Horizontal games on vertical monitor question

[Paladin]

I posted this in the monitor/video section, but didn't get any responses so I'm trying it here in main.

I've got a vertical mounted 25" arcade monitor, a PC with an AGP ArcadeVGA, and I'm using MAME .103.

My issue is with horizontal games, the right side of the screen is getting chopped off.  I've run the resolution tool with vertical monitor option checked, and set up the mame.ini to the recommendations on the Ultimarc website.

For a couple years I've been using an old setup with noname mame .63, and only 300 or so games.  I couldn't ever get the resolution tool to work right back then either, so I manually went into each horizontal games .ini file and changed them to hwstretch 1, effect sharp and resolution 288x640.

Is there some simple thing that I'm doing wrong here that's preventing me from getting horizontal games to display the full width?  I'm changing my cabinet to use a new front end and a full ROM set, so editing every horizontal .ini file isn't a realistic option.  I wouldn't have thought that I'm the first person to have this problem, but I haven't been able to find anything with the search function.

Any help would be appreciated!

[juggle50]

How much of the right side is getting chopped off?  I run my horizontal games on a vertical monitor and I found the resolution tool fairly useless. I manually change all of my horizontal games to 600x800 using GDI mode in MAME version 118. (It's said that GDI is really slow but I've not experienced that.)  I use MAME32 with MALA.  I like that set up because I find that changing things in MAME32 is way faster that editing an ini file.

[TheShanMan]

(juggle, I use MameUI with Mala too, for the same reason.)

I have a vertical 21" PC monitor and I don't have to do any special configuring to get horizontal games to fit. I imagine the arcadevga/arcade monitor setup must make a difference though.

Hope you get to the bottom of it!

[FrizzleFried]

There is a huge difference between configuring horizontal games on a vertical PC (31khz) monitor and doing the same on a standard resolution arcade (15khz) monitor.  The biggest difference is that the standard resolution monitor has very limited resolutions it supports. 

While I've never tried setting up horizontal games on a vertical monitor,  I do know that setting up vertical games on a horizontal ARCADE monitor is impossible to do without some of the top/bottom being cut off....i'd assume the same is true going the other way.

[Minwah]

While I've never tried setting up horizontal games on a vertical monitor,  I do know that setting up vertical games on a horizontal ARCADE monitor is impossible to do without some of the top/bottom being cut off....i'd assume the same is true going the other way.

Yes...on a vertical screen you will have 240-300ish (probably 240 or 256 in practice) pixels width.  To fit most horizontal games on you would need to use hwstretch to *squash* the image to fit...not ideal, but better than nothing!

[juggle50]

I guess I should specify what I have.  I use a multisync monitor with an Arcade VGA card.  All of my vertical games are played at the correct res.  However, with my horizontal I use the 600 x 800 GDI set up.  Of course I get black bars at the top and bottom but I believe it displays at the correct aspect ratio and nothing gets chopped off.

[G1zm0]

im in the process of putting a scart tv as a vertical monitor since the original arcade monitor was busted.
 im going to use the arcade vga card and also ive got the engineers code for the tv to set the geometry so it fits snug.

all i need to do is figure out what fromt end to use and how to get it to boot mame up in vertical mode

[Paladin]

On the one hand I'm glad that it wasn't a simple oversite, but on the other hand I can't believe the resolution tool doesn't account for this.  I just assumed that you tell it what orientation your monitor is so it would set up all the games accordingly.  It seems to me that there would be enough people with this setup that a solution would have been found.

[juggle50]

I think you'd be surprised by how few people here have this set up.  I think most people here have large 25" to 27" monitors mounted horizontally.  When games are played vertically on this type of set up the vertical games are scaled down to about 19" which is actually the size of the origional vertical games from the 80s.  And people seem pretty happy with that.  I think that most people who have a Mame cab with a vertical monitor use it exclusively for vertical games.


Also, I think that res tool was developed by someone with a horizontal monitor so they weren't thinking to hard about people like us.  I even emailed Andy Warne about the best way to set up MAME coupled with an ArcadeVGA card to play horizontal games on a vertically mounted monitor and he didn't know and said very few people had ever inquired about it.

It's only been recently that other emulators like Daphne have even had a rotational feature.

Anyway, let me know what works for you.  Do you have a cocktail cab or an upright?  If you have a cocktail cab Mame 107 and up have a great head to head feature that is really cool when playing horizontal games.