Newbie question on managing resolutions

[withalligators]

Hi, Years ago a friend of mine picked up two PDP V402 plasma monitors for me.  These are 40" 4:3 640x480p flatscreen monitors made at the very outset of flat panel technology.  They cost something outrageous like 25K apiece.  I finally got around to picking them up, and plan on building a cab around this (very large) screen.  I somehow managed to get powerstrip to put out 480 and am breaking in the panel with solid color slideshows.  I have played around with Mame64 and the Simpsons arcade game to get a feel for how it looks.  Since this game is native 288x224i, it looks muddled when scaled to slightly more than 2x times.  How do I get Mame to output exactly 2x resolution (576x448), without any ugly antialiasing to try and fill the available screen?

Cheers,
Alex

[DeLuSioNal29]

Have you checked out GroovyMAME?  It autoselects the correct resolution.
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,135823.0.html

DeLuSioNaL29

[withalligators]

I've been reading about groovymame, and it seems like kind of a bear to set up.  Also, I don't have an old ATI card laying around.  I was planning on getting a higher end card (for instance, a 7850) for modern PC stuff and Dolphin/NullDC/Taito X.  It there any better way to set it up?

How do I display fixed scaling intervals (1x, 2x, 3x) with a black border around the image with any version of mame. 

My setup will be Haswell i7 or i5, probably a 4670, probably a Radeon HD 7850, and this monitor or a 16:9 TV. 

My question is still relevant even if I went with a TV, because I would still want to run in fixed intervals (ie 960p) not antialiased scaling to full screen. 

Any opinions?

[nitrogen_widget]

I'm also a newb.

You might want to check out advanced mame.
i'm using it on a P3 system with a 19" 1280x1024 native res lcd panel & it's built in scaling features make the games look pretty good to me.

Yes, it's old using version .106 mame but I was able to convert a more recent set to .106 roms without issue.
You can run a game then hit tab to select the video menu & cycle through the scaling options.

It looks like groovymame is similar to advanced mame just uses a more up to date version of mame so you might want to check that also.

Or here is a link to video info for mame.

http://mamedev.org/source/docs/newvideo.txt.html

[cools]

Groovy fixes the problems that AdvanceMAME had (video/sound sync), and it'll also work fine in stretching the image as you've requested (it'll even allow games that won't integer scale 2x in the horizontal to be displayed well on that plasma - e.g. CPS2 games). It doesn't require an old ATI card to do any of this, and is no more difficult than setting up a normal version of MAME - the complexity comes in when you want to run on CRTs with no-native resolutions.

If it was me doing this I'd simply drive the panel at 640x480 all the time (disable modeline generation, select a fixed resolution) and set "cleanstretch 1" for anything that can be 2x scaled on horizontal and vertical, and "cleanstretch 2" for anything that can only be scaled linearly on the vertical.

It'll work well, I've done it.

[nitrogen_widget]

If I didn't have old hardware I probably would use Groovymame.
but, I just set audio output to SDL in the advancemame config & that fixed all any video/sound sync issues I had.

I only suggested advancedmame because he is using .106 roms.

[withalligators]

Darn, I never got notifications about these last few posts.  Thanks guys!

I ended up trading an old Core2Duo setup (E8400, GT 430, 4GB Ram, 500gb HD with win 7 HP) for an i5-4670K and a Gigabyte Z97 mobo.  I've got an SSD with win 7 ultimate on it, and I've ordered a PSU.  Still need a case, storage, a GPU (though HD 4600 iGPU ain't da wurst) and some Ram, and I can start playing around.  I figured out how to change settings in the MAME.ini file, so that helped some, but I'm going to mess with GM for sure when I have it all put together.

I've started a project thread with some renders, check it out: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=139805.new;topicseen#new

[Howard_Casto]

My 2 Cents. 

Using native resolutions is typically done for low resolution displays.  480p is high enough res to where you shouldn't have to fool with that. 

You typically set the resolution to the highest your monitor will allow and that's it.  I'm not sure what this "muddled" stuff you are talking about is, but 9 times out of 10 it's just your video card screwing things up with direct3d's scaling method.  Setting the "effect" setting in the mame.ini to either "sharp" or "none" typically fixes this. 

[withalligators]

You're probably right, but I'm super anal retentive about my pixel art.  My brother and I were building a game at one point (fail!) and I got pretty into the medium.  So it bugs me when some lines are 3 pixels and some are 2.  I played around in settings and got it to display at fixed scale intervals, and it looks freaking great. 

The muddled stuff was the fact that the display was not properly calibrated, and direct 3d was scaling things up.  Instead of antialiasing between the two adjacent colors, it was dithering and flashing between the two colors.  twas ugly.  Sharp scaling looked a lot better, but personally, I think 2x native looked great, and only had a small bit of black border.  Behind the darkened glass, it'll look perfect.  I think.

Cheers,
Alex