From the manual under section 3.5 :How to create and assign skins;
animated bitmap cycling:
Because the main use is to create the illusion of attractmodes on all cabs in cylarcade and fpsarcade these are setup in
arcade cfg files. But they can also be used to cycle between bitmaps on the screenshot sprite and the flyer sprite. (Flyer sprite cycling currently works only in the listbox menutype.)
...
overlays and backdrops:
These options are setup in the arcade cfg files and not in the skinner as they refer to what is shown in the 3dsprite itself. There are two layers of overlays and two layers of backdrops.
Each can show bitmaps, bitmap cycles, video's and animated textures. The first overlay and backdrop when used have some special additional features.
The first overlay is created from a snaphot of the background bitmap behind the 3d sprite. When the background bitmap has no transparency the 3d sprite will seem to disappear but when the background has transparency the 3d sprite will appear to show behind the background. Especially useful to get rid of the rectangle borders of the 3d sprite.
The first backdrop will take a snapshot of the stage behind the 3d sprite, giving the effect that you can see through the 3d sprite resulting for example in the ability to let the 3d sprite hover above the background.
There are a lot of possibilities for each overlay and backdrop. To make it easier to use I already did setup some useful defaults that can be turned on and off by setting the first field either to true or false for each overlay and backdrop.
These are the options for each overlay and backdrop:
overlayfpsarcade|add this overlay=true,don't =false/blend/renderformat/video,foreanim,backanim or false/options/bitmapsprite/options/bitmappath/options|
The fe will first try to show a video or animated texture setup in field 4. If none is found or set to false the fe will then try to show the current bitmap from either the marquees, screenshot or flyer sprite setup in field 6. If not found or set to false it will try to find bitmaps from the pathname setup in field 8 that refers to a path setup in emulator cfg files. Either one of the existing paths like flyers, sshot or a custom path defined by the user. Ahum I went nuts here...almost anything can be done
Renderformat in field 3 refers to how the overlays and backdrops will be rendered. By default 16bit colordepth and a 1bit alpha chanel will be used. For a full alpha chanell set this field to rgba8888. Foreanim and backanim refer to animated textures created from a set of bitmaps and stored in arcade\arcanimtextures. These are the same as used on environment models.
To create them just put a set of bitmaps in an empty folder and use the option in the cfg utility to automatically create the animated texture. The options in field 5 are /
(file to use:name.cst),(pause animation while moving through the list=pause or don't pause=play),(animation update frequency in milliseconds)/ for example /driesmamelogo.cst,pause,100/
So it can be done. I'll play around some more and see what I can come up with....