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wn2000 edited this page Jun 14, 2021 · 3 revisions

One saUCE Customization FAQ:

First of all, I'd like to say that the amount of customization you can do to this build is to the maximum extent allowed by RetroFE the software itself. Everything is on the USB, everything can be changed, and nothing is locked down. To get a good understanding of what RetrFE is capable of doing, please refer to the official documentation at http://www.retrofe.nl/wiki/doku.php . However, as the software used in this build contains certain customizations and features not found in the official source code, please communicate any bugs found to the builder first.Now some popular customizations:

How do I add more games?

The short answer is that you just put the romset (.zip file) in retrofe\collections\MAME\roms folder. And it'll show up in the game selection menu.

Whether it'll show up in a pretty form or not, depends on whether there're matching artworks for it. The way RetroFE looks for artwork for a particular title is in this order:

  • First look for an exact match to the rom file name itself (e.g., "1941u.png").

  • If that was not found, try to match the full title (e.g., "1941: Counter Attack (USA 900227).png").

  • If not found, look in the database to see if the game is a clone of another title, and see if there's a match using the original title's file name. For example, "1941u" is a clone of "1941", so if there is a "1941.png" at this point, it will be used.

  • If still not found, check to see if we have an artwork named "default" (e.g., "default.png"). This is mostly useful for marquees, front covers, preview videos, so that a generic artwork can be shown if a good match cannot be found.

So there's a good chance that the newly added games have artworks available already. If not, you can add your artworks to the corresponding folders in retrofe\collections\MAME\medium_artwork\.

As you can see there are quite a lot of folders there. The good news is that not all of them are needed by each theme. The "CoinOPS" theme uses the following folders:

  • artwork_front
  • logo
  • marquee
  • video

The "LUNA" theme uses the following folders:

  • artwork_front_s (These are down-sized pictures of those in artwork_front, for performance improvement.)
  • logo
  • video
  • story

The "bezel" folder is used by the emulator itself in game play.

How do I remove games?

Simply remove the romsets in retrofe\collections\MAME\roms and they'll disappear from the menu. You can also remove the corresponding artworks to free up more space, but that's optional.

I see some games are in a wrong category, or I want to add a game to a particular category, how can I do that?

Let's go by an example.

So I found that "NBA Hang Time" is in the "Sports" genre, but "NBA Maximum Hang Time" is not. I then opened the file "retrofe\collections\8 Sports\MAME.sub", which is a plain text file, and yes "nbahangt" is in it but "nbamaxht" is not. So all I need to do is to add "nbamaxht" to the list, and voila it shows up in the "Sports" category.

The folder "retrofe\collections" contains all collections defined in this build. The "MAME" collection is the parent collection that actually contains all arcade games. All other collections are sub-collections to MAME, and the content of each sub-collection is defined in the "MAME.sub" file found in each of those folders.

The sub-collection mechanism can actually do more than that. Like you can pull games from several different collections to make "my collection". For a thorough explanation on how collections work in RetroFE, see http://www.retrofe.nl/wiki/doku.php?id=collections .

I actually don't need the categories...How do I go straight into "All Games"?

The "All Games" collection is defined by the folder "retrofe\collections\02 ARCADE ALL". Like other collections, it is also a sub-collection of "MAME", that happens to contain all games from its parent collection (an empty MAME.sub file means all titles from MAME). So to go straight into this collection, you just need to tell RetroFE that you want to start from there. Here are the steps:

Open retrofe\settings.conf, find the line firstCollection = Main then change it to firstCollection = 02 ARCADE ALL

Copy the file "retrofe\layouts\CoinOPS\collections\02 ARCADE ALL\layout\layout.xml" to "retrofe\layouts\CoinOPS\layout.xml" and overwrite the destination file (make a backup first if you want).

The first step is to tell RetroFE to start from the "All Games" collection. The second step is to make the theme to match.

Now it is worth to mention the "playlist" feature. A playlist is another form of sub-collection within a collection. In "All Games", there are the following predefined playlists:

  • Favorites (for this one you can add/remove titles using button Y/B)
  • Buttons
  • Dual Stick
  • Lightgun
  • Mouse
  • Spinner
  • Trackball

That is, play lists by control types. They can be looped through by pressing the "X" button while inside "All Games". These lists are defined by text files in the "retrofe\collections\02 ARCADE ALL\playlists" folder. Have a look at them to see the basic formats. For a thorough explanation of playlists, refer to the official documentation at: http://www.retrofe.nl/wiki/doku.php?id=collections#playlists

You can add an unlimited number of your own playlists. For example, playlists by genres, by manufacturers, by number of players, by year published, and so on. So essentially all categories provided by the multi-level menu structure in this build can also be implemented by playlists instead. There are fewer graphical effects associated with playlists, so it won't be as fancy. But if you are a "minimalist" who prefers functionality over fancy animations, using playlists is a good choice.

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