Feature suggestion: Dynamic properties

[dmworking247]

I'm having some trouble with optimising video properties in MAME, and I started wondering about if/how Mala could help.

My specific problem is that if I set keep-aspect to 1 (for proper vertical games) many horizontal games have a black border, ie only take up 80% of the screen. I good game to test this problem with is Bubble Bobble.

If I set resolution to 'auto' instead of fixed 800x600, I seem to get other problems, such as Asteroids tries to take up 200% of the screen (ie it actually scrolls around to fit on the screen).

So I've had to resort to using game-specific .ini files in the MAME\INI directory. In the main MAME.ini I have got my resolution set to 800x600, and keep_aspect to 0 (as this stretches the horizontal games nicely to take up the whole screen). For vertical games however, I am creating the game-specific ini files one by one to keep_aspect = 1 (so that the vertical games aren't stretched to the full width).

The feature request
This got me thinking whether Mala could support suplimental MAME command line properties (or edit mame.ini like the screen rotation option does) based on properties of the game rom.

Example:
If rom controller type = lightgun then offscreen_reload = 1
If orientation = vertical then keep_aspect = 1
etc

Thoughts?

[loadman]

Have you not hit the Advanced button on the options-mame config- basics tab?

Here you can set additional command line parameters conditional on various items including orientation.

Try that