I'm kinda partial to the type of 'scanlines' you see on 25" and 27" monitors. Recently I was messing around with D3D on pre-video re-write mame and came up with the following. (No pictures for obvious reasons, but you can try this yourself if you have the hardware.)
- pre-re-write mame + D3D
- texture management: perhaps on for horizontal games, on of off for vertical games, likely off for scrolling games in general.
- rotate effects "off", especially vertical games
- scanlines 50-25 percent, depending on the game and monitor used
- prescale: if using an SVGA/XGA 27" monitor, "2" or "none". PC monitor, generally, 'none'.
- advanced tab: up fullscreen brightness to at least 1.15, though higher for various vertical games; enabling D3D over-rides DD, but if you're worried about it you can turn off directdraw; fullscreen brightness still works, despite being grayed out.
Caveats:
- seems any desktop setting below 1280x1024 will artifact
- because of the integer stretch due to use of the 'scanlines' effect, most horizontal games (one exception I found was World Class Bowling), and 224x288 games displayed horizontally, will not fit the display area.
- this fluctuates per desktop resolution, though. At SXGA, the above is the case. However, in my testing at 1600x1200, most horizontal, and 224x288 games run horizontally, did fill the screen. 224x256 and 240x256 were reversed and didn't fit the screen. I tried the desktop at 2048x1536, but got overscan and a scrolling desktop (which, curiously, you can scroll with your mouse in-game).