Horizontal games on a vertical monitor

[mgb]

guys have always talked about playing vertical games on their horizontal monitors but I gotta be difficult and go backwards.

My cab is vertical with a 27" multisync monitor. I'm mostly interested in haveing the vertical games on it but there are a few horiz games I still wanna play and with a 27" monitor, they won't be a bad size.

I know I have to do some experimenting with resolutions but I was curious if anyone has had some experience with this and give me some tips.
I know the guy who built the deep six cabinet had done this but his writeup (on another site) just said that he took advantage of the mame overlay function in order to get artwork to fill in the areas below and above the game.

any help would be appreciated

[VanillaGorilla]

There was a Killer Instinct cab on this site that did exactly that with a 27" monitor.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=97260.msg1136079#msg1136079

 What do you mean by a 'bad' size. Im guessing that you will get an image as large as will comfortably fit on you screen, wit a large black void above and below your image. Make sure to turn off resolution stretching in your ini file, you dont want to change the aspect ratio of your screnn active area. You can then turn on bezel graphics (for the games that you have graphics for, if you dont have graphics see mr. do's site on the mameworld forums) and display them in cropped format, and you will get a nice fill-in above and below the screen area. With a monitor as large as yours, you should get great horizontal gameplay, with no real sacrifice in screen size (at least with the  older games).

[Malenko]

My KI2 cab (you linked to) has a 32" CRT in it, horizontal games are about 24 1/2". Using rough math a 27" Vert should yield about 20 3/4" horizontal display, so slightly bigger then a 19" horizontal

[mgb]

Yeah I figured I'd get around 19" horizontals.
It'll be mostly for older games such as Ghouls and Ghosts and then maybe some other emulation like Jumpman on C64 (I gotta have my Jumpman)

[mgb]

I'm using an arcadevga card. any ideas on what to do with the resolutions. I've fired some games up and there just a bit off and I can adjust for them but some games won't launch and Mala just kicks back to the main screen but all messed up looking.

[mgb]

I messed around with the resolution .ini for Metalslug and no matter what, it wouldn't load. I would select the game from Mala and it would appear to be loading but then it would kick back to Mala but the screen would be squished up.
It finally worked when I selected for hardware stretch to be applied (within Mslug.ini)

[mgb]

Actually what I've found seems to work well for the horizontal games is setting the resolution for 640x288 with hardware stretch on in each horizontal game's .ini

[Paladin]

Actually what I've found seems to work well for the horizontal games is setting the resolution for 640x288 with hardware stretch on in each horizontal game's .ini

That's exactly what I did several years ago when I had a Dynamo cabinet with 25" vertical standard res monitor.
I haven't messed with MAME for some time, so now I'm trying the same thing with my Blast City cab that has a 29" tri sync monitor.  The horizontal games and front ends are all jumpy, and I can't figure out why it's different than the old Dynamo was. 
Doing some web searching I found that there's a tri sync utility on the Ultimarc site that allows 640x480 non interlace 31k for tri res monitors.  I'll be trying it out, and with luck I'll be able to get horizontal games going.

[bitbytebit]

To get the exact resolution without stretching for a game, this is the basic formula (which is really the same as the vertical game on a horizontal monitor formula, but you technically using the games width in one and height in the other).  You basically want the resolution height to be as the original horizontal games width, and the height to be the correct proportion to that (3:4, since your reversing the monitor aspect)

resolution_width = game_width * (4.0/3.0) / (3.0/4.0)

Example here for mario...

# Horizontal monitor resolution:
# mario 400x256@56.88 15.7000Khz
   ModeLine          "400x256x56.88" 8.164000 400 416 456 520 256 257 260 276 -HSync -VSync

# Vertical monitor resolution
# mario 400x256@59.19 16.5128Khz
   ModeLine          "400x256x59.19" 8.586647 400 424 464 520 256 259 262 279 -HSync -VSync


Without any stretching or aspect ratio control, the second resolution will display it nicely on a vertical oriented monitor.

In Mame you may need to change the rotate settings too for getting it the right direction, basically -rotate and -rol seem good to add to mame.


This is what I've come up with in my switchres program and it seems to work good in testing here on my monitor, with the help of Calamity he's come up with the basic formula which is great for both vertical and horizontal games.  You can change the 3:4 (which is always the opposite of your desired monitor aspect ratio, like 4:3) to things like 9:16 for an HDTV wide screen, or 3:3 if you want a more square picture, or 5:7 for a slightly taller game (or wider if it's a horizontal monitor with a vertical game).  It's just thinking opposite of your normal vertical on horizontal monitor calculations. 

Hopefully that information helps someone, was interesting when getting this feature working in switchres to see how the calculation actually worked to avoid any stretching.

[mgb]

Bitbytebit,
 Thanks for the info. Thats the kinda info I was looking for.

[NOP]

Jumpman on C64 (I gotta have my Jumpman)

yay!  jumpman.

I had mine on the IBM PCjr.  I loved that game so much that I reverse engineered the entire game back to assembly language and updated it so it would run in DOS and on any speed CPU.  I probably spent as much time with the source code as I did playing it when I was a kid.
http://www.oldskool.org/pc/jumpman

Sorry about the thread hijack, but I had to jump on a jumpman posting!

[mgb]

No problem,
Its good to hear from a fellow Jumpman fan.
I used to play it everyday at my friends when I was a kid.
I know it was somewhat of a copy of and inspired by Donkey Kong, but man I'd rather play Jumpman.
Right now I'm just getting my Jumpman fix by playing Jumpman Jr. on my Dreamcast through a Colecovision emulator