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Horizontal Glitch Line At Top Of Vertical Games

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Zebidee:

--- Quote from: lilshawn on October 05, 2022, 12:50:42 pm ---just to expand a bit, galaga runs on a horizontal monitor...rotated 90 degrees vertically... so at 240x320

your horizontally oriented monitor has 320x240 worth of pixels to work with. Galaga's "width" of 240 is fine, and fits within your monitor's 320 available horizontal pixels... but the Galaga's game "height" of 320 pixels is a little hard to fit in a screen with only 240 lines of resolution the monitor has available in the vertical dimension.

--- End quote ---

Galaga's original resolution (rotated) is actually 224x288@60.60. You can happily run the game in 240x320, though there will be 32 extra vertical lines (well, because CRT is rotated, they are really "pixels"). These extra lines/pixels can be an advantage, if you are running the game on a CRT TV with excessive overscan, because you can use the slider controls in mame/groovymame, and/or video mode porch settings in CRT_emudriver, to centre the screen and avoid losing any details.

For Galaga on a horizontal monitor, groovymame will run the game in 288p if that is available. That is the maximum number of (visible) progressive lines possible on a 15khz CRT (and on a CRT TV some of those lines may still be hidden due to overscan). If you have no 288p modes available, GM chooses the next best, which for your setup is 480i.

As to why first setting the desktop resolution to 2560x480i removes the glitch at the top, I don't really get that!

bumble:
Thanks Zebidee!

I actually found a way forward, though I don't love it.

My frontend is Launchbox/Bigbox. Every game in Launchbox has metadata you can edit, and one of the options is to add additional applications to run when your game starts and/or stops. With the help of a simple command line utility called "Qres", I wrote a couple of batch files. One changes the desktop resolution to 2560 x 480, and the other to 640 x 480. I set the first to run when the game starts, and the second to run when the game ends. This allows me to run the game as intended, then be able to close it and still use my frontend without stretched graphics.

Of course, LaunchBox doesn't give you the option to bulk edit this for multiple games by default. I found a plugin that allows this, you can find it here if anyone is interested in that:

https://forums.launchbox-app.com/files/file/2866-bulk-add-additional-applications/

The main drawback of this method is game startup and shutdown doesn't looks as clean as it used to. I have Windows completely hidden, and adding this method reveals a little more under the hood than I'd like. I'm sure I can figure out a way to circumvent that.

This is my solution for now, but if anyone has more information to the specifics of this glitch and a way to fix it without running these scripts that would be great!

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