Going insane - arcade monitor and sides of screen.

[hayaeti]

Hi guys. 

Quick backstory.  Had a power outage and my old mame machine died.
Got a new one put together and tried using one of the ArcadeVGA 3000 cards but wasn't quite happy.
Decided to go get a old radeon and use the calamity drivers and arcade monitor (which is either a D9200 or D9800)

Everything seemed to go well, but I have one of two problems... (which only seem to come into play with CPS2-esque res games.
With one set monitor spec settings I load up final fight and I see this...



with another I get the whole screen and everything looks PERFECT.... until I start playing and walk from left to right.

The moment the screen starts scrolling I am noticing that the sides are fatter than the middle of the screen and things stretch as I move, it makes everything look very funky! (and not in a good way)

What can I do to fix this?  this is with using '-nohwstretch' as if I don't use that, it all fits on the screen perfect but looks horrible.

tldr:  when I scroll, the sides of the screen stretch out and make the sprites bigger.

This wasn't a problem with my old pc hooked up to the same monitor with the original AGP arcadevga.  So I would like to think I could get this working.  At the moment I'm stuck with a perfect picture with no sides, or full screen with stretchy sides.


The problem isn't so much what's in the picture, but I figured I'd explain both my issues.  The one in the picture can be fixed by using different monitor spec lines as provided on this site, but how do I fix the stretchy-sides as it scrolls?  if I could fix this, my machine would be complete!

[Calamity]

Hi hayaeti,

It sounds strange to me that a modeline could cause stretching on the sides of the monitor. Anyway, before we go any further, launch Arcade_OSD and set the resolution 384 x 224 @ 60 to full screen. You'll see a grid in the background, check if you notice the stretching here too.

[hayaeti]

Hi Calamity, thanks for the quick reply.  Unfortunately when I go into arcade_osd I can't find that resolution.

The closest I can find is 288 x 260 60vfreq 59.993hz 15.718khz
When I open that up, it looks fine, and when I manually change the y res to 244 it looks fine too.

I think it has something to do with the frequency? when I bring up my montors osd while playing final fight it says 17.8/59hz, which is what I think Final Fight is meant to be played at?

[Calamity]

The resolution must exist, otherwise GroovyMAME wouldn't be able to use it. Unless you're using magic resolutions ?

If you attach a log of the game I'll see what's your current setup:

groovymame.exe romname -v -md 4 >romname.txt

I think it has something to do with the frequency? when I bring up my montors osd while playing final fight it says 17.8/59hz, which is what I think Final Fight is meant to be played at?

Did you run VMMaker with the same monitor_specs you're using in mame.ini? This is a required step.

[hayaeti]

Now you understand why I'm going insane
ps.  did I say thanks for helping?


I'm running the commandline as such btw

C:\mame>mame ffight -nohwstretch
which says...
SwitchRes v0.013f: [ffight] (1) horizontal (384x224@59.61)->(384x224@59.61)->(384x224@59.61)

see here for my log

http://www.palgamer.com/ffight.txt

what have i broken?

[Calamity]

Ok, I'm seeing the issue now. That find_best_mode algorithm definitely needs a rewrite. Anyway, try this:

- In case you still don't have it, get the latest versions here: http://aburamushi.net/calamity/VMMaker_1.3c_Arcade_OSD_1.3b.rar

- Edit vmmaker.ini and set YResMin_XML = 224

- Set the same monitor settings as in mame.ini

- Run VMMaker and restart.

Now you should have the required 224 lines resolutions and everything should be fine.

[hayaeti]

Yes!!! that fixed it up straight away!

You sir are a genius! and I'm so glad I haven't spent the last couple of days trying to get this to work only to find out I'm an idiot

Thanks so much for all the work you do for this scene

[Calamity]

Glad to see that it worked!