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Hardware Rotation Faq (please sticky)
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Howard_Casto:
*Updated 12/29*


I'm not sure if this should be in displays or not, but here goes.
jcrouse:
Howard,
      What video card do you plan on using and at what resolution do you plan on running it? Also what monitor are you using? I have a 19" U3100 in my cocktail. I run 640x480 resolution. I tried both a GeForce 3 TI500 and a GeForce 2 MX400 (I think) along with an ATI 7000 series chipset and had more than my share of issues with the drivers. Most of them were based around the monitor not handling the the resolutions/color depths/refresh rates well and syncing problems. When I would leave a game (mame) and return to my front end (MameWAH) the monitor would just scroll. I have worked with WG on the issues. It was left standing that I may need to go onto the board on the monitor and unsolder two IC's to allow it to work correctly. Hence, as you saw in my other post, I resorted to Pivot Pro software. For me it fixed all my issues and has never missed a beat. The one annoyance is that I can't set the FE as my shell. If I do when I return to the shell from a game it just scrolls. So I just put a shortcut in the startup folder and then turn the monitor on automatically after the system has booted with the timer I spoke of before. I figure this is something to do with the Pivot Pro software needing to start to Windows to do a few things. Maybe something to do with drivers/services/dependencies, not sure. I never looked into it too deep. Anyways, I just thought I'd share my experiences in a positive constructive post.

John
Howard_Casto:
That sounds like a driver interface issue to me.  While writing this I found a nifty little tool called irotate.  What it does is interface with the drivers of all the popular video cards and handles rotation itself.  I had similar glitches before I started using it, but now everything seems to be working fine. 

One of the cool things is it supports command line switching, so I'm currently re-writing part of my fe to work well with it.  (Tell the fe not to rotate certain emulators while rotating others.... auto resizing of the skin when it's rotated, ect...) 

I'll be using a wg hybrid monitor that is capable of svga resolutions (which I don't care for, but the price was right)  so that stuff isn't as much of an issue for me.  I'll also be usign a radeon 7000. 

The pain about pivot pro is that it only rotates gdi applications, which means emulators and direct-x based front ends aren't effected.  Works for mamewah though, luckily for you.  :)

I'll probably run it at 1024x768, mainly because I plan on running some pc shooters which support vertical orientation and high resolutions. 


I hope that helps some people. 

Seriously, try out irotate, it rocks!
Howard_Casto:
Update:

I've been experimenting with visual pinball.  As I suspected the width and height are stored in the registry.  Something nice is the fact that the window isn't locked to a 4:3 aspect ratio, which means the render can be stretched to fill the whole screen when it's vertical. 

A more sensible option would be to make the window a square (like 768x768) and use the extra screen space on top to place the dmd display.


This stuff should be wrappable, so I'll work on the necessary additions to my wrapper next year.
rerstad:
One problem with iRotate that I haven't been able to work around yet (I reverted back to PivotPro in the meantime) is the keyboard shortcuts.  Ctl-Alt arrow rotates the screen, so when my nephew was playing he constantly hit P1s buttons 1 and 2 with the joystick and that would rotate the screen, meaning I had to fix it.  A bit annoying.  Maybe there's a way to change that to a far less likely combination, but I haven't been able to get anything like that to work.
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