cocktail question

[Donkbaca]

Okay, there is the classic 2 player cocktail where on player sits at one end and the other player sits at the other end and the screen flips.  And I have seen Mame cocktails that add a CP on the longside to play horizontal games.  My question is this:

Is it possible to mount a screen vertically and then cut it in two so that the top half mirrors the bottom half?  That way, if you  played say, street fighter, one person could be at one end, and the other could be at the other end, there would be two images of  the screen?

[Nephasth]

Don't know, but if you made a cocktail long enough (or wide enough depending on how you look at it), you could mount two monitors horizontally displaying the same image to each player on each end.

[opt2not]

Is it possible to mount a screen vertically and then cut it in two so that the top half mirrors the bottom half?  That way, if you  played say, street fighter, one person could be at one end, and the other could be at the other end, there would be two images of  the screen?

Yes. I believe it's called Cocktail Mode in the mame display settings (not to be confused with the Cocktail setting for the rom's dipswitch setting) . It does exactly what you've described.

[SavannahLion]

Yes.... sort of.... I don't know.....

There is Splitview that virtually "splits" a monitor but IMHO, it's just a glorified $29 API call to rearrange your windows which also happens to add some custom title bar buttons.

I had a Linux install that made this concept easy-peasy to do. Almost to the point that it was ridiculous. Oddly enough, none of my later Linux boxes sport this feature. Maybe I just never installed the Graphics UI that supported or it was dropped in later revisions of the software I used. 


Then there's GridMode (and nVidia's Grid) that can split a screen up into predefined grids.

Wow.... this sounds like a really interesting code project for someone to take on.
edit: put it back

[Donkbaca]

no. cocktail mode just flips the image, it does not display two images at the same time, and its only for a few games.

2 monitors would look like 2 monitors.  I want to know if its possible to do one monitor and have it be a big screen for your old classic vertical mounted games, and then if you play horizontal games, it would cut in half and mirror so that you can have one player at each end.

[opt2not]

Hmm, I might be wrong in the name of the setting. But it is definitely possible. I've seen it done on a friend's cocktail cabinet, where his gamelist UI was displayed regularly on the vertical setup (facing P1) but the horizontal games were split in two for both players when loaded.

I was sure it was a mame setting...


*edit: Just did a quick Google search for you, took me 10 seconds to find this page:
http://blog.patshead.com/2010/12/cocktail-arcade-cabinet-build-part-9---the-computer-hardware-and-software.html

Looks like he used SDLMess/SDLMame's advanced cocktail setting. On his last page, there's a video where half way through he loads up a horizontal game (Clu Clu Land) that splits the monitor in half for both to view.

[SavannahLion]

opt2not is absolutely correct. I downloaded 141 and the option is definitely in there and it behaves exactly as the OP desires. Calling it cocktail is probably a little misleading though. If I saw that without seeing this conversation, I would have thought it enabled the cocktail switch (eg, flip for player 2) for the games. Not split the monitor and flip the second image.

I'm not sure what happens if you use a cocktail game with the cocktail DIP set then use the cocktail mode in MAME. Do you still get a split screen?

I usually run 111 and haven't bothered to update to the latest (too much hassle really).

[Donkbaca]

cool, so you are saying I can play, say street fighter via cocktail mode and have each player sit at the opposite end of the table!  That would be sweet.  I'll have to try that when I get home

[opt2not]

Hah!  I tell ya, my brain's like a steel trap!  They should definitely change the name though...Split Mode would probably be a better label.

[Donkbaca]

you guys have made me so happy!