Main > Software Forum
Explanation of best MAME Version for TVs
albrigsr:
I am wondering if anyone can help explain or recommend the best version of MAME for use with a regular television. My current cabinet contains a 27 inch TV (S-Video) which is paired with an ATI card. My question really centers around MAME versions such as ADVANCE MAME or SmoothMAME, etc. which claim to be optimized for output to a television. It appears that the refresh rate, etc. is what gets optimized as well as resolutions or stretching. All games work fine for me with stretching turned on using MAME32 and I haven't noticed any problems but am wondering if there is a benefit to using one of these other versions.
Thanks for your response!
Howard_Casto:
I'll tell you what most people don't know.
Advance mame is for dos users. Yes you can run it on windows and there is a windows version, but all of it's "tv specifc" benefits can pretty much be done away with if you simply turn hardware stretch on (only available in windows) and use a fixed resolution and a refresh rate of 60. In today's world of hardware acceleration and arcadeVga cards advance mame is slowly becoming a thing of the past.
Smooth mame is an interesting one. I know a lot of people like it, but it doesn't make any sense to me. It makes every game run at 60fps I believe. Why? That doesn't make more frames in the animation, it simply takes the same frames and shows them multiple times. Yes there is less "tearing" sometimes and the game appears to be more responsive in some cases, but that's not how the game was originally in the arcades. Imho a feature that compromises arcade accuracy that much is a step in the wrong direction.
TalkingOctopus:
I tried SmoothMAME w/ my TV for a couple of weeks, but I honestly could not tell the difference so I went back to plain old official commandline mame. I don't think SmoothMAME is being released anymore anyways. Although I think it may have been incorporated into NoNameMAME.
Howard_Casto:
Well, atm anyway, noname is dead as well, so it doesn't really matter :)
sofakng:
--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on July 30, 2004, 02:01:43 am --- but all of it's "tv specifc" benefits can pretty much be done away with if you simply turn hardware stretch on (only available in windows) and use a fixed resolution and a refresh rate of 60.
--- End quote ---
Where do you turn on hardware stretch?
Also, what fixed resolution should I set?
I'm not sure how to set a fixed resolution and refresh rate, but I'm assuming it's in the MAME documentation.
[EDIT] One last thing, my desktop does not stretch to fit the entire TV screen. I think there are tools that exist to do this but I'm only familar with "TVTool" which is not free. Does anything free exist to fix this?