Hardware Stretching Confusion

[Andy Warne]

Regarding the Trident Blade T64 card not supporting hardware stretching.. I want to clear up some confusion about this option but need to make sure I have the facts (man).
I'll explain the world as I see it, and if I'm wrong (which is very possible!) then someone please correct:
The "-stretch" option in DOS MAME and MAMEW (in MAME.CFG) is an option to double pixel size, which is a standard VGA function that all cards can perform. But this option has no effect in later versions of MAME because they use enhanced VGA modes to fill the screen instead, which is faster.
The Hardware Stretching option is a function of Windows drivers on some 3D cards, and invoked by a check box on recent versions of the MAME32 GUI. So this is a function of MAME32 only. It is not relevant when MAMEW / ArcadeOS etc are being run from Windows, or of DOS MAME.
Can anyone confirm/deny all this?

Thanks

Andy

[Howard_Casto]

The old "-stretch" option is long gone (in the windows port of mame at least)  It has been replaced with the hwstretch option.  Hardware stretching is not exclusive to mame32.  It's in the offical standard mame build as well.  I believe it's also supported in the linux builds of mame.  Hardware stretching is by no means a new feature and virtually all farily new video cards support it.  However I've heard, as you have, that the trident cards are simply too old to support this feature.  

So to answer your question the hardware stretching option is very relevant to any mame setup except one using a dos build of mame.  

Like you though, I'm not positive on this.  This is just what I understand from monitoring the mame messageboards and reaading the mame documentation.  

[MannyTC]

Here is a snippet from the readme file from the first windows version of mame.

0.37 BETA 15


Source:
-------

- The main binary distribution of MAME is now a completely new win32 console
 port. Some of the benefits are: support for full screen hardware stretching
 (if you have a decent video card), and a much better command line / options
 file parsing (ported from xmame).
 To create the mame.ini configuration file on startup, use the -createconfig
 option. -showusage lists all available options. [Aaron Giles, Bernd Wiebelt]

Hope this clears the confusion.

[Howard_Casto]

Good input, but all that tells us is hardware stretching is supported in mame, which I already mentioned.  The question is does the traditional stretch option still work and will it work properly in the windows build?  The "stretch" entry used to be in a mame config file, but in the windows version it was replaced with "hwstretch."  I thought that meant it was gone, but I can't confirm that.  Even if it does still work, hwstretch is a much better option if you can get it.  

[MannyTC]

Andy has been mailing me privately and the real question we have been discussing was if the official windows build of MAME supported hardware stretch. He was under the impression that hardware stretch was only a feature of MAME32. I don't think anyone who has a recent video card capable of hardware stretching would care about the old STRETCH option unless, as you stated, they are running the DOS build.

[Andy Warne]

Thanks for this info, I was looking at old versions of Windows MAME!

[Howard_Casto]

Thanks for this info, I was looking at old versions of Windows MAME!

??  The very first windows compile of mame supported hardware stretching.  That was the main reason they switched to windows as the official build.  

Somebody's out of the loop.