Attract-Mode Plug-in: Now Loading

NOW LOADING is a plug-in for attract mode that was born of necessity.  I was having an issue with my newly built MAME PC rig oddly “freezing” right at selection before going to a black screen.  Even using the fadetogame plugin,  for whatever reason,  with my video card plus CRTEmudriver plus Attract-Mode,  at selection it would simply freeze the screen for a few seconds then load GroovyMAME.  It didn’t look very nice in my opinion… so I figured that if I could install some sort of “Now Loading” screen… at least it would look nicer than just the layout screen … frozen.   I figured adding such a screen would be a no-brainer.  Frankly,  I figured the functionality was already implemented,  I just needed to enable it (my experience with Attract-Mode prior to building this PC was with the ARpiCADE… and that system has a launcher in place that,  evidently,  handles the “NOW LOADING” screens for that platform).  I was wrong.  I found that there was no “Now Loading” screen functionality in stock attract-mode… and,  to my surprise,  there was no plugin for it either.

My searches turned up primarily discussion of a dynamic loading screen that could change with the emulator … and some vague discussion about how Rocket Launcher could be used to create a static Now Loading screen… but that was about it.  I then started poking around to see if I could build something and I came across a bit of code I had saved months ago… and for the life of me,  I can’t figure out where I got it from.  If this is your code… PLEASE LET ME KNOW so I can give credit where credit is due.  All I did create many of the loading screens… package it up in to a plug-ing… and add the ability to choose which screen you prefer (I also managed to figure out how to unbreak the intro animation that the original code broke).

To use this plug-in,  simply unzip the NOW LOADING folder in to your plugins folder… go in to the plugins settings screen inside Attract-Mode and Enable the plugin.  You can choose one of 20 different loading screens or you can change them out to your own.  Currently the plugin is setup stock @ 640×480 as all the images are that size and all my layouts are geared toward arcade cabinets and are created at that size.

You can EASILY change that to whatever resolution your front-end runs at by going in to the plugin.nut file (use NOTEPAD++)… you will see each NOW LOADING skin option includes this line:

local screen_now_loading = fe.add_image(“GameLoading1.png”, (fe.layout.width – 640)/2, (fe.layout.height – 480)/2, 0, 0);

Simply change the “GameLoading1.png” file name to whatever you wish and (obviously) the size of that image should be reflected in the line where it currently reads “640” and”480″…

YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THIS PLUG-IN HERE!

You can see this plug-in in action here…

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