Mala resolution switch problem

[NelsonPJ]

I've found a  Mala problem that appears to be related to a "bad" resolution switch when returning from a game.  I'm running Mala in a fixed 800x600 layout, and sometimes when returning from a game at a higher resolution, Mala appears to switch back to 800x600, but the "background" graphics of Mala only show up the the upper-left corner (it takes up maybe 2/3rds of the screen, leaving a 1/3rd screen width "band" of the desktop showing behind.  The scrolling list of games, screen shot, etc seem to be drawn in the correct places, but everything is shifted so that the interface is unusable.  It's almost as if Mala has calulated something at a higher resolution before the switch back to 800x600 was made.

I took a screen shot, but it's at home on my cabinet computer. I can post that image tonight.  Here's a bad ASCII version of what it looks like:


+-------------+
|  Mala    |     |
|            |     |
+--------+     |
|                   |
+-------------+

I've found as a workaround that rotating the display (like for cocktail mode) will fix Mala (although the screen will be upside down, of course).  Therefore I've dedicated a button on my control panel to rotate the Mala layout, and I'll press it twice to get Mala back to normal.

I'm running the latest Mala 106 beta J, but I've also seen the problem in version 105.  I've got a PentiumIII running at 933MHz, 768meg RAM, Windows XP, onboard NVidia graphics displaying to a standard computer monitor.  I had Mala previously at 1024x768, but the interface was too sluggish so I switched to 800x600.

I've seen this problem in MAME trying out ROMS that crash (and I'm guessing are running at 1024x768?).  If the MAME game doesn't crash (which is most of the time!), I don't get this problem when quitting the game.  FYI, I'm running MAME 0.95 with resolution switching.

I also get this problem consistently running that latest version of Visual Pinball at 1024x768.  In case it matters, I use closemul.exe to open Visual Pinball so that I can use the Escape key to cleanly exit the game, but I use no other closemul options.  I'm using no other pre or post commands in Mala.  As a workaround I'm now running Visual Pinball at 800x600 (same res as Mala) and have not seen the problem.

[loadman]

I think it's best to run windows at the same Rez as your MaLa Layout to avoid any savage switching.

[NelsonPJ]

I found a similar problem posted in the forums last year.  The user had a similar Mala layout problem when exiting from Stella.  It was apparently fixed by enabling OpenGL in Stella.  Was this ever addressed in a Mala update?


http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=68586.0

[NelsonPJ]

I found a similar problem posted in the forums last year.  The user had a similar Mala layout problem when exiting from Stella.  It was apparently fixed by enabling OpenGL in Stella.  Was this ever addressed in a Mala update?


http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=68586.0

And I found a followup thread that implies it's a refresh rate switching problem.  Using a video card driver to fix the refresh rate has also been found to fix this problem.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=68807.0


PS: I swear I looked for these posts using the forum search option before I posted!

[NelsonPJ]

Here's a screenshot of the layout problem.  I was running Mala in 800x600 and launched a Visual Pinball table at 1024x768.  When returning to Mala, I got this layout.