MAME and Widescreen LCD

[GrandMasterTuck]

Okay, this is my first official post, and it's a question to you truly experienced folks.  I'm going to begin building my second arcade cabinet for MAME, and would like to make use of a widescreen monitor in this one.  Now, the first cab had a standard 4:3 21" CRT monitor in it, and though I liked it, I wanted to go bigger, but I don't want to purchase a bigger CRT, because I also want to go THINNER!  So here's what I want to do:  I want to build the cab using a widescreen monitor turned on its side (taller as opposed to wider), and then I want to load only vertical games into it, and I want to create a custom bezel for every game loaded, so that when you start a game, the game itself shows as large as possible in the correct aspect ratio, but shows all the way at the bottom of the screen, and in the huge empty space at the top, I want to load a PNG of the game's marquee.  That way, each game loaded will load its proper marquee at the top, and display both. 

My question is:  Is this possible?  Yeah, I know it's going to probably be a pain in the rear to get everything just right, but I want to make sure there's no real roadblocks for me before making purchases.  So, to you geniuses out there, can you see if there may be anything I'm not thinking of, in terms of "stuff that's going to make your project the seventh level of Hell"?

Some questions that sit on my mind right now: 
1.  Can you force MAME to display the arcade graphics all the way at the bottom, with space up top, as opposed to centered on the screen?  I don't want space at the bottom.

2.  I know how to create bezels through PNG images, and I'm pretty sure I know how to get them in there and working, but is there anything specific in terms of limitations I should be aware of?

I know I'm probably being too vague, but I'm taking a stab in the dark to see if anyone out there can give me the advice I need.  Or even if there's a kind soul out there willing to give me a "Can't wait to see it! Go for it!" type post.  That would be cool, too.  Anyway, thanks for helping, and thanks for making the BYOAC Forum the absolute best place to get the info you need to build a project of your own.  I couldn't have done what I did without this community!

[madengr]

I'm in the same boat as the above poster.  I'm laying out my first cabinet, based on Knievel's Woody, and want to use a widescreen LCD as they are more of a commodity.  I mainly want to play vertical games so I figured vertical mounting would be best and also keep the cabinet thin.  I presently have Mame on a mac hooked up to a widescreen TV however it won't rotate the games 90 degrees and correctly scale them to maximize the screen area.

Galaga for instance shows 288x224 (V) scan lines for the game info.  Would a ratio comparison be (288/224)*(4/3)=1.71, which is close to 16/9=1.78 ? I know LCDs use square pixels, and CRTs form rectangular ones.  I'm trying to estimate how much black-space will be left on the screen after the image is scaled to maximum dimension.  Unfortunately I don't have a windows PC (only Linux) to experiment with.  Also wondering, as did the above poster, if I can shift the image down. There are many horizontal games I like too, however I'm wondering if these will be too small on a vertically mounted 24" widescreen LCD.