Need help navigating MAME source

[AlanS17]

Heck, if you just want a switch...

-mirror
-split
-reflect

It doesn't matter. Just so long as we're not getting ahead of ourselves here.

[lokki]

Hi,
Been looking at the MAME Plus code for the past couple of days, and while I still have not been able to figure it all out, it looks like it may be a good framework to try to implement dual monitor support.

Here is kind of my understanding of what I am talking about. When one of the scale effects is used on mameplus, mame+ creates a new direct draw surface that is the size of the scaled surface. (original size 240x280. using scale 2x new surface is 480x560) and has custom blitters to scale the original bitmap to this surface.  A similar approach to this could be implemented, if a dual monitor game is played. Create two directdraw (one is needed for each monitor) objects and surfaces for each, and have the blitter copy half the bitmap to one surface and the other half to the other surface.  (or if running single monitor, then blit half of the bitmap to one of the surfaces (monitor 1, or 2) .

Will ned to know a few things. for example if the resolution on both monitors is the same cut in half horizontally (or vertically) , or be able to configure from the driver the resolution for each of the drivers).

I just read a bunch of posts about this, and it looks like this was one of the method that has been suggested. Not a generic suitable for official mame solution, but as a will probably work for some games keep your hacked build to yourslve type of solution.


Was not sure which thread I should post on, looks like there are a couple of threads touching on this at the moment.

[lokki]

I finally made some progress.

Need to play with the options to see if it will look OK flipped fullscreen.

Haven't measured the performance loss, but does not seem to be big.

It's late I will continue with this tomorrow.

[EndTwist]

I finally made some progress.

Need to play with the options to see if it will look OK flipped fullscreen.

Haven't measured the performance loss, but does not seem to be big.

It's late I will continue with this tomorrow.

Will this also work with the -rol and -ror options?

[lokki]

yes ror, and rol work. (they look the same but they work.

[EndTwist]

Yay

[lokki]

Been playing with this for a while now and here are a few more items.

As you can probably tell from the Screen shots the aspect ratio looks off. (images look squished). But this actually looks great running this in full screen using the -nokeepaspect and ror (or rol)  . Not using this option displays black borders at the bottoms (when using ror or rol in vertical mode) with the images centered at the image. so I don't think I get any points for accurate emulation.

Also I'm using MAME Plus source code, and the implementation relies heavily on enhancements already made to MAME.  So I have no idea how hard it will be to port this to older/different versions of MAME.

Basically what I did was I added a new scale_effect currently called duprot (duplicate and rotate), but a nicer name is needed  (leaning towards Head2HeadCocktail what do you guys think?)

Sample of current command line

C:\mame>mameppp kof98  -scale_effect duprot  -resolution 1024x512 -d3d -tb -hws -ror -noka

I am not done with the code, different color depths need to be supported separately and I only have the 15-16 color depth implemented  (8 will not be supported not really sure what games use this) so I need to add 32. Also I have not tested performance I would like to get some clear numbers re performance, and the code could probably use a little tweaking.  Most of these blittters are implemented in Straight C and assembly in mame plus, I have only coded the C portion but hope it is enough for most uses.

Hopefully the guys at MAMEPlus can add this code to their build, I will sending the code in the next few days for their consideration.

Speaking of MAMEPlus, I had never tried it before but it does look pretty cool. So I will probably be using this on my cocktail machine.

[Howard_Casto]

better add 8 bit support..... all games prior to 1984 are in 8 bit color.  Of course, most of those have cocktail mode (except the horizontal ones)

for the effect, just call it "mirrored"

[lokki]

better add 8 bit support..... all games prior to 1984 are in 8 bit color.

[Howard_Casto]

I figure so then. 

This is odd as official mame dropped support for 8 bit resolutions ages ago.  Seems a litle crazy that the 32plus guys would put it back in (it's not terribly useful in windows, only in dos)  and then not code their efects to support it. 

Oh well, them guys must be crazy or somethin.

I wouldn't bother with the vectors...... taking a 19 inch display raster display, cutting it in half and then drawing thin lines on it.  I don't think it'd be very playable anyway. 

[AlanS17]

How many 2-player simultaneous horizontal vector games were there, anyways? (Answer: Not enough to warrant the effort.)

[lokki]

Just tried to run this on galaga with interesting results.

[Popcorrin]

Any new updates with this project?

[lokki]

Been busy with real life, so I have not spent much time on this since the last post.
I have done a bit of cleaning up nothing that would be visible, I hope I can submit the code to the mameplus devs this weekend.
Did a few timing tests and it did loose performance by 3-4%.  Which was not really a problem for any of the games I tested, but may wish to consider on lowend systems.

[mortacci]

Does anyone have the code to do this for mamePlus .100 ? I am interested in the mirroring feature. Maybe someone can tell me where I can find a completed compiled version of this for I686.

Thanks.