Scart TV native resolutions in full screen

[rjpe]

Hi all,

Finally got a 28'' TV that works / syncs the original resolutions with soft15KHz and AVGA! (Crown ACTV 7298). 
It cost me 50€ in a local on-line auction, it has 3 years old and the image is great.

Besides frogger (it syncs in a very high resolution, have to check why), all games display those beautiful scanlines, and the games look authentic... but... none of them fits correctly in full screen.
I can choose one resolution, arrange the geometry and so, but I will still have problems on all the others.

For instance:
- bubble bobble, double dragon and black tiger look too thin (like a vertical game) - horizontal black stripes;
- golden axe has 1 inch black frame around it;
- indiana jones and Pang don't fit the screen (overscan);

maybe the ones that look better are marvel super heroes and ghouls n ghosts.

My question is: is there a way of making all the resolutions fit the screen? 
I suspect that the only way is with hardware strecth... but I must check with the best experts 

 

[Jack Burton]

The reason why different games fill different parts of the screen is because MAME is selecting different resolutions depending on the game.  Sometimes MAME will pick a resolution from your available ones that is the nearest neighbor to its native one and there will be a little bit of black space around the sides where there was extra resolution left over.  The most common example of this is going to be when you choose a 224 line game and MAME picks a 240 line resolution.

In other cases MAME may be able to match the number of lines exactly.  In this case you can expect the image to go beyond the bezel of your screen because commercial televisions were not designed to show every last line of resolution within the image like a computer monitor did.  They usually cut off 10 lines or so.  Those lines are there but they're hidden behind the plastic shroud of your tv.

In order to remedy this problem your best option is to mess around a bit with AdvanceMAME and the ADVV configuration utility that comes with it.  With this you manually adjust the signal that will be sent to your tv to make it fit the screen.  Keep in mind this affects the signal only, not the image and if done correctly will maintain native modes. 

[rjpe]

Jack,

You are talking about the linux version, or the windows version will also do?
It's a petty the project stopped, I thought about going linux with advancemame, but some new roms changed my mind.

Maybe the new distro (http://arcade.groovy.org/) will have a similar utilty?

[Jack Burton]

The windows version will be fine. 

Advancemame may not be updated frequently these days, but it's still an invaluable tool.

When you create and edit a resolution in advv it's possible to open the configurationfile advmame.cfg and copy the modelines into a custom configuration file in soft 15khz.

So you can use advmame to find what settings fit your screen for the resolutions you need, and then copy those resolutions into soft 15khz and use them with any emulator.