Adventures in Tv-Overscanning Part 2: This time it's personal.

[Howard_Casto]

Ok a few months ago I mentioned how you can use the video/overscan modes on invidia  and ati cards to completely remove the blur on tvs, even if you are using svid out!  There were some issues though but I don't want to repeat myself in another thread, just check [here] for a recap.

Anyway, the new video system in mame (as of .107) brings new hope of an "auto-magic" solution.  Now when you bring up the tidle menu in mame it has the options of horizonal stretch and vertical stretch.  Set both of those to around .9 and poof your picture is no longer cropped!  Mame will save the setting for this game and you never have to do it again.  Unfortunately, there isn't a global way to set this for all games.  However, cfg files are now ascii (xml to be exact) so it would be quite easy to write a utility to set these settings for every game by first making a listxml and then making cfg files and adding in the appropriate video settings.


Also some interesting developements in the "other emulators" front.  While zinc doesn't have such an option, it does have the ability to set the resolution to lieterally anything while in windowed mode.  So you figure out the pixel value of your non-overscanned area, set it in your renderer.cfg and away you go. You don't see the window borders because they are off-screen in the overscan area, so it looks just like fullscreen even though it isn't.  The only problem is that the window doesn't always come up centered.  A utility could easy be written to fix that though.  Heck, I could include that as an option in one of my wrappers.   Daphne is undergoing changes which willl eventually allow this as well.  It used to be that daphne supported 640x480 and that was about it,  right now the cvs builds support more flexible resolutions. 


Just an update on the idea.  If you have anything to add just let me know.