Software Support > GroovyMAME
GroovyMAME and vector games
krick:
Due to the known problem with Tempest in GroovyMAME cropping the bottom off, I started digging deeper into vector games trying to understand what's going on and get a discussion on how to get the best results when running vector games under GroovyMAME.
I noticed that Space Fury runs too fast and is really hard to sync on my monitor. I also noticed that Star Wars runs even faster. so much that the voices sound really silly.
So I gathered some statistics from MAME 0.146 on the various refresh rates and orientations...
Vector games (parent sets only):
13 horizontal @ 38Hz - armora, boxingb, demon, qb3, ripoff, solarq, spacewar, speedfrk, starcas, starhawk, tailg, warrior, wotw
12 horizontal @ 40Hz - aztarac, bradley, bzone, elim2, esb, llander, omegrace, spacfury, startrek, starwars, tomcat, zektor
1 horizontal @ 45Hz - spacduel
1 horizontal @ 50Hz - mhavoc
6 horizontal @ 60Hz - astdelux, asteroid, bwidow, gravitar, redbaron, topgunnr
2 vertical @ 38Hz - barrier, sundance
2 vertical @ 40Hz - cchasm, tacscan
3 vertical @ 60Hz - quantum, raaspec, tempest
Are these refresh rates actually used by GroovyMAME? Are they even correct?
It appears that GroovyMAME defaults to 640 x 480 for all vector games, regardless of orientation.
It also seems to me that we might want to (somehow) pick the highest interlaced resolution supported by the monitor as the vectors look less jaggy the higher the resolution.
Finally, I don't know if this is anything we can control, but I believe that vector games look far better with the following changes. I usually make them in a separate vector.ini file, but I was wondering if it might make sense for GroovyMAME to apply these options automatically when a vector game is run.
#
# CORE SCREEN OPTIONS
#
contrast 2.0
gamma 2.0
#
# CORE VECTOR OPTIONS
#
beam 2.0
Calamity:
Hi krick,
Thanks a lot for your post. I admit the vector games have been somewhat neglected in GroovyMAME, mainly because I just play raster games and are the ones I'm testing all the time.
Currently, a default resolution of 640x480 is used for all vector games. As you say, this ignores orientation, which is the problem of tempest and others. But we're also making a suboptimal use of the monitor's potential resolution. We should always go for the highest possible resolution, but this is refresh dependent. The 'virtualize' feature in GroovyMAME does right this: it calculates the highest possible resolution for a given refresh, within the monitor specs. So this is indeed what we should do for vector games: virtualized resolutions - now, most people are used to set an unique 'highest' resolution for all vector games, so they will complain about this behaviour, and specially about those crazy high resolutions above 640x480 they will want to remove with my-monitor-just-supports-up-to-640x480 kind of argument, but that's a different story -
On the other hand we have the odd refresh these games usually have. For raster CRTs we normally move in the 50-60 Hz range, so what GroovyMAME does with a refresh that's outside our defined limits is to set either the minumum or the maximum, depending on the value. Thus 40 Hz will become 50 Hz, etc. As -syncrefresh on is the default behaviour now, that means it will run at 125%. You can override this by enabling -triplebuffer manually, but it seems like a good idea to implement this programmatically.
As for using different specific rendering options for the vector games, it's something that should be easy to implement, just nobody had asked for.
So I think we could add all these features for the next release of the patch.
Paradroid:
I don't play any vector games myself but these ideas sound really cool!
Gravitar:
I also use 2.0 beam and very high contrast on MAME... it makes the games look a lot better.
Speaking of vector games, are you familiar with AAE? It's pretty awesome. While it can't substitute a real vector display it's much better than MAME in every regard.
I have managed to get AAE look really good... you have to play with the video settings a bit. I can't stress enough how amazing emulator this is... you won't even look at MAME after this... if you play vector games. Look at the brightness... you'll never see this kind of quality with any other emulator.
Here are the settings I use:
And these are the results:
I wonder how could we get in touch with the author... there's still a few little bugs to beat.
Biggest annoyance is the lack of mouse support in Star Wars. I'd LOVE to play it on AAE.
PS: PM me if you have trouble finding the stuff for it.
krick:
--- Quote from: Gravitar on July 10, 2012, 08:58:53 am ---
Speaking of vector games, are you familiar with AAE? It's pretty awesome. While it can't substitute a real vector display it's much better than MAME in every regard.
--- End quote ---
Are you using AAE with a 15KHz arcade monitor?