Mame over-stretching a couple of classic games

[Sylentwulf]

27" TV set at 640*480 res. through S-video to a Radeon 7200.

Mame stretches out missile command and pac man too much, missile command scrolls the screen about an inch when I go to the top/bottom/sides.
Pacman just cuts the bottom 1-2 inches off.

Using Mamewah.

Thanx!

[etumor]

My guess is that MAME is trying to display the games at something other than 640x480, and your video card is having trouble pushing other resolutions out to the TV.

The simplest solution is to disable "switchres."  In MAME32, do the following:

Go to: Options->Default Game Options
Click on the Advanced tab.
Uncheck the box that says "Switch resolutions to fit."

If you are using a commandline MAME, then set the following line in the mame.ini file:

switchres 0

(the default is "switchres 1").

Or if you are setting your mame options by using the command line, use the following switch:

-noswitchres

Regards,
Jeff "etumor"

EDIT:

I am assuming that you can see your entire desktop when you are not in MAME.  If not, then you need to experiment and see if you can get your video card to output any other resolutions (such as 800x600) that fit in more of the desktop.

[Sylentwulf]

I'll give the switchres 0 a try in the mame.ini
But, doesn't that mean it won't be changing any games at ALL? Most games it stretches perfectly, the desktop and mamewah look good.

Maybe I'll give 800*600 a try, the only reason I had it at 640*480 was because windows was hard to read and it seemed to flicker a little bit less.

Just found out that Tapper also gets overstretched last night.

[etumor]

Odds are your video card can only output correctly to the TV at 2 or 3 resolutions -- probably 640x480, 800x600, and (maybe) 1024x768.  When trying to find a good resolution, Mame tries some other oddball ones, like 400x300 (or much lower if you are using DOS mame, but I am assuming you aren't) and these don't display right because the video card wasn't designed to handle them (not for TV out, anyway).  However, if you are using hardware stretching, it doesn't really matter much what resolution you use, the games will come out about the same (with some exceptions -- vector games look better at higher resolutions, for example).

Mame does a series of calculations to decide what resolution to use.  Odds are that for the games that are fitting correctly, it is using 640x480, so setting it to use that for ALL games probably won't be a problem.  If it is, then just use the switch on a game-by-game basis (I haven't used MameWAH, but I'm sure it lets you set this).

-Jeff "etumor"

[GameDork]

I'll give the switchres 0 a try in the mame.ini
But, doesn't that mean it won't be changing any games at ALL? Most games it stretches perfectly, the desktop and mamewah look good.

Maybe I'll give 800*600 a try, the only reason I had it at 640*480 was because windows was hard to read and it seemed to flicker a little bit less.

Just found out that Tapper also gets overstretched last night.

I first noticed this with Tapper, I have an ArcadeVGA with an arcade monitor, I'm just waiting for MinWah to check out the bug with the ArcadeVGA M.A.M.E. Res. Tool and Mame .85 to correct mine, Hopefully!!

[Sylentwulf]

changing to 800*600 didn't change anything.
Can anyone tell me how to set all the games to use 640*480 with mamewah (or the mame.ini, or whatever)?

[etumor]

Okay, let's back up a minute here.  Which version of MAME are you using?  MAME32?  Or commandline Windows MAME?  Or some other version?

-Jeff "etumor"

[Sylentwulf]

Mame (I'm guessing command line mame? Just Mame version .83 I believe) through Mamewah and windows XP

[etumor]

In that case you should be able to follow the directions I already outlined to disable screen resolution switching.  Just open mame.ini with a text editor and make the change.  There is also a line to set the resolution in there.  The default is "auto" but you can change it to 640x480.  The change will effectively be the same as disabling screen res switching.

Also, make sure that hwstretch is set to 1, and keepaspect is set to 1 (these are default settings, so if you haven't modified them before then they shouldn't have changed).

Now unfortunately, I don't know if MameWAH overrides the ini defaults by inserting this stuff into the command line (it might).  So I would first try launching one of the games in question straight from the command line to see if it works properly.  If it does, then launch it from MameWAH to see if the results are the same.  If they are different, then you will need to learn how to configure MameWAH.

-Jeff "etumor"

[Sylentwulf]

In that case you should be able to follow the directions I already outlined to disable screen resolution switching.  Just open mame.ini with a text editor and make the change.  There is also a line to set the resolution in there.  The default is "auto" but you can change it to 640x480.  The change will effectively be the same as disabling screen res switching.

Also, make sure that hwstretch is set to 1, and keepaspect is set to 1 (these are default settings, so if you haven't modified them before then they shouldn't have changed).

Now unfortunately, I don't know if MameWAH overrides the ini defaults by inserting this stuff into the command line (it might).  So I would first try launching one of the games in question straight from the command line to see if it works properly.  If it does, then launch it from MameWAH to see if the results are the same.  If they are different, then you will need to learn how to configure MameWAH.

-Jeff "etumor"

PERFECT. Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you