New to GroovyMAME : 640x288 ?

[Pixeljunkie]

Hi everybody

I have always used an ArcadeVGA5000 in combination with Windows 7 for my cab.
Just recently I acquired a brand new, faster pc that doesn’t play well with the card. Using my ArcadeVGA in the new pc with Windows 10, the card won’t output 15Khz during BIOS screen & boot, whereas it does perfectly in my old pc. It does output 15Khz in Windows though. Changing to Windows 7 doesn’t help, looks like the BIOS of the new pc doesn’t like the card.

On my CRT scart TV, with the old pc, I always used a fixed resolution of 640x288 for both the desktop, frontend and games running in MAME. Worked like a charm. When I try to use that resolution in Windows 10 on the new pc, all games look super skinny, please check attached image. No amount of adjusting helps, width size is already maxed out.

Out of frustration and despair, and after finding out about groovyMAME, I bought a card from arcade express that has already been patched with the Atom BIOS and i’m going to install it this evening using some of the tutorials. But I can’t seem to find how to run my desktop & all games in groovyMAME in the fixed resolution of 640x288. I have read so many posts but I really can’t find it.

Can someone please help me ? Would be very much appreciated

[Substring]

Azerty keyboard   
But I'm of no other help excect suggesting "oh give up windows, and join the dark side of the force on GroovyArcade"

[Pixeljunkie]

Azerty keyboard   
But I'm of no other help excect suggesting "oh give up windows, and join the dark side of the force on GroovyArcade"

I don’t have a clue on how to get my ipac & general hardware drivers working under linux 

[Calamity]

Pixeljunkie,

If you set your desktop at 640x288, MAME will wrongly assume your monitor's aspect ratio is 2.22, that's the reason for the incorrect stretching. In order to fix this, edit mame.ini and set aspect 4:3 (it's "auto" by default).

With regards to running everything at 640x288 well... please don't do that, you deserve better. Follow GM/CRT Emudriver tutorials. Or simply burn GA in a pendrive and try.

[Pixeljunkie]

Pixeljunkie,

If you set your desktop at 640x288, MAME will wrongly assume your monitor's aspect ratio is 2.22, that's the reason for the incorrect stretching. In order to fix this, edit mame.ini and set aspect 4:3 (it's "auto" by default).

With regards to running everything at 640x288 well... please don't do that, you deserve better. Follow GM/CRT Emudriver tutorials. Or simply burn GA in a pendrive and try.

Thank you for the help 
I will try my best following the tutorials. The reason for running my desktop in 640x288 is because 640x480 interlaced looks terrible on my crt

[psakhis]

I recommend you GroovyArcade, i'm pretty sure that works on your hardware.

[Substring]

Azerty keyboard   
But I'm of no other help excect suggesting "oh give up windows, and join the dark side of the force on GroovyArcade"

Hoefully there is a merry discord community that is pretty eager to help any lost sheep 

[Pixeljunkie]

Azerty keyboard   
But I'm of no other help excect suggesting "oh give up windows, and join the dark side of the force on GroovyArcade"

Hoefully there is a merry discord community that is pretty eager to help any lost sheep 

I’ve looked at some YouTube videos & it looks great, I have to admit..
But one of the reasons I want to use a fixed resolution, is that I don’t want to adjust the monitor for every game that has a different screen size. From what i’ve seen, you end up having black borders 

That’s the main reason why I always stayed away from GroovyMAME to be honest.

[abispac]

runing games at 640x288 aint that bad, games look ok and as long as you have fun , thats wha it really should mater. Back in the days when we had dos, im dont really recall if games were running in theyr natural resolution or a certain fixed resolution, all we cared was, the game was running on a crt screen. Now, having groovymame and emudrivers is a blessing as most games can run at theyr natural resolution with no problem. If a certain game runs and gets black bars or starts scroling, i just create a ini file for that particular game to run at 640x480, witch makes the game stable. Now un multigames, since verticl games i run with a bezel to fill out the whole screen, i just create a fixed ini for vertival games and they all run good. I still get some games that give some hiccups li mr do, but i get working just fine with a mrdo ini. So in that way , most games run in thery natural resolution and some not but they all look great to me, im not a purist. 

[makya]

Well, just my opinion but having occasional small black borders is way more preferable than being off frequency-wise (@288p you must be stuck @50Hz) and resolution-wise 99.9% of the time.