Font scalling on CRT

[haynor666]

On some games (or rather some resolutions) texts when You are hitting TAB are unreadable. I tried switch fonts from Mr.Do site but results are poor - either is ok on some resolutions but then too big on other (for example DIP switch descriptions does not fit on single line). This is not a problem with super resolutions from what I tested briefly long time ago but on standard low like 256x240 or 256x248 it's not too good :/

Is there a way to set mame so font can be always readable? I was thinking to set bigger fonts for horizontal games and smaller for vertical but I don't know what to set up in mame.ini and vertical.ini. All I can see is option uifont but I cannot find option for size of font.

This is quite old problem and in fact not only for groovymame but general.

[big10p]

Don't think you can set font size, but as you say, you can set the UI font in ini files - e.g. vertical.ini and horizont.ini. Have you tried the emulogic font?

[krick]

This used to work in older versions of MAME.  Not sure if it applies or even works anymore...

You can modify a setting in mame.ini...

uifont    default

...just remove "default".  This causes MAME to fall back on some kind of low-res bitmap font that looks reasonably decent on an arcade monitor.

[chrisvg]

Wow! That is a super handy tip, gonna have to remember that one.  This "not default default" font doesn't look pretty, but it's definitely more readable at low resolutions 

[haynor666]

That font is far too big on some vertical resolution :/

[krick]

I was setting up GroovyMAME 0.193 tonight.

When you remove "default" the font is smaller, but looks kind of crappy on my arcade monitor.  I think it used to look OK in older versions of MAME.

However, if you change it from...

uifont    default

...to...

uifont    uismall.bdf

...then it looks pretty decent, at least on the handful of games I tested.

[Calamity]

There's no way to force the internal UI to be integer scaled, that's the issue. I don't bother about this because I always use super resolutions these days.

[haynor666]

Topic is maybe a bit old but in my opinion font rendering still in my opinion could be better. There some requests and propositions to fix this problem:

https://github.com/mamedev/mame/issues/7105
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/issues/6886

I tried many configurations and fonts somehow I obtained good results. Of course disabling font filtering would be still good option.