Widescreen monitor in vertical orientation ... how do you like it?

[biscuit001]

I'm kicking around the idea of building a bar top and really want to use one of those ASUS 24 inch monitors with LightBoost. I've mocked up a design with the monitor mounted vertically and wanted to know what peoples thoughts are on playing this way. Obviously the older vertical games and pinball should work great, but how does it work when going to a 4:3 game? Are the big black bars on top and bottom annoying to you?

[mamenewb100]

It all comes down to whether you like playing Horizontal games or Vertical games more. You are going to have a larger vertical 3:4 screen in Vertical position but a smaller 4:3 Horizontal. You are going to have a larger 4:3 screen in Horizontal position but a smaller 3:4 Vertical. Hopefully you are going to keep the aspect ratio of the games and not stretch it to look terrible. 

[BadMouth]

Just don't stretch the vertical games to fullscreen.
I cringe whenever I see that. 
Your monitor and/or video card should have an option to display the 4:3 resolution properly.

Using tinted glass can cut down on how noticeable the bars on the top/bottom or sides are.

FYI, the 4:3 image on a 24" widescreen is going to be about the same size as a 21" 4:3 monitor.
There are still a fair number of those around used.

If you're considering the light boost to avoid blur, check out this thread about doing the same thing in MAME without special equipment:
http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Number=305674&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1&vc=1&new=1373837488

[welash]

I keep thinking about doing this, but not having a fixed marquee, but instead display the game in the middle of the screen, the marquee for the game in some of the unused space at the top, and the control panel layout and maybe the instruction card at the bottom.  I figure for a 1080x1920 display, for vertical games, the game should take up an area of 1080x1440 leaving 480 pixels of vertical space.  The marquee could then be 240x1080 at the top, and the bottom could have control layouts (I was thinking maybe the original control panel, the contols as mapped to your control panel and maybe the instruction card.

For horizontal games, there would be a lot of extra pixels left over, (the game would only be 810x1080) and it might be hard to use up the extra space, and I would want the monitor to take up almost the whole width of the bartop, so the bartop would be pretty narrow (a foot or so in width)

I still need to finish fixing my old upright cabinet that I pulled apart partially when I moved 5 years back, and I don't feel I can start a new project until I get it back in working order.

[biscuit001]

Awesome comments, thanks guys.

Really interesting idea Welash - honestly I didn't even know that was a possibility. I've got some reading to do

[PL1]

Look into modifying the art and layout (.lay) files.

You can find some basic info and links here and at the end of the FAQ on Mr. Do's site.


Scott

[Terr1]

I'm very interested in doing the same on my 2 player upright.. I currently have a 19" 4:3 monitor, and I rather want a 22"-23" 16:9 installed vertical, to have the pinball option..
Can you have per game settings in MAME (resolution wise)? something that changes the screen resolution to match on vertical games?

[welash]

I had looked at creating layout files, and I think you can create different layout files for vertical and horizontal games, but there were some things that I wasn't sure I could accomplish with layout files.  It is possible that I just wasn't getting how to make a generic template that would allow adding some of the things I wanted.

I use Linux (I've never been able to understand how people get windows to do anything at all), so I was thinking about doing some window manager tricks to display MAME at a specific location on the screen and display the other graphics at other locations. Ideally SDLMAME should take more than a width and height for it's geometry, it should also take a position, (Usually in X11 you can specify a geometry as wxh+x+y to tell the application to run at size wxh at location x,y).  With some window managers, you can coerce the application to run at a specific position if it doesn't support it.

[lettuce]

how about using the top part of the LCD for the marquee

[Crazy Cooter]

The issue is getting high resolution marquee images.  I've been trying to get them since 2010 for this exact reason:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,107206.msg1136203.html#msg1136203