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optimizing display settings for tv
severdhed:
I have a 27 inch tv in my cab connected via component video, the picture looks fine, however I get small black bars on either side of the picture, probably about 3/4 of an inch thick. It also seems as if the top and bottom are cit off slightly, not just in mame, but at the xp desktop as well. Any ideas? I looked through the tv menu, but couldn't find any adjustments. The playstation looks just finegoing through the same component input.
RayB:
Those kinds of adjustments are usually hidden in what's called a "service menu". Just Google your specific make and model # for this menu. It usually requires a series of button pushes on the tv and/or remote control to bring up the secret menu.
Ginsu Victim:
Your video card software should let you adjust it.
MonMotha:
TVs actually draw video beyond the edge of the area you can see in order to ensure that the picture fills the entire screen and to hide minor (or sometimes major) imperfections in the edge geometry. This is called "overscan" and the amount is typically 10-20% of the picture being off the screen (so quite a lot).
What your PC is doing is actually resizing the video to be smaller and placing it inside a black box. Since PC graphics are always assumed to have no overscan (the image is adjusted to go right up to the edge of the monitor and no further), the edges of your screen would be cut off if this were not done when outputting to a TV. This is colloquially referred to as "underscan" by way of being the opposite of overscan. Unfortunately, since the range of overscan on TVs varies so widely, the defaults for the underscan on PCs have to be pretty conservative resulting in visible black bars around the picture.
Most PC graphics drivers have an option to adjust the amount of underscan/overscan. You can often just grab a slider and drag it until the image fills your entire TV screen without cutting anything off. Easy peasy.
The best picture is attained by setting the control to "full overscan" as this results in the least amount of scaling (down) of the PC graphics. Unfortunately, this will chop off the edges of your display. It is sometimes possible to adjust the TV's geometry to remove the overscan in service mode, but it's often a pain in the butt, and if you mess up, you can render your TV pretty well broken.
releasedtruth:
I use a 25" TV via component as well and to reduce overscan I used powerstrip to set my resolution to 640x432 which produced a perfect fit when using MAME and various front ends. Might want to give powerstrip a try.