be scanned automatically at startup, unless you (or someone else) have disabled that in run.sh. Where are you putting the roms?

Not sure what you mean by the tracking is bad... If the default low res settings seem a bit shakey I'd try the "240p only" setting from the service menu as it's likely just how your monitor handles interlacing.

For the vert hold and other boards it's hard to say, you may find there's a very tiny range of setting on the hold knob that makes everything work nicely together. Some monitor chassis have the controls on a smaller board intended to be remote mounted conveniently, unfortunately some don't. I've never heard of an inline with the vidoe signal product to reproduce those sort of monitor controls, likely if they exist they have a negetive effect on picture quality.

[skeletroll]

Thanks for the reply

You didn't mention which version of ARpiCADE you have but hopefully any of this helps:

Arpicade version is the newest stable version from the website, which is 3.7.

Not sure what you mean by the tracking is bad... If the default low res settings seem a bit shakey I'd try the "240p only" setting from the service menu as it's likely just how your monitor handles interlacing.

For the vert hold and other boards it's hard to say, you may find there's a very tiny range of setting on the hold knob that makes everything work nicely together. Some monitor chassis have the controls on a smaller board intended to be remote mounted conveniently, unfortunately some don't. I've never heard of an inline with the vidoe signal product to reproduce those sort of monitor controls, likely if they exist they have a negetive effect on picture quality.

Noted. I did other research as well and it looks like very few chassis have a remote or easy way to breakout such a control. I will try your recommendation of finding the 'sweet spot' between all pcbs on the switcher. If that doesn't help, I can break out the vertical hold pot to be under the control panel or at least more accessible somehow.

Shakiness probably is a sync issue which would also hopefully be fixed by playing with resolution. Overall, these clues are all telling me that it is my arcade tube that is causing this stuff.

Roms should be scanned automatically at startup, unless you (or someone else) have disabled that in run.sh. Where are you putting the roms?

They are in the directories recommended in the guides in the /roms/emufoldername, such as /roms/mame-181.

Plot twist - I got the roms to show up by exiting attract mode with 'esc' on a keyboard. Why would this be the case? is there a way to turn attract mode off and always boot to a list of roms with the basic UI instead of the pacman thing? Does this question even make sense, or am I misunderstanding what attract mode does?

Cheers

[skeletroll]

After further tinkering, manually generating the gamelist.xml for each emulator of interest finally got things to show up.