Vector in Mame

[southpaw13]

I noticed a lot of work on vector emulation lately.  Has Mame caught up to what AAE is doing?  Another Arcade Emulator?

Thanks!

[gildahl]

I've played with it in 149 and it's now worth trying.  The exaggerated bullet glow that AAE shows in Asteroids isn't there, but that was never really authentic anyway (I just recently played a real Asteroids machine up at Funspot and there's no comparison to the real thing).  I currently have vector glow turned on in Asteroids and Star Wars and kind of like it.  For some reason, Tempest doesn't work right in 149 (even with vector glow turned off).  Vector glow in raster games is also interesting and I spent some time trying to make it look like a real Galaga machine I had access to.  I thought the effects were cool to play with and approached in some ways the real glow and scanline artifacting, but ultimately, when I turned it all off and just went back to the standard MAME bilinear filtering and scanline mask, I liked it better.

[McHale]

I have HLSL turned off for everything but vector games.  On vector games the difference is night and day but it does take some horsepower to run HLSL.  On Asteroids I had audio glitches every once in a while with an older machine I was using so I got a better machine... JUST for HLSL on vector games.  Once I found settings I liked for one vector game, I copied that .ini file and renamed it to all of the vector games I play. 

[nick3092]

Once I found settings I liked for one vector game, I copied that .ini file and renamed it to all of the vector games I play.

I'm pretty sure you can just make a vector.ini file, and MAME will automatically apply those settings to all vector based games.  Can save you some time if you ever decide to tweak your settings again.

[McHale]

Yep.  That works but initially I was setting them all individually trying to make each game as close to the original (or what I thought looked the best) before I got lazy for the ones I hadn't done yet.  For example, Asteroids and Asteroids Deluxe needed to have a slightly wider beam so you could see the shots but using those same settings on Star Wars or Tempest and it just looked too fat.  I do plan on going back and tweaking each one a bit more as I spend time with them.  Also, when I got started with HLSL I didn't realize you could have a Vector.ini before I was already done with most of them.