MAME and S-Video Settings for Great Picture Quality

[c0ntra]

Hey everyone,

I'm new to the forum but I've been dabbling in MAME and tweaking my cabinet for a little over 3 years now. I'm writing this thread because I think I've finally gotten everything set up to a point where I'm quite pleased with the picture quality using a 27" Orion Television (Flat Toshiba Tube) and S-Video. I spent the last several weeks on a quest to obtain native resolutions on my cabinet, but through much research, I believe (and correct me if I'm wrong) that due to my S-Video setup, I'm limited to displaying a 480i picture on my TV whether I want it or not. Not letting that get the best of me, I managed (through the help of this forum and the MAME newvideo.txt) to get a clear crisp picture which has no screen tearing, and almost....almost....perfect unskipped sound.

After spending hours and hours on this, here are the modified parameters in my MAME.INI file which I finally set on using. I hope it will help people in my similar situation as I've yet to see a single post anywhere online which includes all of these tips combined.

Code: [Select]


#
# CORE PERFORMANCE OPTIONS
#

sleep                     0
refreshspeed              60

#
# WINDOWS PERFORMANCE OPTIONS
#

priority                  1
multithreading            1

#
# WINDOWS VIDEO OPTIONS
#

video                     d3d
prescale                  2
effect                    sharp
syncrefresh               1

#
# DIRECTDRAW-SPECIFIC OPTIONS
#

hwstretch                 0

#
# DIRECT3D-SPECIFIC OPTIONS
#

d3dversion                9
filter                    1

#
# PER-WINDOW VIDEO OPTIONS
#

resolution0               640x480@60

#
# FULL SCREEN OPTIONS
#

triplebuffer              1
switchres                 1


Now I realize some of these changes might be direct-draw specific, but I've included them anyway (just in case . Purists out there might hate on my 60hz forced refresh speed but I honestly love how it ends up looking; everything is smooth, and there's no video jitter.

There are two interesting options which to my eyes look like they result in a similar picture, but I've decided to stick with what the MAME developers suggested I use, and those are the filter and prescale options.

Filter=1 and Prescale=1 ends up looking very blurry on my television, with some colours like reds bleeding outside of the pixels a bit, so as suggested I changed Prescale to 2, and this cleaned up the picture considerably. What I'm confused with is, if I keep prescale at 1, and turn off filter, the picture looks the same as with my settings above, so I'm not quite sure what the difference could be.

Originally I had attempted to make direct draw work with hwstretch off and switchres on but it always ended with either certain games running in a very small window, or overscaled to the point where I was only seeing 1/4 of the screen. I think if I had component inputs this would probably not be an issue, but alas my television despite having a GREAT high contrast tube made in 2003, doesn't include one.

To further improve the picture quality however, I managed to find the service menu code for my television, and was able to crank up the sharpness beyond what the user menu allowed making resulting in a very striking vibrant picture which I love. Its possibly the best picture I've seen on a tube television ever. If you have a toshiba based tv, try remote-9 and volume-down (on tv) to access this menu.

If you're using svideo to connect your MAME pc to a television, then I highly suggest trying the above options as you may be as impressed as I was afterwards.

Thank you arcadecontrols.com for having quite a few awesome threads on monitor/video set ups, as it was quite enlightening!

Feel free to suggest anything that might further improve my set up, I'm all ears

[Ummon]

<kinda wondering here....> You keep saying directdraw, but it looks like you're using D3D. Another thing is that there isn't a 'sharp' effect in mame after the re-write. I'm surprised games are loading...or maybe it's just disregarding it. Also it comes to mind that turning off the bilinear filtering may reduce some CPU usage. And I'm betting what caused the greatest clarity in the picture was the service menu sharpness tweaking.

In any case, what version of mame are you using?  And pictures are always nice.

[c0ntra]

<kinda wondering here....> You keep saying directdraw, but it looks like you're using D3D. Another thing is that there isn't a 'sharp' effect in mame after the re-write. I'm surprised games are loading...or maybe it's just disregarding it. Also it comes to mind that turning off the bilinear filtering may reduce some CPU usage. And I'm betting what caused the greatest clarity in the picture was the service menu sharpness tweaking.

In any case, what version of mame are you using?  And pictures are always nice.

I mentioned that I originally had attempted with directdraw but eventually went with Direct3D, hence the D3D option in the ini file. I didn't realize that the sharp effect had gone away...when I took a closer look today, you're right, mame is looking for something which isn't there but it never caused any issues other than a quick warning upon load about sharp.png missing, so lucky me I removed it from the ini today....
The video sharpness is definitely not only due to the service menu tweaks I did, as if I turn prescale to 1 and filter 1, the image becomes blurry, but with filter off, or filter on + prescale 2, its sharp and clear.....just not quite sure what the technical difference is. According to the newvideo.txt docs here's what the MAME devs claim is happening:

Code: [Select]


If you dislike the blurry look of the graphics, you can specify the
-nofilter option to disable bilinear filtering, though that will
produce blocky artifacts. Alternatively, you can use the -prescale
option which is described at the end of this article.

...


If you are running in Category 1 (-video d3d), then -prescale will
use your video card to scale the game graphics up before rendering
them to the screen. Depending on the video card, this is usually a
small performance hit, but not too significant. The benefit is that
each prescale factor reduces the blurriness of the pixels.
-prescale 1 is the default, which does no scaling. -prescale 2 will
double each pixel, -prescale 3 will triple each pixel, etc. For my
money, -prescale 2 is sufficient, but people with super high
resolution displays claim that larger -prescale factors work even
better.


So they essentially say with the combo filter 0, prescale 1, you get artifacts, but with filter 1, prescale >1, you get a sharp image (i'm assuming without artifacts?) Either way, the image looks identically sharp, so I'm hard pressed to know what these artifacts look like. Obviously if there's a performance gain to be had by setting filter to 0 then I would like to know what the downside would be visually.

Thanks

[c0ntra]

Oh, and I apologize for the lack of pics in this thread.... I currently don't have a digital camera but the girlfriend is thinking of picking one up within the next few days so maybe she will let me snap a couple shots for all of you.... maybe next week??

[Ummon]

Either of you have a camera in your cells?

[Beretta]

i curious to know as well, i came to the same conclusion as you did.

that prescale turned up seems to be the same as just turning of filtering.

and as was mentioned cranking up the prescale does eat cpu time, turning filtering off can actually help with speed (slightly)

i've also read about the artifacts.. and indeed that maybe true, but i have'nt noticed any either so im curious what to look for.

i think perhaps it uses some selective line doubling which would effect the proportion of things.. but im not sure, i suppose the real test is rather or not they look good to you.. for me the answer is yes so i guess at the end of the day thats what matters.. if it looks good to you then who cares if it's "technically" 100%? after all we're emulating here it'll never be 100% authentic.. it's all a skin deep mimic.

[november]

What cab are you using?

What width and height is the tv?

I would prefer not to use a TV but I really just want a nice LARGE picture in my cab.

Just started a thread about using 2 lcd's either vertically or horizontally to fill the whole window up.

I would have to take off the frames of course, but I'm assuming it wouldn't look too bad...

If I do it, it could be a $500 mistake though lol....so I'm hesitant.