QMC2 scanlines

**nll** · July 16th, 2012

Hey, I'm trying to get QMC2 to play games with scanlines by going to tools>options>emulator>global settings>video>effect and choosing one of the attached pngs which I got from a MAME forum, but none of them is working. The only video settings I changed from the default were unchecking keepaspect and trading soft for opengl.

Does anyone know what could be going on?

**nll** · July 27th, 2012

Well, did anyone at least have had success with another MAME frontend?

**nll** · August 4th, 2012

I found out what the problem was! =)

For some reason, MAME can't get a full path to a effect file, just the name of the file when it's on /usr/local/share/games/mame/artwork. This is what I get in the commmand line:

Code:

nll@nll:~$ /usr/games/mame -rompath "/home/nll/.Roms/MAME" -gl_glsl -video opengl -nokeepaspect -effect /usr/local/share/games/mame/artwork/Scanlines25x4.png mvsc
Unable to load effect PNG file '/usr/local/share/games/mame/artwork/Scanlines25x4.png'

I can only get overlay effects when I run the game with this command:

Code:

nll@nll:~$ /usr/games/mame -rompath "/home/nll/.Roms/MAME" -gl_glsl -video opengl -nokeepaspect -effect Scanlines25x4.png mvsc

So, as a temporary workaround, we can get QMC2's output, fix the effect name and run it in the terminal. (Edit: I tried adding just Scanlines25x4 instead of /usr/local/share/games/mame/artwork/Scanlines25x4.png in the QMC2 effect options and it worked too, so there's no need for terminals if we just copy the overlay pngs to the right folder. =])

It looks like a bug. I'll see where I can report it.

(And yes, I do own an original mvsc arcade. ;D)

**nll** · August 4th, 2012

While I was looking for a solution for this problem, I also found out about GLSL CRT shaders. In case anyone is interested in them, here's what I done.

1- Get the latest version of cgwg's shader called CRT-geom-20120130.zip here and unzip it in ~/.mame/CRT.
2- Get MAME's source for your version from http://mamedev.org/, unzip it and copy the contents of mame/src/osd/sdl/shader folder in ~/.mame/CRT/shader.
3- In QMC2's global settings tab in Emulator options, check gl_glsl and gl_glsl_filter, and add /home/username/.mame/CRT/shader/glsl_plain to glsl_shader_mame0 and /home/username/.mame/CRT/CRT-geom to glsl_shader_mame1.

(Thanks to eldiau for the hint.)

The best thing about this is that cwgw's shader is highly customizable. There's a very detailed guide to customizing it here. The only problem with it is it's very cpu intensive. I have an Intel HD3000 and an Nvidia GT520M, and neither GPU could run higher than 70 %. I also couldn't run any CPS-1 and CPS-2 games, just CPS-3 and Neo Geo You'll need a very powerfull GPU to play games using this shader.