Robotron, Centipede and other games. Not Full Screen

[Zeosstud]

Hello All,
              I swear I tried..  I cant for the life of me make these games go full screen.  I have a clean install of Windows XP on an old IBM Thinkpad A31, all drivers up to date and windows patches..  The ONLY thing on here is Mame.  Its a version I compiled myself but an original version does the same thing.  I have tried so many setting in the .ini file I am just sick to my stomach.  Nothing I can come up with works.  If anyone has any suggestions I am all ears.  I have used an external LCD and the built in screen, no change.  I have loaded if from a front end and loaded it from command line. I have tried MameUI.  I got nothing.

- Rodney

[EwJ]

Other than double checking the ini for artwork, backdrop,bezel,overlay,etc being off, i got nothing, except maybe posting your ini here to see if someone might catch something.  Do some games run full screen?

[DJ_Izumi]

It's likely that the LCD panel isn't resizing automatically.  Either that it can't or that it's not set to do so.

LCD's have a 'native' resolution and when given a signal less they either need to stretch it, or don't and leave a black space all around.

You just need to get MAME running at the same resolution as the native resolution of the panel.

[Zeosstud]

1st, Thanks for the replies.  I can post the ini alittle later but I have to say, I messed with that silly thing for HOURS last night.  Yes, some games run full screen just fine, most in fact I would say.  Problem is the most important ones dont.  I will continue to try. 

- Rodney

[Ginsu Victim]

I'm definitely interested in looking at that INI. Something is messed up.

[zelony]

These games are vertical orientation, they will never be full screen on a horizontal monitor.  Now, if you have a vertical monitor and it won't fill the screen that is a different story.

[Ummon]

If you're using newer mame, it may be a matter of aspect ratio, so check whether 'autoselect aspect' on the SCREEN tab is checked. Try it both ways.

[MaximRecoil]

These games are vertical orientation, they will never be full screen on a horizontal monitor.  Now, if you have a vertical monitor and it won't fill the screen that is a different story.

Robotron is not a vertical game.

Have you tried setting the resolution of the game in MAME to match the resolution of your monitor? It is on "auto" by default. If that doesn't work, then it could be that your video card doesn't support hardware stretching. If your video card doesn't support hardware stretching (or if you have a video card driver issue, or you have the wrong settings for the video card configuration), then you will only get the direct multiple of the game's native resolution that is closest to the resolution that you told it to run in.

For example, say your monitor is an LCD with a native resolution of 1280 x 1024. So in Robotron's properties in MAME, you set it to run at 1280 x 1024. With properly working hardware stretching, it would squeeze and stretch the image to exactly 1280 x 1024 and fill your screen perfectly. However, without hardware stretching, it is only going to give you a direct multiple of the original 292 x 240 resolution, which would be 1168 x 960, and the rest will be a black border.

Another possibility is that you have the wrong aspect ratio selected in MAME. If you want the game to fill your screen perfectly, then you need the aspect ratio in MAME to match your monitor's aspect ratio. The default for MAME used to be 4:3 but with newer versions I think it defaults to "autoselect aspect". So if MAME is defaulting to e.g., 4:3 and you have a 5:4 or 16:10 monitor, then it is not ever going to fill the screen correctly. BTW, if you do have a widescreen monitor, old games are going to look weird stretched to fill it.

So, in MAME's default options (assuming MAMEUI), manually set the resolution and aspect ratio to match your monitor. If that doesn't work with a fresh copy of MAME, then I would suspect your video card as the problem.

[Zeosstud]

Frist let me say, thanks for ALL the replies.  BYOAC's really are a very helpfull bunch.  This is going to sound very low tech but is solved my problem.  I deleted the artwork and backdrop folders, that's all I did, and things worked as they should.  Rest assured I had set those setting in the mame.ini to 0, I mean, its the very first thing I did after running mame -cc.  It seems for whatever reason the games were setting up as if there was a bezel even though that area was just black.  Its a mystery to me but the problem is solved so I have moved on to other challenges.

Thanks again to everyone,

- Rodney