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Author Topic: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen  (Read 25150 times)

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Arroyo

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #80 on: February 13, 2019, 12:44:05 pm »
If you leave default settings, GM will squish the picture. If you force -unevenstrecth 0 (in per game.ini as GM tries to manage that option itself) the you force GM to crop the picture.

Brilliant, you need to start getting paid for all this Calamity!  There’s a donation page on Geedorah right?  Does that come directly to you?

Calamity

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #81 on: February 13, 2019, 12:54:39 pm »
(I'm working from home today too, my kid has a cold and didn't go to school today. Aside of the paypal fee, donations come directly here, yes :)).
Important note: posts reporting GM issues without a log will be IGNORED.
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CRT Emudriver, VMMaker & Arcade OSD downloads, documentation and discussion:  Eiusdemmodi

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #82 on: February 13, 2019, 12:57:10 pm »
So sadly turns out I was bumping into the limits of my crt at 240p. I can lower the image to have the top fully displayed but then it starts cutting off the bottom.

So you mean you can't get 240 lines displayed on the screen whatever you do in the service menu?
Important note: posts reporting GM issues without a log will be IGNORED.
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Arroyo

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #83 on: February 13, 2019, 01:48:36 pm »
(I'm working from home today too, my kid has a cold and didn't go to school today. Aside of the paypal fee, donations come directly here, yes :)).

Done.  I know you've probably heard it a thousand times, but Gracias por todo lo que haces.

Calamity

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #84 on: February 13, 2019, 01:55:01 pm »
Done.  I know you've probably heard it a thousand times, but Gracias por todo lo que haces.

Thanks mate, it's much appreciated.
Important note: posts reporting GM issues without a log will be IGNORED.
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Neilalphazeta

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #85 on: February 13, 2019, 03:04:40 pm »
Calamity are you from South America?  :)

When I get my payment this month I should go give a donation too, you're too much of a help and your work on GM/VMM/ArcadeOSD is legendary.

So I did some more testing just now, it appears as though the max image this tv can display vertically is exactly 240, but because the image stretches with a picture being displayed I basically defacto lose a number of lines, then because there is that bright line at the top that is an eyesore to see I have to overscan a few extra lines so that it doesn't appear when pictures are dark or going to black, so by the time I was done finding the best compromise I'm basically losing some good 3%~3.5% of the picture, and that's with a setting that adds noticeable underscan to all other systems making it ideal for none.

Out of curiosity I did test my other tv's (all same era Sony silver case and digital chassis) and although the default setting ranges differ the ultimate result is the same, where it seems to stop at 240 on the spot. I think the larger tv I have might offer a few more lines since Arroyo doesn't seem to have a problem with his but that tv has poor focus and sharpness and the picture tube just isn't anywhere close to the condition of these others so I wouldn't want to use it for this anyway. The engineers probably never imagined consumers would use these tv's with something like emudriver to force higher resolution to the tv.  ;D

For now I'm going to resign myself to making an ini for every single 240p game and forcing it to 224 or perhaps 232. At least with my current setup I think this is simpler and allows me to maximize all the 224 and 232 games (which combined make up over 2/3 of my game list). I spent some time on the Mortal Kombat II character selection up close comparing the forced 240p version versus the forced 224p versions and to be honest I couldn't spot much difference until I went really into pixel peeping mode (granted though we're already downresing it from 256 but since that resolution doesn't work for me I can't compare with it). The differences I spot are usually on small texts especially letters that have horizontal lines in them such as "E" where the middle line occasionally has a faintly different look from the top and bottom lines. It's clearly not ideal and I understand I'll be working against GM's fantastic ability to recreate the correct resolutions but the other way is just chock full of compromises.

I don't suppose there is any other way other than doing game per game for all the games in my list is there (going to be hundreds of inis when I'm done lol).

Ultimately 85% or so of the time I'm going to be playing 224p games because the majority of my favorite games are in that resolution, so I feel very happy and satisfied with Groovymame (and Mortal Kombat seems to be pretty flexible at whatever forced resolution). I just wish there were something more that could be done to get even more out of it but short of getting a pal tv, an older model Sony or different brand crt this seems to be impossible.

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #86 on: February 13, 2019, 03:18:13 pm »
For now I'm going to resign myself to making an ini for every single 240p game and forcing it to 224 or perhaps 232.

Before you go to all of that trouble, let me break out my KV-24FV300.  It's the same chassis as yours.  The size of the tube shouldn't have anything to do with you vertical range limit, its about the number of vertical lines, and even some of those 14inch PVM's can do much higher resolutions (some 20inches can do 1080).  I'll report back here my findings. Hopefully I can get to it tonight.

Neilalphazeta

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #87 on: February 13, 2019, 03:24:20 pm »
For now I'm going to resign myself to making an ini for every single 240p game and forcing it to 224 or perhaps 232.

Before you go to all of that trouble, let me break out my KV-24FV300.  It's the same chassis as yours.  The size of the tube shouldn't have anything to do with you vertical range limit, its about the number of vertical lines, and even some of those 14inch PVM's can do much higher resolutions (some 20inches can do 1080).  I'll report back here my findings. Hopefully I can get to it tonight.
Thanks, greatly appreciate it. Yes I just double checked to be sure and the 20 and 24 inch FV300 have the BA-6 and same service manual so should be identical. I'll wait till then before I start my res crushing operation.

Calamity

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #88 on: February 13, 2019, 04:17:27 pm »
Calamity are you from South America?  :)

Spain.

Quote
Out of curiosity I did test my other tv's (all same era Sony silver case and digital chassis) and although the default setting ranges differ the ultimate result is the same, where it seems to stop at 240 on the spot.

Yeah, if you search the forum, many users have encountered this specific problems. Paradroid, who has tested a few dozens of models, can confirm this.

I wonder if it'd be possible to somehow hack these chassis to remove their little brain without breaking the rest.
Important note: posts reporting GM issues without a log will be IGNORED.
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 - Attach resulting romname.txt file to your post, instead of pasting it.

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Neilalphazeta

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #89 on: February 13, 2019, 04:46:02 pm »
Nice. no wonder you're able to find nice crt's.   :D

Yes I think I also shouldn't make rash decisions. As I was actually sitting down to play i realize having a bit of overscan isn't a deal breaker. Even with my ideal 224p settings I basically get about 5% overscan on 240p content, which is roughly what tv's used to launch with and in those days most people didn't bother correcting it (although in the arcades it was always correct as far as I can remember).

Ruining the resolution is probably not worth getting in those edge pixels. I already do that to 256p but there's absolutely no other way with that size on my setup.

I'll wait to hear whether Arroyo experiences the same thing but it sounds likely that he will (if he doesn't then I have to try to figure out what I'm doing wrong).

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #90 on: February 13, 2019, 07:21:21 pm »
I’m not seeing anything different (outside of a yet to be calibrated TV that does not look very good yet ;-)):





Anything you want me to test?
« Last Edit: February 15, 2019, 03:04:07 pm by Arroyo »

Neilalphazeta

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #91 on: February 13, 2019, 07:23:43 pm »
Wow, thank you Arroyo for testing this. So when you pull down the vertical sizing when do you start seeing the end of the screen (bright line at the top)?

Maybe something like a capacitor is out on my tv perhaps causing it to lose V size (come to think of it unlikely since I have tested this on 3 tv's of mine)? That or there's some setting I'm not aware of somewhere.
« Last Edit: February 13, 2019, 07:25:45 pm by Neilalphazeta »

Arroyo

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #92 on: February 13, 2019, 07:25:28 pm »
If you leave default settings, GM will squish the picture. If you force -unevenstrecth 0 (in per game.ini as GM tries to manage that option itself) the you force GM to crop the picture.

Brilliant, you need to start getting paid for all this Calamity!  There’s a donation page on Geedorah right?  Does that come directly to you?


This worked very well IMHO.  You get some cut off top to bottom and I had to adjust the porches to bring the horizontal picture in line but it’s the original resolution just truncates top and bottom.  You only notice it the character select screen, but in game play it’s perfect:





Definitely using this as it seems to be the best compromise.  Yes there’s triple buffering but I tried playing both with forced resolution and without and I couldn’t tell the difference outside of scrolling where it’s not quite as smooth!  I dropped unevenstretchx and just did unevenstretch  0.  Looks amazing!
« Last Edit: February 13, 2019, 07:50:22 pm by Arroyo »

Arroyo

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #93 on: February 13, 2019, 07:29:34 pm »
Wow, thank you Arroyo for testing this. So when you pull down the vertical sizing when do you start seeing the end of the screen (bright line at the top)?

Maybe something like a capacitor is out on my tv perhaps causing it to lose V size (come to think of it unlikely since I have tested this on 3 tv's of mine)? That or there's some setting I'm not aware of somewhere.

I assume you are talking about Arcade OSD?

Neilalphazeta

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #94 on: February 13, 2019, 07:33:11 pm »
That looks amazing. Really beautiful picture on the fv310 (in saying this I'm somewhat indirectly complimenting my own tv too lol). You don't mind the slightly off aspect ratio though? If I did it that way I would stretch the horizontal evenly to have four thirds of the pixels missing top and bottom off screen left and right to maintain proper ratio but I'm a bit of a stickler for aspect preservation.  :D

EDIT: No I meant in the service menu of the tv (disp, 5, vol+, power). Looks like you don't have it though, but on my sets what happens is there is a bright line at the very top at the very last pixel in the 240 image, and the bottom has a cutoff mark around the last pixel too. The bright line somewhat ruins things because depending on the adjustment it will show on dark images, when a full image is displayed it blooms out so it goes out of sight however. But because I calibrated for 224p those extra pixels out of sight on 224 are not straight either so to get the bright line completely out of sight requires overscanning 2% to 3%.

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #95 on: February 13, 2019, 08:03:41 pm »
That looks amazing. Really beautiful picture on the fv310 (in saying this I'm somewhat indirectly complimenting my own tv too lol). You don't mind the slightly off aspect ratio though? If I did it that way I would stretch the horizontal evenly to have four thirds of the pixels missing top and bottom off screen left and right to maintain proper ratio but I'm a bit of a stickler for aspect preservation.  :D

Not sure what you mean by aspect ratio being off.  Mortal Kombat 2’s resolution is 400x254 which is a ration of 4:2.54.  Street fighter 2 is a resolution of 384x224 a ratio of 4:2.33.  Some games like Robotron for example is 292x240 is very close to 4:3 at 4:3.28, but rarely is a game an actual 4:3 perfect.  I was just going to say you could test it by going back and forth but I realized you can’t see the untouched 256p image cause you get scrolling with this set.  The FV310 allowed me to view the untouched  256p I just have the water ripple effect going on.

I can promise you the aspect ratio hasn’t changed from the changes we’ve made to the original, just cut the top and bottom off.  Now you can argue that my settings via the TV internal menus geometry are off, but I did do an extensive calibration and I’m pretty confident it’s accurate.

Quote
EDIT: No I meant in the service menu of the tv (disp, 5, vol+, power). Looks like you don't have it though, but on my sets what happens is there is a bright line at the very top at the very last pixel in the 240 image, and the bottom has a cutoff mark around the last pixel too. The bright line somewhat ruins things because depending on the adjustment it will show on dark images, when a full image is displayed it blooms out so it goes out of sight however. But because I calibrated for 224p those extra pixels out of sight on 224 are not straight either so to get the bright line completely out of sight requires overscanning 2% to 3%.

I calibrated for a perfect picture in 240p so that I wouldn’t crop that picture (on the FV310) as there’s enough games that use it I figured that would bother me more than some black bars in the top and bottom of 224p content.

I looked through the pics you sent and not sure what the issue is that you mentioned.  The pics I was looking at showed what looked to be normal stuff except maybe that red line in the upper left?



Wait I think I know what your seeing, do you mean this?:

« Last Edit: February 14, 2019, 01:27:46 pm by Arroyo »

Recapnation

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #96 on: February 13, 2019, 08:15:07 pm »
Aspect ratio precisely refers to the picture's geometry. It's always 4 : 3 no matter the pixel count.

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #97 on: February 13, 2019, 08:20:06 pm »
Aspect ratio precisely refers to the picture's geometry. It's always 4 : 3 no matter the pixel count.

You’ll have to explain that one, as the ratio of pixels describes the ratio of the picture.  A 1920x1080 resolution is a 16:9 picture (division of both equals 1.77777), how could a resolution of 400x254 be a 4:3 ratio when the math works out to (1.574 vs 1.333)?  I’m confused.

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #98 on: February 13, 2019, 08:52:49 pm »

Arroyo

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #99 on: February 13, 2019, 09:26:20 pm »
But I did a couple of weeks ago:

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,159472.msg1677155.html#msg1677155

Thanks for passing along, I’ll take a look later tonight after kid duty.

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #100 on: February 13, 2019, 11:35:10 pm »
Yes basically almost all games were 4:3 regardless of actual resolution. Artists worked on various resolutions knowing that the image would be displayed in a 4:3 aspect ratio monitor or tv and the games were of course also tested on such monitors and tv's. So when you cut off the top and bottom of MK games by leaving the full horizontal size the picture is being stretched inwards (characters become a little bit thinner), it's perfectly fine that way if you don't mind it, some probably would prefer that to forcing the sides off the screen to maintain the proper 4:3 aspect ratio we knew in the arcades, it's just a preference thing. I tend to favor keeping the true aspect ratio of all games. For some reason there was a period in emulation where a lot of people liked the resolution to be intact instead of the full 4:3 aspect ratio so even stuff like Snes emulators would often have black borders on the sides, personally I hated it because that just wasn't the way real consoles and games looked like in our childhood or at any time, not sure what the trend is now, but certainly Mame in general seems to favor original aspect ratio by default which is nice.

Yes that line at the very top, did you get there by zooming out on the v size or was it there already and only visible on black screens? Interestingly I also have vpos set at 27, I guess our measurements are probably not far off with the same chassis and all.

I think there seem to be slight variations a few lines more or less and on my best set the picture has a couple lines cut off by that glowing line because the picture expands with blooming pushing some of the picture out. That line seems to define the end of the screen from the looks of it. Do you manage to have some black space between the end of your 240p picture and the cutoff line?

At first it seemed like a mistake to adjust H size for different resolutions as Calamity pointed out, but since these limitations are in place and I basically need my tv to be more often than not calibrated to display 224p for other consoles, turns out it wasn't a bad thing to have all those h porch adjustments, I can just live with some minor overscan for 240, and 256 has to be pulled in on my tv's (sucks for R-Type and a few others where texts look a bit weird, but I think this still tops interlaced).

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #101 on: February 14, 2019, 10:19:28 am »
Also out of curiosity Arroyo, did you follow the instructions of most guides of lowering in mame gamma setting to 0.700? On my Sony sets doing that resulted in the picture being much much too dark. I think .900 seems to be somewhat acceptable, but I ended up leaving it at 1.0.

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #102 on: February 14, 2019, 11:01:02 am »
Also I did some calculations and numbers were a bit higher than I anticipated. Assuming you have 240 full screen from top to bottom then the overscan on MK is about 16 lines, so an overscan of 6.25%. If you are able to leave it the way we had it before and have some more lines to reduce v size you might get more out of the picture that way (but with some scaling). General overscan that was found on tv's was generally between 4~5% from what I read, so actually there's quite a bit of lost picture sadly.

In my setup with default 224p centering I have an overscan in the 6% range as well in 240 content, and I find playability is generally not affected but varies per game, in some games important information gets cut off and in a few others the center image just seems too big imo. Doing my best calibration to close in on that bright line while still guaranteeing it stays hidden I can reduce the overscan to either 3.3%~4.1% depending on what I do (I can push the v centering down and further reduce the v size one more point that way). Technically I could go as low as 2% but then I have this annoying bright line showing itself, hiding again etc, fully dependent on whats being displayed (blooming will move it around, and it ends up visible on blacks for sure). The FV310 doesn't bloom because it has that unusual high voltage generator (as far as I know no other consumer tv in North America had one of these), so actually the line would stay out of sight if you push it out (assuming you have the line as close as the BA6 chassis does, maybe you have more room on that tv).
« Last Edit: February 14, 2019, 11:03:16 am by Neilalphazeta »

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #103 on: February 14, 2019, 01:16:43 pm »
But I did a couple of weeks ago:
 
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,159472.msg1677155.html#msg1677155

You don't mind the slightly off aspect ratio though?

 
Ok, so the little hamster in my head was huffing and puffing on his wheel trying to make sense of this all.  I read that thread that you posted Recapnation, and it was thought provoking.  I realize in looking back at my post how I communicated it implied I was in the camp of the OP of that thread.  To be clear, I don’t believe that the pictures for games were intended to have black bars.  I would fall in your camp of the argument that the intention of the developers was to have the picture fill the screen.  The “designing for RGB” vs poorer signal standards seems like a silly argument to me as SCART in Europe provided for a RGB connection, so how could developers design console games for the inferior North American composite/RF and ignore the European RGB?  In addition as you pointed out they developed the games undoubtedly on RGB monitors, so there’s that.
 
But Neil’s question was very thought provoking to me.  Given that it appears we accept that the resolution ratios of the games themselves are not perfect 4:3, and given the reasonable assumption that the intention was to fill a 4:3 screen it does imply that some (and I hate to use this word, can’t think of another) stretching is mandated to fill the picture, either vertically or horizontally.  How MUCH stretching seems to be the question.  So what is the intended look of a game?
 
Neil’s question about the MK2 aspect ratio got my searching deep last night, and I did come across this video (took a still image) that got me worried that he might be right about the mk2 aspect ratio being off:
 

 
This threw me off big time, because even with leaving the original untouched GroovyMame settings the image was “squished” horizontally compared to the image above.  The only way to correct for it was to go into the TV’s service menu and dramatically increase the horizontal size, but of course this severally distorted other games.  Then after doing more searching of actual mk2 cabinets running on CRT’s I came across this image:
 

 
I also checked an LCD with no stretching applied to get this image(has border bezels):
 

 
So based on those 2 images it would seem the original mk2 image I posted does not look distorted from an aspect ratio standpoint (I’m judging based off of the square box outlines of the character selection).
 
But obviously this requires subjection on how much to increase or decrease the vertical and horizontal size on the hardware of the display to make.
 
Clearly you can change the aspect ratio to the amount you like as evidenced by Calamity’s link to the video:


 
and indeed to reinforce your point Recapnation, I believe the intention was to do exactly that, have the image be filled on the 4:3 by adjusting the vertical and horizontal size on the hardware of the display so that it fit perfectly on all sides.
 
Assuming that’s true it makes Neil’s pursuit of making 224p, 240p, and 256p content fit the display vertically seem pretty logical as technically that’s what was done in Arcades.  The difficulty as far as I can see it is that it can’t be done in the vertical direction via software because of the inherit limited number of lines.  Horizontally it’s not a problem because you can draw a lot of lines (15khz vs. 60hz).  So it seems the only real solution is to either put pots on your display (like in the above referenced video), or accept that the aspect ratio isn’t exactly what was intended.  I had never thought of the aspect ratio as being off though until Neil mentioned it.
 
« Last Edit: February 14, 2019, 01:23:24 pm by Arroyo »

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #104 on: February 14, 2019, 01:49:31 pm »
and given the reasonable assumption that the intention was to fill a 4:3 screen it does imply that some (and I hate to use this word, can’t think of another) stretching is mandated to fill the picture, either vertically or horizontally.  How MUCH stretching seems to be the question.

Your reasoning requires to introduce "stretching" because you're based on an anachronism: the concept of square pixels.

There are two separate concepts to realize about: screen aspect and pixel aspect. Pixel aspect was rarely 1:1 (square) in the CRT era.

Quote
Assuming that’s true it makes Neil’s pursuit of making 224p, 240p, and 256p content fit the display vertically seem pretty logical as technically that’s what was done in Arcades. 

Yeah, but Neil's pursuit goes beyond that. Having realized his TV can't accommodate vertical size properly, he's trying to propagate the overscan to the horizontal dimension to overscan "evenly". That's an original approach I can't remember to have seen before. I'm my opinion it's a futile effort, but interesting anyway.
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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #105 on: February 14, 2019, 02:21:41 pm »
Arroyo>

What you can do to check the aspect ratio is the following:
go back to previous mk2.ini settings which had unevenstretch and unevenstretchx so that you can fill up the screen, then go to the in mame geometry settings and start pulling the v size down until you have the full vertical image displayed (you can press the enter key at any time to return these to 1000, and you can press tab on and off to see the picture and quickly return to the settings to help you get there. Once you have the full vertical image displayed just input that very v size setting number into the h size (it might be around 900 or around there depending on your default tv v size). Once done if you see black bars on the sides then you know the aspect ratio is incorrect.

On most tv sets the v and h size work accurately per line in a way, so to preserve aspect ratio when using Sony service menu settings you'd go in a 4:3 pattern (such as decreasing or increasing H size by 4 points and then V size by 3 points and so forth), but in Mame I found the settings already adjust the changes to preserve aspect ratio (so a change in v size is less dramatic than a change in h size because it tries to preserve 4:3 if that makes any sense). So starting at 1000 if you pushed both settings to 750 they would still be in 4:3 (albeit with a black frame).

I think you will find your tv is horizontally compressed for 256p content but fairly minimally. I can tell because I'm quite used to seeing MKII. If it is and you want to correct it you can leave mame settings as are, adjust the porches and check till it fits, once it does you can revert the mame settings to 1000 but now you will know that the aspect ratio is preserved. :)

The examples you showed above on that arcade cabinet to me look like on the opposite they might be slightly horizontally expanded, and actually this was more common in the arcades. When they adjusted the settings in arcade cabinets it was more important to have the vertical image fully shown as there were often texts that would be noticeably clipped if they weren't but when doing horizontal size it is more common for the extreme edges to have geometrical imperfections and instead of trying to work on it more they would often times just shove a few lines off screen since it would rarely be noticed.  :D
As a result given the choice I also favor having the horizontal image slightly expanded than the reverse, but that's just me.

As for what I did with my setup yes, I maintained aspect ratio for all resolutions but at the time I hadn't realized all I needed to think about was adjusting the v size and I could have had all resolutions correct with a single v size change. However ultimately as it turns out my tv's cannot accommodate most larger resolutions fully so instead I have to live with moderate overscan on 240p content and as such having the horizontal porches set to maintain the 4:3 ratio allows me to just play the games without bothering with any geometrical settings and just live with some overscan on the higher res content. I really like that Groovymame allows one to set things up any way one wants.

I do have one thing I can't figure out and that is what alternatives are there for times where I would want to force a higher res game to fit in a 224p image (such as 240 or 256) and not have texts look weird at times (like they do in R-Type or ZeroTeam). Is there no hlsl or other shader that I could apply in these situations so that things still look smooth (aside from going to 480i)?
I'm trying to figure this out as I don't intend to go shopping for new tv's at this moment (although eventually I would like to get an arcade monitor for Groovy).

« Last Edit: February 14, 2019, 02:41:03 pm by Neilalphazeta »

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #106 on: February 14, 2019, 03:08:53 pm »
and given the reasonable assumption that the intention was to fill a 4:3 screen it does imply that some (and I hate to use this word, can’t think of another) stretching is mandated to fill the picture, either vertically or horizontally.  How MUCH stretching seems to be the question.

Your reasoning requires to introduce "stretching" because you're based on an anachronism: the concept of square pixels.

There are two separate concepts to realize about: screen aspect and pixel aspect. Pixel aspect was rarely 1:1 (square) in the CRT era.


The only way that I can make sense of that statement is to assume that the CRT guns are doing one of the following 2 things:

1.) Increase the beam height to fill in the additional vertical space but keep the gaps between the lines the same....or
2.) Keep the beam height the same but increase the gaps (space) between them to fill the screen.

I would think it would be the latter, but perhaps neither.  I would love to know how in that video the vertical was increased but it does not affect the aspect ratio.  I guess I've spent to much time in photoshop, cause in trying to reconcile how the horizontal picture stays the same but the vertical is expanded and it does not affect the aspect ratio.....well that makes my brain hurt.

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #107 on: February 14, 2019, 04:00:28 pm »
I don't think people were asking those kind of questions back then. The only tv's and monitors we had in arcades and at home were 4:3 so it wouldn't have made sense for game designers to purposely want to miss out on screen space by using resolutions such as 5:4 or 3:2. If you look at CPS games in their pixel resolution then you'll notice everything looks fat, that couldn't possibly be what they intended right? They purposely drew the characters that way knowing it would be stretched inwards to properly fit the screen. :)

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #108 on: February 14, 2019, 04:09:47 pm »
I don't think people were asking those kind of questions back then. The only tv's and monitors we had in arcades and at home were 4:3 so it wouldn't have made sense for game designers to purposely want to miss out on screen space by using resolutions such as 5:4 or 3:2. If you look at CPS games in their pixel resolution then you'll notice everything looks fat, that couldn't possibly be what they intended right? They purposely drew the characters that way knowing it would be stretched inwards to properly fit the screen. :)

I believe Calamitys comment says that no stretching takes place, that’s what I’m trying to understand.  When I make those adjustments using my TV’s menu it certainly appears to change the aspect ratio to me.

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #109 on: February 14, 2019, 04:14:01 pm »
I think it's because the tv has no horizontal pixels, it looks like this (in the case of aperture grille, but shadow mask is the same idea with a different shape):


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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #110 on: February 14, 2019, 04:22:47 pm »
I believe Calamitys comment says that no stretching takes place, that’s what I’m trying to understand.  When I make those adjustments using my TV’s menu it certainly appears to change the aspect ratio to me.

You're confusing "analog scaling" (as shown in the video) with "analog display" (as explained in the other thread). Obviously the former alters the pixel's aspect ratio and with it, the picture's aspect ratio. If you do it to just fill the screen for every game as it should be, you'll have different pixel aspect depending on the resolution, whereas the picture's aspect will always be of 4 : 3.



Quote
The “designing for RGB” vs poorer signal standards seems like a silly argument to me as SCART in Europe provided for a RGB connection, so how could developers design console games for the inferior North American composite/RF and ignore the European RGB?  In addition as you pointed out they developed the games undoubtedly on RGB monitors, so there’s that.

Well, "European RGB" was for sure ignored by the Japanese manufacturers -- they never gave a ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- until the DC/GCN. But RGB in Japan was a little bit more availaible than in the US. There're official RGB Super Famicom cables since day 1, for instance.
« Last Edit: February 14, 2019, 04:30:32 pm by Recapnation »

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #111 on: February 14, 2019, 04:28:27 pm »
I believe Calamitys comment says that no stretching takes place, that’s what I’m trying to understand.  When I make those adjustments using my TV’s menu it certainly appears to change the aspect ratio to me.

You're confusing "analog scaling" (as shown in the video) with "analog display" (as explained in the other thread). Obviously the former alters the pixel's aspect ratio and with it, the picture's aspect ratio. If you do it to just fill the screen for every game as it should be, you'll have different pixel's aspect depending on the resolution, whereas the picture's aspect will always be of 4 : 3.


Sounds like we are saying the same thing, that the intention on the part of the game designers was for adjustments to be made to the Display via hardware to fill the screen which renders a 4:3 image. 

If however you did not adjust the vertical height then wouldn’t you agree that the picture has a different aspect ratio?  I mean physically the picture looks different, regardless if the resolution stays the same.

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #112 on: February 14, 2019, 04:35:42 pm »
It's a yes when we're talking about small aftermath adjustments, but that's not what I or Calamity were addressing. It was this:


Quote
You’ll have to explain that one, as the ratio of pixels describes the ratio of the picture.  A 1920x1080 resolution is a 16:9 picture (division of both equals 1.77777), how could a resolution of 400x254 be a 4:3 ratio when the math works out to (1.574 vs 1.333)?  I’m confused.

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Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
« Reply #113 on: February 14, 2019, 04:37:45 pm »
It's a yes when we're talking about small aftermath adjustments, but that's not what I or Calamity were addressing. It was this:


Quote
You’ll have to explain that one, as the ratio of pixels describes the ratio of the picture.  A 1920x1080 resolution is a 16:9 picture (division of both equals 1.77777), how could a resolution of 400x254 be a 4:3 ratio when the math works out to (1.574 vs 1.333)?  I’m confused.

I’m with you that pixels don’t have to be 1:1 on a CRT, that makes sense.  Thanks for clarifying.