How to position a horizontal game on vertical screen

[Felsir]

I'm trying to move the display of the horizontal games in MAME. So far I was only able to move the display of the game inside the viewport (thus if you move the game down using the MAME sliders the display gets cropped but the bottom boundary stays in the same position).
So is it possible to move the viewport?


For extra info, this is what my setup looks like. I have a cocktail table where I'm trying to get the MAME display to move to the bottom of my display.

This is a topdown view of my 16:9 display in ASCII art with the O representing the player positions. The _ is the bottom of  the screen in windows.

O[____]O

In cocktail mode the display looks like this (MAME is set to cocktail rotated 90 degrees):

O[1_|_2]O

In singleplayer vertical games it looks like this:

O[1____]  <- the game takes up most of the screen's real-estate. It is almost aligned to the bottom of the player 1 position.

In singleplayer horizontal game is where the problem is:

O[__1__] <- the game is centered in the display, this way the player is removed too far from the game display to comfortably play the game.

[Felsir]

I solved it by making a layout file. In case someone running into a similar issue this is the code in the default.lay file:

Code: [Select]

<mamelayout version="2">
   <element name="bezel">
      <image file="black.png" />
   </element>

   <view name="Bottomview">
      <screen index="0">
         <bounds left="0" top="0" right="500" bottom="500" />
 <orientation rotate="90"/>
      </screen>
      <screen index="0">
         <bounds left="500" top="0" right="1000" bottom="500" />
 <orientation rotate="270"/>
      </screen>

      <bezel element="bezel">
         <bounds left="499" top="-1" right="1001" bottom="501" />
      </bezel>
   </view>
</mamelayout>

black.png is a square 500x500 pixel png all black pixels.

After some tweaking with the numbers and graphic, this is the result:


There may be a more elegant way of doing this, but so far this seems to work.

[cmoses]

That looks very interesting. I am currently building a cocktail cabinet and might want to include a couple of horizontal games on it. I am using a 19" 5:4 aspect ratio monitor. Currently the games just show up in the middle as you said. It doesn't look to bad but it's not a widescreen monitor so not as long vertically.

It's hard to tell from the picture but is that some standard graphic in your overlay or are you incorporating the games marque artwork?  I thought I might do that on mine.

Sent from my iPad Mini using Tapatalk HD

[Felsir]

I have made a Game King graphic (the name of my cabinet) with blue bokeh background. Since I have to create a .lay file for each game anyway I might add the game's marquee there as well.

[rCadeGaming]

If you're putting up static images like that, you might want to shift them around a few pixels from game to game to reduce burn-in.

[Gray_Area]

I'm surprised the position shifting in MAME is display field-dependent, rather than display area-dependent, otherwise why have it?

Is there a batch command that would generate a custom sort of lay file per game at run-time?  **Edit: like maybe this?  'real-time photoshop art generation in front end'

I wouldn't be worried about burn on a late/current model LCD, especially in-game unless he's playing the same game for hours on end every day.