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Software Support => GroovyMAME => Topic started by: Neilalphazeta on February 10, 2019, 02:21:20 am

Title: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 10, 2019, 02:21:20 am
Hello all.

Was wondering if anyone could help me figure out how to set games of different resolutions to fit onto a tv set for one set of resolutions (in my case 224p). 232p have very minor overscan and are not much of a problem, but 240p has quite a more significant amount to the point where a lot of games are missing information on the top or bottom (stuff like scores, credits etc). I'm in a setup where I run other consoles and the geometry is set to accommodate those as well so changing is not practical.

I don't run games in 240p all that often so I wouldn't mind loosing some accuracy to get the full image in.

I know I can move the H size and V size sliders within Mame but when running 240p (as well as 232p) it messes up the image by giving texts and textures a crushed look with information missing (making texts harder to read too).

For some odd reason I have no problems with the Mame adjustments for games with resolutions above 240. Any game 256p and up when running in 480i I am able to adjust to fit with no side effects. I was able to get 240p games to run in 480i but adjusting is still impossible as it still messes up the image (why would this happen on 240 but not 256 and up when both run in 480i?).

I saw Cools mention this in another thread:
"With some trickery you can do this. Force the game resolution, then play about with the vertical size (increasing it until the pixels are clear) and position sliders in game. You probably want filtering disabled too (I forget whether it's definitely unwanted or doesn't matter)"

I'm very interested in trying this but I don't know where to find a filtering to disable (can't seem to find any setting for this anywhere).
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Recapnation on February 10, 2019, 09:45:49 am
The graphic filter should be disabled by default (filter 0).
 
If with 256-into-480 you don't get missing lines when using the sliders but you do with 240-into-480 it's most likely due to having fractional scaling and filtering with the former but not with the latter, since it just doubles the lines. Try creating another interlaced mode of say, 484 lines and force it into the game. This is just a guess since what you're doing is nuts. You make all the effort of building and configuring a dedicated setup for GM to then use it with non-native interlaced resolutions. Whereas it's understandable (but not really) if you have to resort to that for extreme cases such as Mortal Kombat's, it makes no sense to prefer that to having to touch the vertical amplitude in your monitor every time you run a 240-lines game, especially if those are rare occasions as you mention.

If you reeeeally need to leave the vertical amplitude untouched, do what most people here do (and I'm sure you've already been told) -- accomodate the picture for 240 lines and just live with the underscan you'll get for sub-240 lines.

Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 10, 2019, 10:14:46 am
Ok, I wasn't aware that the only recourse would require downgrading the graphics to interlaced video. I appreciate that you took the time to explain all that and I apologize for my ignorance.   :-[

I assumed there would be a hidden trick of sorts to achieve this but it does sound like I'll just have to build a list (or tag) filled with the over 224 res games and just change the tv h and v size for playing those optimally.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Recapnation on February 10, 2019, 10:19:24 am
Ah, do not apologize for that. Everyone but Calamity was ignorant once here, I'm sure.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 10, 2019, 04:02:29 pm
It's not surprising, there's so little documentation and so much to learn and at least to me, things don't make sense at first.  :laugh:

I'm using arcade 15khz preset now with a limitation put of 59.75-60.10 on the frequency range, but somehow I still am not getting 256 content to work (switches to 480i).

Even Denjin Makai which runs at 256p and 61hz won't work (even if I expand to range to 61hz). Am I still doing something wrong?
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 10, 2019, 05:41:24 pm
It's not surprising, there's so little documentation and so much to learn and at least to me, things don't make sense at first.  :laugh:

I'm using arcade 15khz preset now with a limitation put of 59.75-60.10 on the frequency range, but somehow I still am not getting 256 content to work (switches to 480i).

Even Denjin Makai which runs at 256p and 61hz won't work (even if I expand to range to 61hz). Am I still doing something wrong?


If you used the range in the mame.ini that I think you did you indicated to GroovyMame that your TV can’t fit larger than 480 lines (interlaced) and similarity 240p (progressive). Therefore as you “can’t” display more than 240p it has to “fit” into 480 interlaced.  To fit 256 lines you would have to go back to the mame.ini and indicate that wider range, but as we know from your other thread the issue is that those games with more vertical lines cause issues because they all run at the lower frequencies which it appears the Sony TV’s can’t handle.

Each TV has a set number of vertical lines that’s why you can’t force a game that has 224 vertical lines to be the same vertical size as a game with 240, without changing the way the beams hit the screen to make it fit.  That’s why old arcade monitors had a vertical potentiometer so that you could adjust a game to fit vertically as they varied from game to game. 

Personally I don’t find the “black bars” on the top and bottom of 224 games to be distracting. However I do find losing information at the top and bottom of 240 games to be distracting, so I’ve set my the vertical adjustments for my TV to match 240p content, especially since like you I can’t display 256p content natively, instead it switches to 480i like you and fits the vertical size perfectly.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 10, 2019, 06:10:43 pm
I used these settings in the mame.ini

arcade15khz preset

crt_range0                15734-15734, 59.90-60.00, 4.700, 4.700, 6.216, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 224, 224, 448, 448
crt_range1                15734-15734, 59.90-60.00, 4.047, 4.700, 5.449, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 232, 232, 464, 464
crt_range2                15625-16200, 59.90-60.00, 3.207, 4.700, 4.650, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 240, 240, 480, 480

Am I blocking out the ability to use 256p with these settings?  :'(
I thought the point of using the arcade preset would have been to allow me access to that range.

When I leave default settings 256p works, but as we both know we end up with a very ripply image. However when changing the range to 59.90~60 I loose 256p. I can understand that games in a low range such as MK and Irem games would not be able to switch, but for a game like Denjin Makai which runs at 61hz and 256p I thought it would work, but instead it reverts to 480i even if I leave 61hz max range purposely to see if I can get it in progressive scan. I'm confused as to why this happens.


As a separate question, I would like to separate 240p and 480p if possible. Is such a thing possible even?

I get a really nice noise free signal for progressive video when limiting the other range to 15734-15734 (59.90hz stops the water ripple effect but the other range seems to determine noise levels), however for some inexplicable reason in interlaced modes it's the reverse, I get more noise with that setting and I get less with a more flexible range (such as 15625-16200).

Here's what i tried to do to seperate the settings for 240p and 480i. I tried adding a range3 like this:

crt_range2                15734-15734, 59.90-60.00, 3.207, 4.700, 4.650, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 240, 240, 240, 240
crt_range3                15625-16200, 59.90-60.00, 3.207, 4.700, 4.650, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 480, 480, 480, 480


However when doing this 480i ends up in 464i which is worse, so for now I reverted to the settings show first in this post.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 10, 2019, 06:45:22 pm
I used these settings in the mame.ini

arcade15khz preset

crt_range0                15734-15734, 59.90-60.00, 4.700, 4.700, 6.216, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 224, 224, 448, 448
crt_range1                15734-15734, 59.90-60.00, 4.047, 4.700, 5.449, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 232, 232, 464, 464
crt_range2                15625-16200, 59.90-60.00, 3.207, 4.700, 4.650, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 240, 240, 480, 480

Am I blocking out the ability to use 256p with these settings?  :'(

Sure. You have allowed these intervals:

(224-224)
(448-448)
(232-232)
(464-464)
(240-240)
(480-480)

Question: does 256 fit in any of those intervals?

Quote
When I leave default settings 256p works, but as we both know we end up with a very ripply image. However when changing the range to 59.90~60 I loose 256p. I can understand that games in a low range such as MK and Irem games would not be able to switch, but for a game like Denjin Makai which runs at 61hz and 256p I thought it would work, but instead it reverts to 480i even if I leave 61hz max range purposely to see if I can get it in progressive scan. I'm confused as to why this happens.

Vertical and horizontal frequency ranges are not independent. This is very important to understand. 256p is mathematically impossible at 16.2 kHz (your max allowed hfreq) if you only allow 59.90-60 Hz. At 16.2 kHz, 256p is only possible at max 58 Hz. You'd need 16.7 kHz in order to reach 256p@60 Hz. If you lower hfreq max to only 15734, then max vfreq for 256p will be even lower 55-56 Hz).

In other words, if you lock vfreq and hfreq you're locking vertical resolution too. To unlock vertical resolution you need to unlock either vfreq or hfreq, or both.

To help you visualize this, VMMaker has a slider panel that you can use to verify dynamically what the capabilities of your monitor definition are, after you edit the ranges in monitor.ini.


Quote
crt_range2                15734-15734, 59.90-60.00, 3.207, 4.700, 4.650, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 240, 240, 240, 240
crt_range3                15625-16200, 59.90-60.00, 3.207, 4.700, 4.650, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 480, 480, 480, 480

Wrong. Do it this way:

crt_range2                15734-15734, 59.90-60.00, 3.207, 4.700, 4.650, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 240, 240, 0, 0
crt_range3                15625-16200, 59.90-60.00, 3.207, 4.700, 4.650, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 0, 0, 480, 480
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 10, 2019, 06:47:17 pm
Ah, do not apologize for that. Everyone but Calamity was ignorant once here, I'm sure.

I'm your creation, don't forget that.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 11, 2019, 02:39:05 am
Thank you Calamity for the explanation.

I feel stupid for not realizing the issue. Now I've added a fifth range for 256 following your instructions.  :D

I'm able to get 256p at 58hz just as you said but the image is too unstable. I then tested the arcade15 extended but unfortunately at 16700 the monitor goes berserk. The best compromise I could reach was 16400 and 59hz but the picture had too many ripples and the very very top was starting to fold slightly. So I'm resigning myself at 480i for 256 games on my consumer tv's.

I'm so glad I left the ntsc preset and came back to arcade because now thanks to you I understand what I'm doing better I'm able to explore with the ranges more. I think I need to create a 242p because Bloody Wolf runs in 480i instead of 240p despite being a 242p game lol.

Is there cause to avoid having too many crt ranges? Does it slow the launch of games down and should I keep it to a minimum or is there no reason to worry with them?


All of a sudden lots of 640x480 games running in 240p 60hz instead of 480i as they were before, but there are a few oddities:

Blood Roar 1 runs in 240p
Bloody Roar 2 runs in 480i

Both run on the same system and have a native resolution of 640x480 60hz 31khz, so what's causing the second game to not run in 240p? It seems to run in 240p at startup and up till the character select, but when it enters a fight it switches to 480i.

A few other games also don't seem to want to run in 240p such as Ehrgeiz, Time Crisis, Crystal of Kings, Dead or Alive ++, Tokyo War etc.

Does this mean these games were originally running in interlaced in the arcades? The only sites I know of with info on the original resolutions don't mention the prog/interlaced info unfortunately.

Lastly and I doubt this is possible but just in case, there's no way to force 256p games into 240p is there?  ;D
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Recapnation on February 11, 2019, 06:37:37 am
Quote
Both run on the same system and have a native resolution of 640x480 60hz 31khz

I think I already told that that's not true. 'Cept for some late Namco particular boards, all the PS-based arcade systems output 15 kHz, no matter the resolution. BR and BR2 don't seem to use the same in-game display resolution, anyway. And dynamic resolution switching was quite usual on this hardware.

The Crystal of Kings should run at 15-kHz progressive (it's 320 x 240), though it seems the hardware supports 640 x 480 and most likely the BIOS screens use it. Maybe MAME's emulation hasn't implemented res. switching there?

Time Crisis and Tokyo Wars were 24-kHz games if I recall, but the rest were indeed hi-res 15-kHz (interlaced).




Ah, do not apologize for that. Everyone but Calamity was ignorant once here, I'm sure.

I'm your creation, don't forget that.

Yeah, laughs. Your patience wouldn't be as well forged as it is today, I'll give you that.


Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 11, 2019, 08:26:35 am

I'm so glad I left the ntsc preset and came back to arcade because now thanks to you I understand what I'm doing better I'm able to explore with the ranges more. I think I need to create a 242p because Bloody Wolf runs in 480i instead of 240p despite being a 242p game lol.

Is there cause to avoid having too many crt ranges? Does it slow the launch of games down and should I keep it to a minimum or is there no reason to worry with them?


Neil,

Here’s the simplified single range that I use, try this:

crt_range0  15625-16200, 59.50-60.10, 2.000, 4.700, 8.000, 0.064, 0.192, 1.024, 0, 0, 192, 240, 448, 480

That’s just using the Arcade 15 preset with the changes in bold.  Try that and if 59.5Hz is an issue then edit that up.

Ive never heard of in game switching of resolutions but I suppose anything is possible.  If you want to try and capture 242p then that’s currently out of your range because you’ve capped your range for progressive lines at 240p (as have I in the above changes to the preset).  You can try increasing or decreasing on increments of 8, in other words you could try:

crt_range0  15625-16200, 59.50-60.10, 2.000, 4.700, 8.000, 0.064, 0.192, 1.024, 0, 0, 192, 248, 448, 496

My guess is though that you will have troubles but try it and see.

By the way, make these changes AFTER you do a normal install the generated modelines of the Arcade 15 preset.  That way you have the full range of modelines available and are simply using the ones that will work with your TV when editing the mame.ini.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 11, 2019, 01:48:16 pm
Quote
Both run on the same system and have a native resolution of 640x480 60hz 31khz

I think I already told that that's not true. 'Cept for some late Namco particular boards, all the PS-based arcade systems output 15 kHz, no matter the resolution. BR and BR2 don't seem to use the same in-game display resolution, anyway. And dynamic resolution switching was quite usual on this hardware.

The Crystal of Kings should run at 15-kHz progressive (it's 320 x 240), though it seems the hardware supports 640 x 480 and most likely the BIOS screens use it. Maybe MAME's emulation hasn't implemented res. switching there?

Time Crisis and Tokyo Wars were 24-kHz games if I recall, but the rest were indeed hi-res 15-kHz (interlaced).

Than you Recap. So then this site is listing resolutions incorrectly I guess:
http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/dettaglio_mame.php?game_name=beastrzr&back_games=bldyroar;&search_id= (http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/dettaglio_mame.php?game_name=beastrzr&back_games=bldyroar;&search_id=)

They also list the wrong button numbers for games, like 2 button games often get listed as 3 or 4. This seems to be in Mame itself. Maybe there's a reason I'm not aware of for them to do this but I find it confusing at times when a game I clearly remember in the arcades only using x number of buttons ends up having more listed.

So in other words if I understand correctly aside from The Crystal of Kings, all the other games I mentioned are already running in proper native resolutions. What determines what resolutions are possible with what game, is there a database where one can find out? Also if The Crystal of Kings is not able to switch res to 240p is this an entry in Mame itself or something the developers of Groovymame would implement somewhere down the line (Calamity I guess)?

With a tricky game like Battle Rangers (Bloody Wolf) which runs at 242p, is there no way to just force it to 240p? It's a shame to see it run in 480i because of two lines of pixels over the threshold. lol

Arroyo> Thanks, I wasn't aware it had to be in increments of 8, I will try that later and see if Groovymame launches Battle Rangers in 248p.
I ended up with similar settings to you but I limited the horizontal range for 224p and 232p to 59.90~60. I was doing fine with a 59.75~60.15 but then I found in some games like Guardians Denjin Makai II there were edge of pixels that had some vibrations or a pulsating look which I didn't remember previously, and after restricting the range it corrected it. It's insane that such minute changes can have such effects on these tv's, they really weren't build with flexibility in mind.

For interlaced graphics using our tv's when it sits too close to ntsc standard settings it gets these faint scrolling horizontal lines of noise (it's not too obvious so maybe it's not in your way), but it gets corrected with a higher vertical frequency range which is weird but works, so I increased the minimum to something like 15734~16200.

Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Recapnation on February 11, 2019, 09:27:49 pm
Quote
Than you Recap. So then this site is listing resolutions incorrectly I guess:
http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/dettaglio_mame.php?game_name=beastrzr&back_games=bldyroar;&search_id= (http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/dettaglio_mame.php?game_name=beastrzr&back_games=bldyroar;&search_id=)

They also list the wrong button numbers for games, like 2 button games often get listed as 3 or 4. This seems to be in Mame itself. Maybe there's a reason I'm not aware of for them to do this but I find it confusing at times when a game I clearly remember in the arcades only using x number of buttons ends up having more listed.

The reason is that these games belong to a "mother" system which has a global input/output spec. Depending on the game, some features will be used while others will not. MAME-centric sites like that of course won't take into account per-game requirements given that even MAME itself is often unclear with stuff like this, when not plain wrong. Usually it's part of the emulation venture itself -- many games have changed the resolution mode years after being added as "working", not to mention the vertical refresh, or even the number of action buttons.




Quote
So in other words if I understand correctly aside from The Crystal of Kings, all the other games I mentioned are already running in proper native resolutions.

The resolution you mentioned is not correct for those, much like the h. frequency. All hi-res arcade games under PS-based systems use 512 x 480. Very, very few used it as progressive scan. Another thing altogether is that it's somehow a bit lame not to display they all at 31 kHz when emulated if there's the possibility. If they were 15-kHz-only back then it's only for budget reasons -- non-dedicated 31-kHz monitors weren't a thing in Japanese centers till late 90's, so there was no point in having your hardware apt to output 31-kHz. But interlace never is --and never was-- a good thing. (Seems not every monitor gives the same result when interlacing, anyhow, and, for upscaled 2-D graphics, interlace helps to alleviate the hideousness, there's that.)



Quote
What determines what resolutions are possible with what game, is there a database where one can find out?

The hardware every game uses, of course, so you need to have a look at hardware/systems lists first and foremost.

https://git.redump.net/mame/tree/src/mame/drivers (https://git.redump.net/mame/tree/src/mame/drivers)

I'm not aware of a single website which I'd call comprehensive, but one which includes non-scaled screens from MAME such as Progetto EMMA, is not a bad tool to use as a general approach for the resolution thing, as well as to check the driver every game belongs to under MAME. I don't think you'll find one which also mentions correct h. frequencies given that even MAME itself doesn't bother. I just mention stuff from my own knowledge.

Anyway, you generally can just rely on (Groovy) MAME and let it be, but that's from the perspective of using an all-terrain monitor, unlike your case. If it is, on the other hand, that you don't feel confortable with running in 15-kHz modes pieces which were intended for 31-, you essentially can discard everything but the ZN/PS-based games (check especially Namco, Capcom, Konami), ST-V games and the American (and Nintendo) antiques. There'll always be some oddities such as Konami M-2-based games (?), but little else worth mentioning was born for interlaced video. I'm of the opinion that having a good 31~38-kHz CRT monitor together with your 15-kHz set-up is mandatory, and not just for GM/arcade games.



Quote
Also if The Crystal of Kings is not able to switch res to 240p is this an entry in Mame itself or something the developers of Groovymame would implement somewhere down the line (Calamity I guess)?

You can do it yourself; check G.2 here (and read the whole guide once and for all while you're at it...):

http://geedorah.com/eiusdemmodi/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=987#p987 (http://geedorah.com/eiusdemmodi/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=987#p987)

Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 11, 2019, 11:55:53 pm
The resolution you mentioned is not correct for those, much like the h. frequency. All hi-res arcade games under PS-based systems use 512 x 480. Very, very few used it as progressive scan. Another thing altogether is that it's somehow a bit lame not to display they all at 31 kHz when emulated if there's the possibility. If they were 15-kHz-only back then it's only for budget reasons -- non-dedicated 31-kHz monitors weren't a thing in Japanese centers till late 90's, so there was no point in having your hardware apt to output 31-kHz. But interlace never is --and never was-- a good thing. (Seems not every monitor gives the same result when interlacing, anyhow, and, for upscaled 2-D graphics, interlace helps to alleviate the hideousness, there's that.)

My bad you're right, the horizontal resolution varies dramatically per system too. The range of resolutions is much larger than I thought possible. You make a good case for owning a 31khz monitor if only for these higher res 3D titles, there's no way around it I guess.

https://git.redump.net/mame/tree/src/mame/drivers (https://git.redump.net/mame/tree/src/mame/drivers)

This database on individual systems is gold, thanks for sharing!  :)

You can do it yourself; check G.2 here (and read the whole guide once and for all while you're at it...):

http://geedorah.com/eiusdemmodi/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=987#p987 (http://geedorah.com/eiusdemmodi/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=987#p987)

Oh gosh this is a revelation to me. I had actually seen that guide but that entire section went completely over my head at the time (was still trying to get it running at all).

So this means games that run at 480 can be forced into single scan at 240. This means I can get all those 480 vertical resolution games running progressive via 240p as well? If so this is amazing.

So if I understand the instructions correctly, I start by creating C:\GROOVYMAME\ini\source for the individual systems. I create a text file and call it crystal.ini (I'll start with The Crystal of Kings). Inside all I put is the resolution to override with and then the unevenstretch 1 which is ues if I understand correctly:

1. resolution                2560x240

ues                             1

nochangeres                1


Is this correct? Is doing it by machine like this the preferred method or should I go by romname instead? If I do go by romname do I just fit into the "source" folder as well?

By the way I actually don't seem to have noreschange although there is a reschange 1 in the mame.ini under Core Switch Options and a switchres 1 option under OSD Full Screen Options. As of Groovymame 205b or even 206 what is the preferred setting for those?
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 12, 2019, 01:31:57 am
I have one more question, in the guide it says:
- Only enable the outputs you actually use. Each extra output that's enabled exponentially increases the time required by certain graphic API calls (e. g. EnumDisplaySettings).

Does that mean I can go to the VMMaker text file and edit the resolutions from arcade preset and just delete all the resolutions I don't use and won't be using on this monitor (I can probably take out a third or more of them).
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Recapnation on February 12, 2019, 11:19:21 am
Quote
So this means games that run at 480 can be forced into single scan at 240. This means I can get all those 480 vertical resolution games running progressive via 240p as well? If so this is amazing.

Think a bit about it -- doing that with graphics which aren't line-doubled means you literally take away half the frame. You'll be downsampling the picture in the worst possible way. Those instructions are meant for very specific cases.



Quote
So if I understand the instructions correctly, I start by creating C:\GROOVYMAME\ini\source for the individual systems. I create a text file and call it crystal.ini (I'll start with The Crystal of Kings). Inside all I put is the resolution to override with and then the unevenstretch 1 which is ues if I understand correctly:

1. resolution                2560x240

ues                             1

nochangeres                1


Is this correct? Is doing it by machine like this the preferred method or should I go by romname instead?

unevenstretch / ues, both work, if I recall.

If the driver indeed always reports 640 x 480 and every game in it has always a design resolution of 320 x 240 (which I believe to be the case), I'd go with that, yeah, and in the driver's INI file. MAME is not as alien in its logic as it seems to be, really. And then, you can make tests too.


Quote
If I do go by romname do I just fit into the "source" folder as well?

Chapter E in the very same guide:

To force specific MAME and Groovy MAME settings into one only game/machine (or just the games from a particular MAME driver), a machinename.ini file should be placed in MAME's INI folder (or a drivername.ini in ini\source, for the MAME driver case).
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 12, 2019, 12:37:34 pm
Thank you so much. So I'll be careful what games to use this on (not on Time Crisis and Tokyo War for example).

So I tried with unevenstretch instead of ues and it seems to work.

One oddity however is The Crystal of Kings is now running at 320x241 > switchres 2560x240. It have a feeling the difference doesn't matter but I found it curious.

I tried on a few others notably Bloodyroar 2, Dead or Alive ++ and Ehrgeiz and it worked perfectly there. :)
512x480 > 2560x240  etc

Is Bloodyroar 2 a bad idea to force to 240p? Somehow it now feels weird, but maybe it's because it was interlaced in the arcades (and I wasn't even aware) according to what you told me (never did play Ehrgeiz or DOA++ in arcades so to me they just seem improved now).

I also did this to Battle Rangers 242 >240, with the same file info, seems to work although probably not ideal.

Lastly how can I cut back on the number of resolutions in VMMaker? I tried editing the super resolutions but most of the resolutions I'd want to remove are not there (anything under 58hz). In your guide you did say having less is preferable right?
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 12, 2019, 01:04:30 pm
I have one more question, in the guide it says:
- Only enable the outputs you actually use. Each extra output that's enabled exponentially increases the time required by certain graphic API calls (e. g. EnumDisplaySettings).

Does that mean I can go to the VMMaker text file and edit the resolutions from arcade preset and just delete all the resolutions I don't use and won't be using on this monitor (I can probably take out a third or more of them).

By enabling outputs we mean sending video through two separate connectors on the video card (e.g. what you do when you extend the desktop). You may want to do this in some situations, e.g. running a 15 kHz CRT as secondary monitor, while you work on an LCD as primary screen. But if you use a single monitor, just enable one desktop, Windows will be faster. Anyway this was a real issue with pre HD 5000 cards, it's not that important anymore. Of course, reducing the mode list also helps, but in your case I wouldn't bother.

Quote
Lastly how can I cut back on the number of resolutions in VMMaker? I tried editing the super resolutions but most of the resolutions I'd want to remove are not there (anything under 58hz). In your guide you did say having less is preferable right?

VMMaker only creates the modes you ask it for. Be aware of this, and find the list from which it's taking the modes you don't like.

Notice that in user_modes_super.ini, a mode can be listed as 60 Hz, but when it's generated it may end up with a lower vfreq, due to the restrictions of your monitor preset.

Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Recapnation on February 12, 2019, 02:09:35 pm

I tried on a few others notably Bloodyroar 2, Dead or Alive ++ and Ehrgeiz and it worked perfectly there. :)
512x480 > 2560x240  etc

Is Bloodyroar 2 a bad idea to force to 240p? Somehow it now feels weird, but maybe it's because it was interlaced in the arcades (and I wasn't even aware) according to what you told me (never did play Ehrgeiz or DOA++ in arcades so to me they just seem improved now).

You're basically going from this:

(https://i.imgur.com/BNOYpEN.png)

...to this:

(https://i.imgur.com/rif4FaN.png)

The game is ugly as sin, so maybe thanks to losing so much definition it looks like an improvement in your eyes? 'Cause getting rid of the interlace just can't justify such an atrocity. And wait till you try it with a 2-D game.


Edit:

Technically, this is actually your result, but still:

(https://i.imgur.com/aShzpXv.png)
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 12, 2019, 03:03:56 pm
Calamity> Thank you! I'm going to go through the list then and scrap the ones that I definitely won't be using on this tv.

For some reason I didn't see any 2560x256 in the super ini resolutions list. Are the entries approximates at times?

Technically, this is actually your result, but still:

(https://i.imgur.com/aShzpXv.png)

lol

Yes I see the point. Since it was running in interlace to begin with on my 15khz tv it wasn't looking like the first pic I can tell you that.  :laugh:

So in your opinion interlaced is better for these games?
But The Crystal of Kings being 240p is worth leaving in such resolution correct?

I still can't figure out why The Crystal of Kings insists on launching in 320x241.

I wonder what would happen if I try to force 256p games to run in 240p. I'll try that later for curiosity sake. I'm guessing same as what you just showed me, it downres' the image resulting in a loss of pixels right? However since interlace is not very pretty for 2D games in Groovymame might it be preferable to interlaced 480i?
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 12, 2019, 03:57:06 pm
By the way is it okay to run those super res as desktop resolutions? Ideally I would use 2560x224 if that were ok but would there be downsides to this?

Sorry for pouring in so many questions.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 12, 2019, 04:00:47 pm
I wonder what would happen if I try to force 256p games to run in 240p. I'll try that later for curiosity sake.

GM will downscale the picture using fractional scaling. GM will always do whatever is required to show the whole picture without cropping.

But if you don't allow it to use fractional scaling (by setting -unevenstretch 0) it will crop the picture and apply integer scaling. Just to make sure you can also force -intscaley 1.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 12, 2019, 04:04:52 pm
By the way is it okay to run those super res as desktop resolutions? Ideally I would use 2560x224 if that were ok but would there be downsides to this?

You can do that but you will hardly be able to use Windows that way. Existing frontends can't handle these extreme pixel aspect ratios as far as I know.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 12, 2019, 04:56:57 pm
Thank you Calamity! That makes sense. Compatibility with the frontend hadn't occured to me. I use Attract Mode. I guess 640x480 it is.  :)

I'll give 256p games a try in 240p.

What do people on 15khz do with the very odd resolution games such as Crack Down (496x384), Virtua Fighter (496x384) and the Crusn' World/USA games (512x400)?
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 12, 2019, 05:23:55 pm
Wow, the result is stunning. What a difference. I edited MK2 and went back and forth, now the interlaced other MK games look quite poor in comparison.

Arroyo you should definitely test this. MK2 is looking gorgeous in 240p. Another odd thing is, for testing purposes I was playing with the in mame geometrical settings and they have no negative impact on the game unlike the way native 240p games (which get crushed and missing lines).

This might sound like an ugly way to run a game (in non native resolution) to many here but when the alternative is 480i I think it's worth giving this a shot (in my case it's not many games anyway).

There's something a little off about 480i with 2D arcade games imo.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 12, 2019, 05:37:11 pm
Wow, the result is stunning. What a difference. I edited MK2 and went back and forth, now the interlaced other MK games look quite poor in comparison.

Arroyo you should definitely test this. MK2 is looking gorgeous in 240p. Another odd thing is, for testing purposes I was playing with the in mame geometrical settings and they have no negative impact on the game unlike the way native 240p games (which get crushed and missing lines).

This might sound like an ugly way to run a game (in non native resolution) to many here but when the alternative is 480i I think it's worth giving this a shot (in my case it's not many games anyway).

There's something a little off about 480i with 2D arcade games imo.

So you are using unevenstretch to compress the game into 240p?  I take it this helps the refresh rate issue?
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 12, 2019, 05:42:40 pm
Arroyo> Here's my ini file for mk2, you can just change the crt range to your own and change the name to whatever 256 game you want to change. I'm creating inis for all my 256p games I have (which aren't all that much actually) I'm not sure I'd do it for 3D games, but 2D games just look like night and day this way. Give it a try. :)

EDIT: Just to explain why I put in the crt range: without it what was happening was none of the previous ranges were taken into account so I had a horizontally squashed image a bit.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 12, 2019, 05:43:41 pm
Arroyo> Here's my ini file for mk2, you can just change the crt range to your own and change the name to whatever 256 game you want to change. I'm creating inis for all my 256p games I have (which aren't all that much actually) I'm not sure I'd do it for 3D games, but 2D games just look like night and day this way. Give it a try. :)

I’ll check it out tonight.  Thanks!
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 12, 2019, 05:51:02 pm
Arroyo> Here's my ini file for mk2, you can just change the crt range to your own and change the name to whatever 256 game you want to change. I'm creating inis for all my 256p games I have (which aren't all that much actually) I'm not sure I'd do it for 3D games, but 2D games just look like night and day this way. Give it a try. :)

EDIT: Just to explain why I put in the crt range: without it what was happening was none of the previous ranges were taken into account so I had a horizontally squashed image a bit.

My suggestion was to use -unevenstretch 0, so GM would apply cropping. I would never have suggested what you have in that ini without the integer scaling part.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 12, 2019, 05:54:22 pm
Arroyo> Here's my ini file for mk2, you can just change the crt range to your own and change the name to whatever 256 game you want to change. I'm creating inis for all my 256p games I have (which aren't all that much actually) I'm not sure I'd do it for 3D games, but 2D games just look like night and day this way. Give it a try. :)

EDIT: Just to explain why I put in the crt range: without it what was happening was none of the previous ranges were taken into account so I had a horizontally squashed image a bit.

My suggestion was to use -unevenstretch 0, so GM would apply cropping. I would never have suggested what you have in that ini without the integer scaling part.


Correct me if I’m wrong Calamity, but the unevenstretch would still maintain the refresh rate?  As that seems to be our biggest problem on these TV’s (sub 59.xxHz) I’m struggling to see how doing anything other than triple buffering would improve refresh rates, outside of going 480i?
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 12, 2019, 06:04:06 pm
Calamity> Oh sorry. I added it now. Testing.

Ah yes I see why I had deleted it. With unevenstretch to 0 the horizontal geometry is off, with the image being squished, this despite the crt range info being inserted into the ini.

Not sure how to stretch it out again to proper aspect ratio 4:3.

Arroyo> Oh that hadn't occured to me. I didn't spend time playing long enough to see if it was running off speed or not.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 12, 2019, 06:39:19 pm
Arroyo> My impression is that the tripple buffering is still applied here, but I could be wrong.

Right now what I'm trying to figure out is how to get the edited  mk2.ini with unevenstretch 0 to get proper horizontal porch levels to work, it's as if they reverted to how they were initially which is to say squished.

EDIT: Changing the porches in the range in the mk2.ini to make it wider doesn't seem to make any difference either.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Recapnation on February 12, 2019, 07:03:06 pm
You only need integer scaling applied to the y axis so that the image gets cropped vertically, therefore try adding unevestretchx 1 to enable fractional scaling on the x axis. If it doesn't work, try intscalex 0 instead.



Quote
So in your opinion interlaced is better for these games?

Sure. You're preserving the picture's integrity, and the interlace came with the original hardware anyway. And being a fighting game, I wouldn't scale the graphics so dramatically in order not mess with the hitboxes either.



Quote
But The Crystal of Kings being 240p is worth leaving in such resolution correct?

For sure:

http://www.progettoemma.net/snap/crysking/0000.png (http://www.progettoemma.net/snap/crysking/0000.png)
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 12, 2019, 07:27:13 pm
Thank you Recap, that worked!

I agree with that. I deleted the other ini for those 3d fighters and just kept the Crystal Kings one.

Now however I'm able to get progressive scan on 256 thanks to you two and it looks fantastic.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 12, 2019, 08:15:42 pm
Thank you Recap, that worked!

I agree with that. I deleted the other ini for those 3d fighters and just kept the Crystal Kings one.

Now however I'm able to get progressive scan on 256 thanks to you two and it looks fantastic.

 ini post? Or is it the same as your previous.  Also did you modify the monitor preset before installing the modelines?  If so can you post that as well?
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 12, 2019, 10:40:51 pm
Sorry for the delay, I went out for the evening and heading back, I'll share my finalized mk2.ini as soon as I get to my computer.

I didn't need to modify my monitor presets but I did need to update the horizontal porches to compensate for the larger picture. I'm not exactly sure why this is but despite running in 240p it's as if they still have a 256p picture so it's much larger than 240p and the settings I had for 240 make the horizontal side squished, I had to expand the porches further to restore a true 4:3 aspect ratio. Everything looks really nice now but when my crt is set for 224 (my default settings) the picture is big time overscanned, and when in 240p (I found good h and v size settings for such content) it's still a bit overscanned. However touching the ingame mame settings to a small degree don't seem to have major impact so I will probably adjust them to 950 or so and the games should work while in a calibrated setting for 240p games. I have to do more testing though because I did notice that when pulling too far the image does degrade noticeably, but from the little testing I did earlier at a small degree there as no apparent negative effect (unlike in 232p and 240p where the picture immediately deteriorates).

My next problem is what to do with Crackdown. That's the last 2D game running in interlaced mode but it has such an awkward resolution I'm unsure what the best method would be to force it to a progressive mode compatible with my 15khz crt. Crackdown appears to be 496x384, was this another game running in interlaced or was it actually progressive? I would have to guess progressive because it looks very poor in interlaced mode imo. I used to love this game on Megadrive/Genesis but never played it in original arcades.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 12, 2019, 10:53:42 pm
Sorry for the delay, I went out for the evening and heading back, I'll share my finalized mk2.ini as soon as I get to my computer.

I didn't need to modify my monitor presets but I did need to update the horizontal porches to compensate for the larger picture. I'm not exactly sure why this is but despite running in 240p it's as if they still have a 256p picture so it's much larger than 240p and the settings I had for 240 make the horizontal side squished, I had to expand the porches further to restore a true 4:3 aspect ratio. Everything looks really nice now but when my crt is set for 224 (my default settings) the picture is big time overscanned, and when in 240p (I found good h and v size settings for such content) it's still a bit overscanned. However touching the ingame mame settings to a small degree don't seem to have major impact so I will probably adjust them to 950 or so and the games should work while in a calibrated setting for 240p games. I have to do more testing though because I did notice that when pulling too far the image does degrade noticeably, but from the little testing I did earlier at a small degree there as no apparent negative effect (unlike in 232p and 240p where the picture immediately deteriorates).

My next problem is what to do with Crackdown. That's the last 2D game running in interlaced mode but it has such an awkward resolution I'm unsure what the best method would be to force it to a progressive mode compatible with my 15khz crt. Crackdown appears to be 496x384, was this another game running in interlaced or was it actually progressive? I would have to guess progressive because it looks very poor in interlaced mode imo. I used to love this game on Megadrive/Genesis but never played it in original arcades.

Thanks for the details.  I’ll wait for your post of the ini and try it in my setup.  :cheers:
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 01:19:34 am
Sorry for the delay. Here's my mk2.ini

As usual be sure to put your own h porch settings, but try to expand the horizontal ones cause if you're set to 240p you're going to have some horizontal squishing since the vertical resolution will be increased (you'll have to play around with arcade osd, but for me adjusting the same difference between 224 to 240 worked (after all the difference is the same between those two and 240 to 256). You'll end up with some noticeable overscan but you can try correcting it through mame although I'm sure some will scoff at this I haven't noticed much difference at moderate levels of using this yet.

I'm not sure I fully understand what we're doing but my understanding is that by using unevenstretch on the y axis we're preserving the 256p in size but actually displaying it as 240p since that's the limit we can reach with our frequency range (if I'm wrong please correct me). Because crt's don't actually display pixels but lines the difference is rather hard to notice (I'm sure trained eyes might spot it but compared to interlaced graphics it certainly seems more accurate). Right now the triple buffering is probably the biggest drawback to this setup but there's nothing we can do with that unfortunately (here's hoping we don't notice it much during actual gameplay).

I think for those of us with consumer tv's with limited ranges like us it gives us the best possible compromise yet, and this will certainly work for me until I decide to get an additional monitor with expanded ranges for these higher res games.

Please let me know how it works for you and how you feel about these higher res games running on your tv.  :)
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 01:59:40 am
I have some unfortunate news however. It looks like on my tv's (all of them) I cannot underscan sufficiently to get 240p fully visible. The top of the image starts cutting off (even curling away) and leaving a bright long line at the cutoff point at the top. I guess Arroyo you might not have this issue because you're running a larger tube (27 inch iirc), I run only mid size tubes at 20 and 24 inch since that's the optimal sizes for me.

I find that when using the in mame setting to reduce the size of the image to adjust I'm getting some warped looking texts (although it's not dramatic it's distracting). I'm really happy to have 224p and 232p running arcade perfect as combined they make up for almost 70% of my game selection, however for running the remaining 240 and 256 games I now need to find a solution to reduce the size of these games to fit in the same resolution as 224 games. I understand this will mean giving up on accuracy, but what's the best way to achieve this on my tv's? Keeping in mind again I'm not able to move h and v sizes far enough to fit 240 and up resolutions.

Can I create inis for each 240p game, force them to 224p and remove unevenstretch?

I remember when I bought all these tv's they had heavy overscan on consoles, so I already had zoomed out big time to get all other systems in full sight, I didn't realize consumer tubes were that restricted on how they can run 240p and up.  :(
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Paradroid on February 13, 2019, 02:24:40 am
I didn't realize consumer tubes were that restricted on how they can run 240p and up.  :(

Ditch that Sony already. It's like your girlfriend is an idiot but you won't leave her because she's really good looking. ;)



Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 02:36:09 am
lol

Yeah problem is was so in love with these tv's I stocked up a room full of them and didn't keep any other so I have no alternatives.
I did once upon a time have lot's of other tubes but I ended up packing up them all up for the recycling centers years ago, I really should have saved a few others in case something like this could happen. Clearly Groovy when running large resolutions needs a special type of crt. Although in hindsight I'm not even sure the others I had would have gotten the job done either. I specifically recall having this weird bright line at the top on the Toshiba's I had, and this was when underscanning to display the full image of the SNES/Saturn etc. I had to actually cut off one or two pixels at the top of that line was there too. It must be some kind of cutoff limitation and I have no idea why it was so low on those. They were all ntsc north american tv models.
Looking back I recall having had issues with most tubes I picked up, it was either focus issues, heavy flickering, bad white purity (colored stains visible in whites), bad color reproduction, I even had one which had absolutely uncorrectable convergence issues (not even permalloy strips could get it done). Even the pro monitors I picked up had various issues related to wear too. One of the bvm's I had was buzzing like it was about to detonate lol. Also one pro monitor also had colors dropping in and out occasionally (as in getting dimmer then coming back etc).
 
Anyway back to this matter, it looks as though I can work with 240p by zooming out just a couple points more which brings me close to the limit before I see that line at the top (actually that brings the image to an ideal 232p frame). I basically have about 3% overscan for 240p this way, not too dramatic but obviously still noticeable. But for 256p it's no go, the picture is just too big so sadly I'm forced to zoom out and get slightly weird texts in some games (first game I noticed this with was R-Type but also Zero Team 2000 and a few others).

I don't supose there's another way that still allows me to leave it in progressive scan?
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 02:45:46 am
Actually doing more tests I might have panicked prematurely. In Mortal Kombat games even zooming out to 900 h and v size in mame settings, then undoing it back and forth to compare, I see no difference in anything. Games look incredibly good. Games like R-Type and New Zero Team have really small fine texts and on those I see them looking a bit different like the letter "E" might have two lines going through the horizontal lines instead of 3 etc, small discrepancies like that. I think this is workable though.

I'll have to test running 240p as 224p to see if it comes through in a bad way or whether it can be played that way too, but ultimately I'll probably just take in the minor overscan for these.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 13, 2019, 03:28:01 am
Ditch that Sony already. It's like your girlfriend is an idiot but you won't leave her because she's really good looking. ;)

 :notworthy:

Yes, one day Neilalphazeta will get a proper TV and he'll wonder what he's been doing all this time. That said, due to the need to fight his chassis he's being forced to learn the inner operation of GM, which most other users unfortunately never bother to learn.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Paradroid on February 13, 2019, 03:38:47 am

That said, due to the need to fight his chassis he's being forced to learn the inner operation of GM, which most other users unfortunately never bother to learn.

Totally agree. Love the enthusiasm for learning! :)

Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 13, 2019, 03:40:13 am
Clearly Groovy when running large resolutions needs a special type of crt.

Not at all. 256p@55Hz is as natural to a standard 15 kHz CRT as 240p@60Hz is. It's your digital chassis the one to blame for not being able to handle it right.

Here's is an example of the behaviour of a CRT without chassis "intelligence": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxdUCLa4VCk&t= (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxdUCLa4VCk&t=)
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 13, 2019, 08:40:42 am
Please let me know how it works for you and how you feel about these higher res games running on your tv.  :)

I was pretty skeptical but this does look pretty darn good.  I mean it’s not quite the same but it’s a lot better looking than 480i I totally agree.

Here’s 256p untouched from the Arcade 15 preset:
(https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20190213/860a247b7542873150ef56e8ff680eed.jpg)

And here’s with the unevenstretchx and forced 240p resolution:
(https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20190213/b82c945b07ff5672ad9764d579d217ee.jpg)

I see very clear “pixel” blocks much better than the settings from 480i, but I can tell the difference but I don’t think the average person would notice.  It’s only in going back and forth between 256p and this do I notice.


Quote
I'm not sure I fully understand what we're doing but my understanding is that by using unevenstretch on the y axis we're preserving the 256p in size but actually displaying it as 240p since that's the limit we can reach with our frequency range (if I'm wrong please correct me).

Not sure that I could say exactly either but from looking at it it seems like the horizontal resolution is preserved, and it looks like the vertical is slightly squished/cutoff, which is what introduces a little bit of blur compared to the original 256p, again it’s slight.  Triplebuffering is on as can be expected.  I couldn’t tell if I noticed game play differences, but you do notice on scrolling, for example when your characters icon scrolls down the challengers icons before a match in mk2.

Quote
I think for those of us with consumer tv's with limited ranges like us it gives us the best possible compromise yet, and this will certainly work for me until I decide to get an additional monitor with expanded ranges for these higher res games.

I believe as Calamity stated the problem isn’t our range (unless you were referring to frequency range), but it’s in the digital chassis forcing refresh rates to NTSC broadcast standards and mucking it up along the way.

One thing I needed to do was heavily edit the ini you sent with my settings.  Really I just took my mame.ini’s settings and modified here:

crt_range0  15625-16200, 59.70-60.10, 2.999, 4.700, 8.000, 0.064, 0.192, 1.024, 0, 0, 240, 240, 0, 0

I of course added the lines you had for resolution, unevenstretchx, and nochangeres

When I tried using your settings I had a hellava time trying to get the picture to fit.  I’ve heard you mention in a few posts challenges with overscan.  I think your issue lies with using such a narrow range for horizontal frequency (15734-15734).  I’d try using my above settings and see what you get with using the Arcade 15 monitor preset.  I think you’ll have the same luck in getting everythjng to work but will lose some overscan issues.

Thanks for continuing the good fight.  I’ll keep the fingers crossed that this can be refined to manage a pretty darn good arcade experience, but I’m also picking up late 90’s TV’s with shadow masks, and hopefully a late 90’s Sony to avoid the digital chassis but pickup the Aperture grill.  If I’m going to go through the trouble of building an arcade cabinet then I want to make sure I’m not sacrificing in game play and original picture.  I’d probably toss one of these TV’s in for a build for a friend in the future, but I don’t know if I’d keep it for myself ;D
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Doom on February 13, 2019, 09:33:15 am
This thread is so much fun. Needs an award for persistance. I know it’s not kosher here but I’ve also used the internal mame geometrical settings for 256p content cause my cab is  set for 240p game and was too lazy to change back and forths. I had Cosmic Cop running that way for weeks on freeplay and not a single person noticed a difference. I did notice it on Rtype and Also kungfuma, it’s like early Irem games used fonts on purpose that didn’t adjust well.

I think there’s something understandable  about caring for picture quality. I wouldn’t say compatibility should be ditched for picture quality but I wouldn’t accommodate a dry looking tube for the sake of accuracy, and I know those digital chassis tubes tend to have a colorful picture. Some kind of compromise is a good idea though.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 10:14:37 am
Wow Calamity that thing is awesome. Really makes me want to get an arcade cabinet and monitor and set it up like yours with an external potentiometer for the V size.

Arroyo> That looks amazing. I think the 240p version has an unfair advantage in that the horizontal porches aren't re adjusted to 4:3 aspect ratio yet, when you do that extra calibration you'll have it looking even closer to the true 256p one I think. Definitely not a difference we can spot in regular usage imo.
EDIT: Oh thank you Arroyo for that great idea, I'm going to try that (increasing the range)


As for the scrolling down prior to the fight, I don't think that's the triple buffering, I think that happens in arcades too cause I somehow remember that not being smooth as a kid too, maybe someone else can correct me there if I'm mistaken.

So I checked the service manual of our tv's for the 20/24 inch and 27/32 inch models and it looks like the larger tubes did launch with a default lower setting on the H and V sizes, which might explain why Arroyo had no problem underscanning the image to fit 240p without bumping into a curl with a white line before reaching the top (where as I can just barely reach the top of 232p before that curl and line).

For those with more expertise on crt's, is any setting in my service menu that might help alleviate this issue?  :laugh:
https://www.manualslib.com/manual/950630/Sony-Kv-20fs100.html?page=18#manual (https://www.manualslib.com/manual/950630/Sony-Kv-20fs100.html?page=18#manual)

That's a service manual for FS100 to FV300 tv's, although there may be minor differences from eyeing the selection all the visible items are included on my set, and I might actually be having a few more towards the end although I think those are incomprehensible features.

I've opened them up quite a few times but beyond doing convergence and geometry adjustments I've never tweaked anything else. Anything I might be able to do on this digital chassis to expand the reachable V size or is it just hopeless?

I never thought about digital chassis as having a serious downside before. I've been able to run every single game system flawlessly with the best picture I've had on any crt before (and I went through countless ones to find this). However Groovy is the first bump I've encountered where it's just not able to work it. I'm not in the mood to undergo a CRT hunt at the moment but I will do it sometime, a Groovymame dedicated tube that runs everything would be ideal, but I can already tell in my area it's going to be a real ordeal to find such a tv.  :D

Yes I've been learning a lot about how Groovymame works and I find it fascinating.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 10:32:11 am
I may have found an issue. Even just moving with the positioning items on the service menu I noticed Groovymame isn't displaying the entire picture of 240p content, it's missing a bunch on the sides and top and bottom (and at the top has that cutoff point with a bright white line), but when moving with in mame settings I am able to see the missing parts. So I guess I need to expand the porch limits in the arcade preset ini. I will try this and see if it allows for full display of the picture.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 10:39:28 am
So expanding the arcade preset limits and going through VMMaker again made no difference (so I restored them). Not sure what I have to do to allow Groovymame to show the entire image for 240p content and up. No wonder I was struggling with tv adjustments.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 10:42:59 am
Here's my mame.ini  Is there anything there that's getting in the way for 240p and up to get fully displayed? I don't have individual game inis for 240p content so nothing should be overriding this.  :-\
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 13, 2019, 10:49:22 am
Avoid friction. Use Arcade OSD to verify the modes. Are they fully displayed this way?
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 13, 2019, 10:50:06 am
So expanding the arcade preset limits and going through VMMaker again made no difference (so I restored them). Not sure what I have to do to allow Groovymame to show the entire image for 240p content and up. No wonder I was struggling with tv adjustments.


I’m telling you your issue is using the NTSC preset.  You have no range of horizontal frequencies to allow flexibility in your display range.  Redo your modelines in VMM using the Arcade 15 preset.  I can guarantee it has nothing to do with limitations in the software, or issues with your set.  You just need a wider range of options to work with. 

When I did mine the main issue was needing to bring the front porch down to around 3.000, as my picture in the right side was truncated.  I also increased the minimum frequency to 59.7 (was previously using 59.5) and the maximum to 60.1.  Other than that I left it alone in the mame.ini.  I made all of these changes AFTER I did the modeline install from VMM.  Then applied them to the mame.ini
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 10:52:15 am
Avoid friction. Use Arcade OSD to verify the modes. Are they fully displayed this way?

How do I verify if there is friction, do I just pull porches all the way out to see how far they go?


Arroyo> I'm using arcade15khz preset right now (gave up on ntsc a few days ago). The limitations you see in the ini are for 224 and 232p content only. I expanded the ranges for the 240 and 480i. For some reason on 224p the range I can use is narrow or even the slightest pixel level issues occur like glowing edges, a little shaky etc.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 13, 2019, 10:54:49 am
Avoid friction. Use Arcade OSD to verify the modes. Are they fully displayed this way?

How do I verify if there is friction, do I just pull porches all the way out to see how far they go?


Arroyo> I'm using arcade15khz preset right now (gave up on ntsc a few days ago). The limitations you see in the ini are for 224 and 232p content only. I expanded the ranges for the 240 and 480i. For some reason on 224p the range I can use is narrow or even the slightest pixel level issues occur like glowing edges, a little shaky etc.

I can’t open .rar files at work, can you just copy paste your crt ranges from your mame.ini?
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 10:57:41 am
Yes one sec I'll get that.

Meanwhile here are some pics. Picture quality is not representative of the real thing as I'm using a very old smartphone, but the general idea is to show how even with an exagerated h size pull away from the edge there is missing information (both on sides and top/bottom), when I then add in mame h size to pull it further it displays information that was otherwise hidden by Groovy.


EDIT: here are the ranges I'm using (and then I have individual ones for 256p games):

crt_range0                15734-15734, 59.94-60.00, 4.700, 4.700, 6.216, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 224, 224, 448, 448
crt_range1                15734-15734, 59.94-60.00, 4.047, 4.700, 5.449, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 232, 232, 464, 464
crt_range2                15625-16000, 59.94-60.00, 3.207, 4.700, 4.650, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 240, 240, 0, 0
crt_range3                15625-16000, 59.94-60.00, 3.207, 4.700, 4.650, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 0, 0, 480, 480
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 13, 2019, 11:04:30 am
Avoid friction. Use Arcade OSD to verify the modes. Are they fully displayed this way?

How do I verify if there is friction, do I just pull porches all the way out to see how far they go?

 :)

It was figurative. I mean don't make things more complicated than needed and avoid things that can fail in the middle. Use Arcade OSD rather than GM to test the different modes, so you can see if they're missing some part, using the background grid.

If you use GM instead, please don't use one of the lamer-targeted so called no-nag builds, which hide the white box on load, which serious crt men require to adjust geometry.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 11:08:50 am
Alright I will go test on arcade osd + service menu to see what the edges look like.

I use the original groovymame package for 205b. I had the no nag one that Arroyo shared with me and tested it but I realized having info for games running imperfectly or incorrectly is actually practical to know what to expect so I stuck with the original GM exe.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 13, 2019, 11:13:18 am
Alright I will go test on arcade osd + service menu to see what the edges look like.

I use the original groovymame package for 205b. I had the no nag one that Arroyo shared with me and tested it but I realized having info for games running imperfectly or incorrectly is actually practical to know what to expect so I stuck with the original GM exe.

More than that, GM shows the selected video mode in the Switchres line, that makes it easy to check in an instant if the ranges are working as expected, rather than relying on indirect observation like borders, etc.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 11:17:30 am
Oh I didn't know the no nag one actually removes that. Glad I didn't keep it then.

Ok so there's definitely a problem. I just have to touch the service menu H size a couple points and it's already cutting off as shown in the picture.

Also in the second picture (please ignore the colors, camera can't keep up) here's what the line at the top looks like (I wonder if it moves upwards depending on source). Anyway if I can get Groovy to display the full picture I can always tweak at lowering the vertical centering via porches and then moving the V pos on my tv service menu and theoretically everything should be working great.

Now I have to figure out what I did wrong for my resolutions to be cutoff on the sides/top/bottom.  ???
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 13, 2019, 11:25:50 am
The line at the top is typical, you just need to hide it later.

What you need to check is whether there are missing lines on top or bottom that never get shown even after adjusting v-size in your service menu so much that you can see the whole raster (once you see black borders up and down).

If you're already there, then probably there's nothing else you can do. Your chassis might be limiting the total visible lines to less than 240p.

With regards to the horizontal overscan, I'm not sure if I understand what you mean. I thought you had already adjusted each range and ported the values to GM so you had no horizontal overscan.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 13, 2019, 11:29:47 am
Yes one sec I'll get that.

Meanwhile here are some pics. Picture quality is not representative of the real thing as I'm using a very old smartphone, but the general idea is to show how even with an exagerated h size pull away from the edge there is missing information (both on sides and top/bottom), when I then add in mame h size to pull it further it displays information that was otherwise hidden by Groovy.


EDIT: here are the ranges I'm using (and then I have individual ones for 256p games):

crt_range0                15734-15734, 59.94-60.00, 4.700, 4.700, 6.216, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 224, 224, 448, 448
crt_range1                15734-15734, 59.94-60.00, 4.047, 4.700, 5.449, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 232, 232, 464, 464
crt_range2                15625-16000, 59.94-60.00, 3.207, 4.700, 4.650, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 240, 240, 0, 0
crt_range3                15625-16000, 59.94-60.00, 3.207, 4.700, 4.650, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 0, 0, 480, 480

Try this:

crt_range0                15625-16200, 59.70-60.10, 3.000, 4.700, 8.000, 0.064, 0.192, 1.024, 0, 0, 224, 224, 448, 448
crt_range1                15625-16200, 59.70-60.10, 3.000, 4.700, 8.000, 0.064, 0.192, 1.024, 0, 0, 232, 232, 464, 464
crt_range2                15625-16200, 59.70-60.10, 3.000, 4.700, 8.000, 0.064, 0.192, 1.024, 0, 0, 240, 240, 0, 0
crt_range3                15625-16200, 59.70-60.10, 3.000, 4.700, 8.000, 0.064, 0.192, 1.024, 0, 0, 0, 0, 480, 480
[/quote]


Report back any issues you have with overscan (which side), ripple effect, etc.  I imagine it will mess up your 224p and 232p on height...

Just to confirm you installed Arcade 15 preset (without modifying it) in VMM and installed all the modelines correct?  And you are using Super resolutions right?
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 13, 2019, 11:37:17 am
Arroyo, that's redundant, it can be merged into a single range.

The reason Neilalphazeta was using different horizontal porch values per range was to compensate for the aspect ratio on different heights. That's rather sui generis but there's nothing wrong with it if he feels it looks better.

Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 13, 2019, 11:43:42 am
Arroyo, that's redundant, it can be merged into a single range.

The reason Neilalphazeta was using different horizontal porch values per range was to compensate for the aspect ratio on different heights. That's rather sui generis but there's nothing wrong with it if he feels it looks better.


Agreed, he just seemed to be having issues with overscan and correct me if I’m wrong but I thought it was due to the limitations in horizontal range.

I use the standard Arcade 15 preset and while I had to compensate on the right side picture with the front porches, I don’t have any overscan issues.  The mk2.ini that he posted (very helpful, thanks again Neil) has the frequency range of the NTSC preset which limited my ability to correctly situate the picture.  I realized I only needed the unevenstretchx and fixed resolution, to get the picture he was referring to. 

As our TV’s are largely the same I figured it would be the same for him with maybe some editing needed to porch values.

Neil:, I have a KV-24FV300 at home, I’ll swap it out tonight and see if it affects things by using my existing settings.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 11:44:40 am
So actually I realized that my tv has a lot of leeway still on the v size. I stop at 38 meaning I can still keep going to reducing it by 37 extra points (although that line at the top is quickly visible), however on the h size I only have a very little leeway left (16 is my default for all 224p content but at around 9 the picture of 240p is getting cut off as shown in the metamoqester pics.

I can see Metamoqester is displaying the full bottom part but not top, so next I need to lower the vertical centering I guess as the only means to get 240p and up to display right.

Yes I have adjusting horizontal overscan quite a lot to greatly stretch out the picture so that Groovymame is displaying a near perfect 4:3 picture in all the different resolutions (and not having the h size squished). Oh, actually I just realized, maybe that's the error I made... By having it pulled out so much it reaches close to the limits of my crt lol.

Maybe I need to pull it back for 240p content so that I can display more of the picture by just touching the v size service menu item... I'm going to try that and will report back.

EDIT: Thank you to both of, just read your messages as I was posting this. I'll try Arroyo's settings to see if that works, and yes I haven't edited anything in arcade15khz preset beyond the h front and back defaults. It's possible my micro managing of the h size to keep aspect ratio of larger resolutions at my default service menu settings for 224p might be what's getting in the way at this moment.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 11:52:06 am
You guys are the best! Thank you Arroyo for those settings. So turns out yes I was my own worst enemy in this situation (adding tons of h size settings and enlarging the image so much forced me to bump into the limits of my tv). So by using the same H porch settings I use for 224 that immediately fixed the horizontal issue. Now the vertical issue is still in play because basically the top is touching that white line, the bottom is fully visible now with the v settings Arroyo shared.

All I have to do now is lower the picture. So if I remember correctly based on what Calamity taught me I have to add 0.0637 per line, so I just multiply that measurement per number of lines I wish to add, and I add this to the back porch in this case (to lower screen) is that correct?
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 13, 2019, 11:56:18 am
I use the standard Arcade 15 preset and while I had to compensate on the right side picture with the front porches, I don’t have any overscan issues.

Yes, that's the expected behaviour. A single horizontal adjustment should be valid for all heights. Probably Neilalphazeta should forget about doing separate horizontal adjustments per height. I just helped him achieving that but now I believe it was an error. It's making his setup a real mess.

Quote
has the frequency range of the NTSC preset which limited my ability to correctly situate the picture.  I realized I only needed the unevenstretchx and fixed resolution, to get the picture he was referring to. 

I'd say the issue had more to do with scaling (unevenstretchx) than the frequency range. Unless I didn't undertand you.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 11:58:32 am
Yes actually now that I realize about the mistake of adjusting the h size we probably can take out the unevenstretch x in our 256> 240p inis since keeping the one and only h setting makes it redundant (and we can possibly also remove the crt range override as well I guess).
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 13, 2019, 12:00:20 pm
All I have to do now is lower the picture. So if I remember correctly based on what Calamity taught me I have to add 0.0637 per line, so I just multiply that measurement per number of lines I wish to add, and I add this to the back porch in this case (to lower screen) is that correct?

Yes, but hfreq also has a role on this, we had already sorted this part out hadn't we?
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 13, 2019, 12:03:14 pm
Try this:

crt_range0 15734-16200, 59.94-60.00, 3.000, 4.700, 8.000, 0.191, 0.191, 0.953, 0, 0, 192, 240, 448, 480
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 12:05:06 pm
All I have to do now is lower the picture. So if I remember correctly based on what Calamity taught me I have to add 0.0637 per line, so I just multiply that measurement per number of lines I wish to add, and I add this to the back porch in this case (to lower screen) is that correct?

Yes, but hfreq also has a role on this, we had already sorted this part out hadn't we?

Oh yes, I changed that to Arroyo's recommended setting now 0.064, 0.192, 1.024 (previously 0.191, 0.191, 0.953 as you just showed).

I remember you saying they are not interdependent but I don't remember what it is I need to do to the hfreq again, if the range is expanded I get more flexibility on the v centering?

I just tested adding 0.0637 to the front porch and it worked, but when I added a second 0.0637 to that same porch it messed things up and gave me a mini picture with a big black frame.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 13, 2019, 12:07:40 pm
I just tested adding 0.0637 to the front porch and it worked, but when I added a second 0.0637 to that same porch it messed things up and gave me a mini picture with a big black frame.

That usually means you screwed the range, get used to checking logs to see what's going on.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 12:17:37 pm
Yeah okay, I was adding it to the wrong porch (front is the last number not first lol). I'm getting there with small increments I just have to be careful rounding up the calculations properly looks like.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 12:24:32 pm
Looks like I can only add two times before it goes to interlace graphics now.

1.024+0.064=1.088

1.088+0.0637=1.152

But after this when I do the third extra line I end up in 480i. :(

1.152+0.0637=1.216

I'll check a log.

EDIT: Ok I got it working after increasing hfreq.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 13, 2019, 12:31:51 pm
has the frequency range of the NTSC preset which limited my ability to correctly situate the picture.  I realized I only needed the unevenstretchx and fixed resolution, to get the picture he was referring to. 

I'd say the issue had more to do with scaling (unevenstretchx) than the frequency range. Unless I didn't undertand you.

Perhaps, I was referring to the NTSC horizontal range: 15734-15734 that he had which seemed to be a limiting factor. I'm going to play with this more tonight to see what it is that made the picture look better, maybe it was just the forced 240p and the unevenstretchx was not necessary. 

My question would be by forcing 240p content on a 256p image I would expect that to squish the image vertically in the y plane?  Seems it would be more ideal to cut off the top and bottom of 256p content by losing 8 lines, but not distorting the picture by squishing it down.  This would allow for the proper resolution (minus the cutoffs), and allow these TV's to run closer to the mandated 60Hz range of the TV's chassis.  I imagine there is a call for this in Groovymame, but I'm not aware of what it would be.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 13, 2019, 12:36:07 pm
Looks like I can only add two times before it goes to interlace graphics now.

1.024+0.064=1.088

1.088+0.0637=1.152

But after this when I do the third extra line I end up in 480i. :(

1.152+0.0637=1.216

I'll check a log.

EDIT: Ok I got it working after increasing hfreq.

Ok I gotta know.  Are you independently wealthy or just that dedicated that you are taking time off work? :laugh2:
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 13, 2019, 12:36:59 pm
1.152+0.0637=1.216

I'll check a log.

EDIT: Ok I got it working after increasing hfreq.

That's too much. As I said, for 240p you shouldn't need to go beyond 15.8 kHz. If you can't center the picture that way, you'd rather use the service menu v-shift or equivalent.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 12:39:45 pm
Arroyo> Yes that might be a good idea too, although with some games this might be noticeable.

So sadly turns out I was bumping into the limits of my crt at 240p. I can lower the image to have the top fully displayed but then it starts cutting off the bottom. I find it weird that the crt reaches the limits at such a high v size setting (36ish) with so much adjustment left. On the H size I reach the limit around 6 but in normal applications I have it at 16 on my tv for displaying a full picture. The best I can do is a middle ground compromise and have a few pixels cut off on the top/bottom and then adjust the horizontal to lose an equal amount that allows me to retain the aspect ratio.

Let me know if you get to test your 24 inch fv300 to see if you have a larger range there on 240p.

Arroyo> lol actually I work from home today is all (part of a startup), so I'm able to slack off a bit and spend time on Groovy. XD
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 13, 2019, 12:39:52 pm
My question would be by forcing 240p content on a 256p image I would expect that to squish the image vertically in the y plane?  Seems it would be more ideal to cut off the top and bottom of 256p content by losing 8 lines, but not distorting the picture by squishing it down.  This would allow for the proper resolution (minus the cutoffs), and allow these TV's to run closer to the mandated 60Hz range of the TV's chassis.  I imagine there is a call for this in Groovymame, but I'm not aware of what it would be.

If you leave default settings, GM will squish the picture. If you force -unevenstrecth 0 (in per game.ini as GM tries to manage that option itself) the you force GM to crop the picture.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 13, 2019, 12:44:05 pm
If you leave default settings, GM will squish the picture. If you force -unevenstrecth 0 (in per game.ini as GM tries to manage that option itself) the you force GM to crop the picture.

Brilliant, you need to start getting paid for all this Calamity!  There’s a donation page on Geedorah right?  Does that come directly to you?
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 13, 2019, 12:54:39 pm
(I'm working from home today too, my kid has a cold and didn't go to school today. Aside of the paypal fee, donations come directly here, yes :)).
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 13, 2019, 12:57:10 pm
So sadly turns out I was bumping into the limits of my crt at 240p. I can lower the image to have the top fully displayed but then it starts cutting off the bottom.

So you mean you can't get 240 lines displayed on the screen whatever you do in the service menu?
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 13, 2019, 01:48:36 pm
(I'm working from home today too, my kid has a cold and didn't go to school today. Aside of the paypal fee, donations come directly here, yes :)).

Done.  I know you've probably heard it a thousand times, but Gracias por todo lo que haces.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 13, 2019, 01:55:01 pm
Done.  I know you've probably heard it a thousand times, but Gracias por todo lo que haces.

Thanks mate, it's much appreciated.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 03:04:40 pm
Calamity are you from South America?  :)

When I get my payment this month I should go give a donation too, you're too much of a help and your work on GM/VMM/ArcadeOSD is legendary.

So I did some more testing just now, it appears as though the max image this tv can display vertically is exactly 240, but because the image stretches with a picture being displayed I basically defacto lose a number of lines, then because there is that bright line at the top that is an eyesore to see I have to overscan a few extra lines so that it doesn't appear when pictures are dark or going to black, so by the time I was done finding the best compromise I'm basically losing some good 3%~3.5% of the picture, and that's with a setting that adds noticeable underscan to all other systems making it ideal for none.

Out of curiosity I did test my other tv's (all same era Sony silver case and digital chassis) and although the default setting ranges differ the ultimate result is the same, where it seems to stop at 240 on the spot. I think the larger tv I have might offer a few more lines since Arroyo doesn't seem to have a problem with his but that tv has poor focus and sharpness and the picture tube just isn't anywhere close to the condition of these others so I wouldn't want to use it for this anyway. The engineers probably never imagined consumers would use these tv's with something like emudriver to force higher resolution to the tv.  ;D

For now I'm going to resign myself to making an ini for every single 240p game and forcing it to 224 or perhaps 232. At least with my current setup I think this is simpler and allows me to maximize all the 224 and 232 games (which combined make up over 2/3 of my game list). I spent some time on the Mortal Kombat II character selection up close comparing the forced 240p version versus the forced 224p versions and to be honest I couldn't spot much difference until I went really into pixel peeping mode (granted though we're already downresing it from 256 but since that resolution doesn't work for me I can't compare with it). The differences I spot are usually on small texts especially letters that have horizontal lines in them such as "E" where the middle line occasionally has a faintly different look from the top and bottom lines. It's clearly not ideal and I understand I'll be working against GM's fantastic ability to recreate the correct resolutions but the other way is just chock full of compromises.

I don't suppose there is any other way other than doing game per game for all the games in my list is there (going to be hundreds of inis when I'm done lol).

Ultimately 85% or so of the time I'm going to be playing 224p games because the majority of my favorite games are in that resolution, so I feel very happy and satisfied with Groovymame (and Mortal Kombat seems to be pretty flexible at whatever forced resolution). I just wish there were something more that could be done to get even more out of it but short of getting a pal tv, an older model Sony or different brand crt this seems to be impossible.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 13, 2019, 03:18:13 pm
For now I'm going to resign myself to making an ini for every single 240p game and forcing it to 224 or perhaps 232.

Before you go to all of that trouble, let me break out my KV-24FV300.  It's the same chassis as yours.  The size of the tube shouldn't have anything to do with you vertical range limit, its about the number of vertical lines, and even some of those 14inch PVM's can do much higher resolutions (some 20inches can do 1080).  I'll report back here my findings. Hopefully I can get to it tonight.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 03:24:20 pm
For now I'm going to resign myself to making an ini for every single 240p game and forcing it to 224 or perhaps 232.

Before you go to all of that trouble, let me break out my KV-24FV300.  It's the same chassis as yours.  The size of the tube shouldn't have anything to do with you vertical range limit, its about the number of vertical lines, and even some of those 14inch PVM's can do much higher resolutions (some 20inches can do 1080).  I'll report back here my findings. Hopefully I can get to it tonight.
Thanks, greatly appreciate it. Yes I just double checked to be sure and the 20 and 24 inch FV300 have the BA-6 and same service manual so should be identical. I'll wait till then before I start my res crushing operation.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 13, 2019, 04:17:27 pm
Calamity are you from South America?  :)

Spain.

Quote
Out of curiosity I did test my other tv's (all same era Sony silver case and digital chassis) and although the default setting ranges differ the ultimate result is the same, where it seems to stop at 240 on the spot.

Yeah, if you search the forum, many users have encountered this specific problems. Paradroid, who has tested a few dozens of models, can confirm this.

I wonder if it'd be possible to somehow hack these chassis to remove their little brain without breaking the rest.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 04:46:02 pm
Nice. no wonder you're able to find nice crt's.   :D

Yes I think I also shouldn't make rash decisions. As I was actually sitting down to play i realize having a bit of overscan isn't a deal breaker. Even with my ideal 224p settings I basically get about 5% overscan on 240p content, which is roughly what tv's used to launch with and in those days most people didn't bother correcting it (although in the arcades it was always correct as far as I can remember).

Ruining the resolution is probably not worth getting in those edge pixels. I already do that to 256p but there's absolutely no other way with that size on my setup.

I'll wait to hear whether Arroyo experiences the same thing but it sounds likely that he will (if he doesn't then I have to try to figure out what I'm doing wrong).
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 13, 2019, 07:21:21 pm
I’m not seeing anything different (outside of a yet to be calibrated TV that does not look very good yet ;-)):

(https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20190214/1ae08e74cd7af73ef019e5c37c4d85fb.jpg)

(https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20190214/b336205bf5f775d3fa512ce8470d9807.jpg)

Anything you want me to test?
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 07:23:43 pm
Wow, thank you Arroyo for testing this. So when you pull down the vertical sizing when do you start seeing the end of the screen (bright line at the top)?

Maybe something like a capacitor is out on my tv perhaps causing it to lose V size (come to think of it unlikely since I have tested this on 3 tv's of mine)? That or there's some setting I'm not aware of somewhere.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 13, 2019, 07:25:28 pm
If you leave default settings, GM will squish the picture. If you force -unevenstrecth 0 (in per game.ini as GM tries to manage that option itself) the you force GM to crop the picture.

Brilliant, you need to start getting paid for all this Calamity!  There’s a donation page on Geedorah right?  Does that come directly to you?


This worked very well IMHO.  You get some cut off top to bottom and I had to adjust the porches to bring the horizontal picture in line but it’s the original resolution just truncates top and bottom.  You only notice it the character select screen, but in game play it’s perfect:

(https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20190214/657f0b9ecd37b384671fc08ffc7df2e3.jpg)

(https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20190214/eec031d2d6ce119e861fb3e066e0e78d.jpg)

Definitely using this as it seems to be the best compromise.  Yes there’s triple buffering but I tried playing both with forced resolution and without and I couldn’t tell the difference outside of scrolling where it’s not quite as smooth!  I dropped unevenstretchx and just did unevenstretch  0.  Looks amazing!
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 13, 2019, 07:29:34 pm
Wow, thank you Arroyo for testing this. So when you pull down the vertical sizing when do you start seeing the end of the screen (bright line at the top)?

Maybe something like a capacitor is out on my tv perhaps causing it to lose V size (come to think of it unlikely since I have tested this on 3 tv's of mine)? That or there's some setting I'm not aware of somewhere.

I assume you are talking about Arcade OSD?
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 07:33:11 pm
That looks amazing. Really beautiful picture on the fv310 (in saying this I'm somewhat indirectly complimenting my own tv too lol). You don't mind the slightly off aspect ratio though? If I did it that way I would stretch the horizontal evenly to have four thirds of the pixels missing top and bottom off screen left and right to maintain proper ratio but I'm a bit of a stickler for aspect preservation.  :D

EDIT: No I meant in the service menu of the tv (disp, 5, vol+, power). Looks like you don't have it though, but on my sets what happens is there is a bright line at the very top at the very last pixel in the 240 image, and the bottom has a cutoff mark around the last pixel too. The bright line somewhat ruins things because depending on the adjustment it will show on dark images, when a full image is displayed it blooms out so it goes out of sight however. But because I calibrated for 224p those extra pixels out of sight on 224 are not straight either so to get the bright line completely out of sight requires overscanning 2% to 3%.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 13, 2019, 08:03:41 pm
That looks amazing. Really beautiful picture on the fv310 (in saying this I'm somewhat indirectly complimenting my own tv too lol). You don't mind the slightly off aspect ratio though? If I did it that way I would stretch the horizontal evenly to have four thirds of the pixels missing top and bottom off screen left and right to maintain proper ratio but I'm a bit of a stickler for aspect preservation.  :D

Not sure what you mean by aspect ratio being off.  Mortal Kombat 2’s resolution is 400x254 which is a ration of 4:2.54.  Street fighter 2 is a resolution of 384x224 a ratio of 4:2.33.  Some games like Robotron for example is 292x240 is very close to 4:3 at 4:3.28, but rarely is a game an actual 4:3 perfect.  I was just going to say you could test it by going back and forth but I realized you can’t see the untouched 256p image cause you get scrolling with this set.  The FV310 allowed me to view the untouched  256p I just have the water ripple effect going on.

I can promise you the aspect ratio hasn’t changed from the changes we’ve made to the original, just cut the top and bottom off.  Now you can argue that my settings via the TV internal menus geometry are off, but I did do an extensive calibration and I’m pretty confident it’s accurate.

Quote
EDIT: No I meant in the service menu of the tv (disp, 5, vol+, power). Looks like you don't have it though, but on my sets what happens is there is a bright line at the very top at the very last pixel in the 240 image, and the bottom has a cutoff mark around the last pixel too. The bright line somewhat ruins things because depending on the adjustment it will show on dark images, when a full image is displayed it blooms out so it goes out of sight however. But because I calibrated for 224p those extra pixels out of sight on 224 are not straight either so to get the bright line completely out of sight requires overscanning 2% to 3%.

I calibrated for a perfect picture in 240p so that I wouldn’t crop that picture (on the FV310) as there’s enough games that use it I figured that would bother me more than some black bars in the top and bottom of 224p content.

I looked through the pics you sent and not sure what the issue is that you mentioned.  The pics I was looking at showed what looked to be normal stuff except maybe that red line in the upper left?
(https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20190214/25a7a4b9f5d643e4860a1633329e86fd.jpg)


Wait I think I know what your seeing, do you mean this?:

(https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20190214/2ab70f4576ed6b6162979ddbc2460315.jpg)
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Recapnation on February 13, 2019, 08:15:07 pm
Aspect ratio precisely refers to the picture's geometry. It's always 4 : 3 no matter the pixel count.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 13, 2019, 08:20:06 pm
Aspect ratio precisely refers to the picture's geometry. It's always 4 : 3 no matter the pixel count.

You’ll have to explain that one, as the ratio of pixels describes the ratio of the picture.  A 1920x1080 resolution is a 16:9 picture (division of both equals 1.77777), how could a resolution of 400x254 be a 4:3 ratio when the math works out to (1.574 vs 1.333)?  I’m confused.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Recapnation on February 13, 2019, 08:52:49 pm
But I did a couple of weeks ago:

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,159472.msg1677155.html#msg1677155 (http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,159472.msg1677155.html#msg1677155)
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 13, 2019, 09:26:20 pm
But I did a couple of weeks ago:

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,159472.msg1677155.html#msg1677155 (http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,159472.msg1677155.html#msg1677155)

Thanks for passing along, I’ll take a look later tonight after kid duty.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 13, 2019, 11:35:10 pm
Yes basically almost all games were 4:3 regardless of actual resolution. Artists worked on various resolutions knowing that the image would be displayed in a 4:3 aspect ratio monitor or tv and the games were of course also tested on such monitors and tv's. So when you cut off the top and bottom of MK games by leaving the full horizontal size the picture is being stretched inwards (characters become a little bit thinner), it's perfectly fine that way if you don't mind it, some probably would prefer that to forcing the sides off the screen to maintain the proper 4:3 aspect ratio we knew in the arcades, it's just a preference thing. I tend to favor keeping the true aspect ratio of all games. For some reason there was a period in emulation where a lot of people liked the resolution to be intact instead of the full 4:3 aspect ratio so even stuff like Snes emulators would often have black borders on the sides, personally I hated it because that just wasn't the way real consoles and games looked like in our childhood or at any time, not sure what the trend is now, but certainly Mame in general seems to favor original aspect ratio by default which is nice.

Yes that line at the very top, did you get there by zooming out on the v size or was it there already and only visible on black screens? Interestingly I also have vpos set at 27, I guess our measurements are probably not far off with the same chassis and all.

I think there seem to be slight variations a few lines more or less and on my best set the picture has a couple lines cut off by that glowing line because the picture expands with blooming pushing some of the picture out. That line seems to define the end of the screen from the looks of it. Do you manage to have some black space between the end of your 240p picture and the cutoff line?

At first it seemed like a mistake to adjust H size for different resolutions as Calamity pointed out, but since these limitations are in place and I basically need my tv to be more often than not calibrated to display 224p for other consoles, turns out it wasn't a bad thing to have all those h porch adjustments, I can just live with some minor overscan for 240, and 256 has to be pulled in on my tv's (sucks for R-Type and a few others where texts look a bit weird, but I think this still tops interlaced).
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 14, 2019, 10:19:28 am
Also out of curiosity Arroyo, did you follow the instructions of most guides of lowering in mame gamma setting to 0.700? On my Sony sets doing that resulted in the picture being much much too dark. I think .900 seems to be somewhat acceptable, but I ended up leaving it at 1.0.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 14, 2019, 11:01:02 am
Also I did some calculations and numbers were a bit higher than I anticipated. Assuming you have 240 full screen from top to bottom then the overscan on MK is about 16 lines, so an overscan of 6.25%. If you are able to leave it the way we had it before and have some more lines to reduce v size you might get more out of the picture that way (but with some scaling). General overscan that was found on tv's was generally between 4~5% from what I read, so actually there's quite a bit of lost picture sadly.

In my setup with default 224p centering I have an overscan in the 6% range as well in 240 content, and I find playability is generally not affected but varies per game, in some games important information gets cut off and in a few others the center image just seems too big imo. Doing my best calibration to close in on that bright line while still guaranteeing it stays hidden I can reduce the overscan to either 3.3%~4.1% depending on what I do (I can push the v centering down and further reduce the v size one more point that way). Technically I could go as low as 2% but then I have this annoying bright line showing itself, hiding again etc, fully dependent on whats being displayed (blooming will move it around, and it ends up visible on blacks for sure). The FV310 doesn't bloom because it has that unusual high voltage generator (as far as I know no other consumer tv in North America had one of these), so actually the line would stay out of sight if you push it out (assuming you have the line as close as the BA6 chassis does, maybe you have more room on that tv).
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 14, 2019, 01:16:43 pm
But I did a couple of weeks ago:
 
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,159472.msg1677155.html#msg1677155 (http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,159472.msg1677155.html#msg1677155)

You don't mind the slightly off aspect ratio though?

 
Ok, so the little hamster in my head was huffing and puffing on his wheel trying to make sense of this all.  I read that thread that you posted Recapnation, and it was thought provoking.  I realize in looking back at my post how I communicated it implied I was in the camp of the OP of that thread.  To be clear, I don’t believe that the pictures for games were intended to have black bars.  I would fall in your camp of the argument that the intention of the developers was to have the picture fill the screen.  The “designing for RGB” vs poorer signal standards seems like a silly argument to me as SCART in Europe provided for a RGB connection, so how could developers design console games for the inferior North American composite/RF and ignore the European RGB?  In addition as you pointed out they developed the games undoubtedly on RGB monitors, so there’s that.
 
But Neil’s question was very thought provoking to me.  Given that it appears we accept that the resolution ratios of the games themselves are not perfect 4:3, and given the reasonable assumption that the intention was to fill a 4:3 screen it does imply that some (and I hate to use this word, can’t think of another) stretching is mandated to fill the picture, either vertically or horizontally.  How MUCH stretching seems to be the question.  So what is the intended look of a game?
 
Neil’s question about the MK2 aspect ratio got my searching deep last night, and I did come across this video (took a still image) that got me worried that he might be right about the mk2 aspect ratio being off:
 
(https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20190214/46019bf6b39d0f64eefabea825ace2a1.jpg)
 
This threw me off big time, because even with leaving the original untouched GroovyMame settings the image was “squished” horizontally compared to the image above.  The only way to correct for it was to go into the TV’s service menu and dramatically increase the horizontal size, but of course this severally distorted other games.  Then after doing more searching of actual mk2 cabinets running on CRT’s I came across this image:
 
(https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20190214/12cc7020420ccb560b1c7fc9c47ae342.jpg)
 
I also checked an LCD with no stretching applied to get this image(has border bezels):
 
(https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20190214/d076edcc7f544f4a616c8b55f9940b23.jpg)
 
So based on those 2 images it would seem the original mk2 image I posted does not look distorted from an aspect ratio standpoint (I’m judging based off of the square box outlines of the character selection).
 
But obviously this requires subjection on how much to increase or decrease the vertical and horizontal size on the hardware of the display to make.
 
Clearly you can change the aspect ratio to the amount you like as evidenced by Calamity’s link to the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxdUCLa4VCk&t= (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxdUCLa4VCk&t=)
 
and indeed to reinforce your point Recapnation, I believe the intention was to do exactly that, have the image be filled on the 4:3 by adjusting the vertical and horizontal size on the hardware of the display so that it fit perfectly on all sides.
 
Assuming that’s true it makes Neil’s pursuit of making 224p, 240p, and 256p content fit the display vertically seem pretty logical as technically that’s what was done in Arcades.  The difficulty as far as I can see it is that it can’t be done in the vertical direction via software because of the inherit limited number of lines.  Horizontally it’s not a problem because you can draw a lot of lines (15khz vs. 60hz).  So it seems the only real solution is to either put pots on your display (like in the above referenced video), or accept that the aspect ratio isn’t exactly what was intended.  I had never thought of the aspect ratio as being off though until Neil mentioned it.
 
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Calamity on February 14, 2019, 01:49:31 pm
and given the reasonable assumption that the intention was to fill a 4:3 screen it does imply that some (and I hate to use this word, can’t think of another) stretching is mandated to fill the picture, either vertically or horizontally.  How MUCH stretching seems to be the question.

Your reasoning requires to introduce "stretching" because you're based on an anachronism: the concept of square pixels.

There are two separate concepts to realize about: screen aspect and pixel aspect. Pixel aspect was rarely 1:1 (square) in the CRT era.

Quote
Assuming that’s true it makes Neil’s pursuit of making 224p, 240p, and 256p content fit the display vertically seem pretty logical as technically that’s what was done in Arcades. 

Yeah, but Neil's pursuit goes beyond that. Having realized his TV can't accommodate vertical size properly, he's trying to propagate the overscan to the horizontal dimension to overscan "evenly". That's an original approach I can't remember to have seen before. I'm my opinion it's a futile effort, but interesting anyway.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 14, 2019, 02:21:41 pm
Arroyo>

What you can do to check the aspect ratio is the following:
go back to previous mk2.ini settings which had unevenstretch and unevenstretchx so that you can fill up the screen, then go to the in mame geometry settings and start pulling the v size down until you have the full vertical image displayed (you can press the enter key at any time to return these to 1000, and you can press tab on and off to see the picture and quickly return to the settings to help you get there. Once you have the full vertical image displayed just input that very v size setting number into the h size (it might be around 900 or around there depending on your default tv v size). Once done if you see black bars on the sides then you know the aspect ratio is incorrect.

On most tv sets the v and h size work accurately per line in a way, so to preserve aspect ratio when using Sony service menu settings you'd go in a 4:3 pattern (such as decreasing or increasing H size by 4 points and then V size by 3 points and so forth), but in Mame I found the settings already adjust the changes to preserve aspect ratio (so a change in v size is less dramatic than a change in h size because it tries to preserve 4:3 if that makes any sense). So starting at 1000 if you pushed both settings to 750 they would still be in 4:3 (albeit with a black frame).

I think you will find your tv is horizontally compressed for 256p content but fairly minimally. I can tell because I'm quite used to seeing MKII. If it is and you want to correct it you can leave mame settings as are, adjust the porches and check till it fits, once it does you can revert the mame settings to 1000 but now you will know that the aspect ratio is preserved. :)

The examples you showed above on that arcade cabinet to me look like on the opposite they might be slightly horizontally expanded, and actually this was more common in the arcades. When they adjusted the settings in arcade cabinets it was more important to have the vertical image fully shown as there were often texts that would be noticeably clipped if they weren't but when doing horizontal size it is more common for the extreme edges to have geometrical imperfections and instead of trying to work on it more they would often times just shove a few lines off screen since it would rarely be noticed.  :D
As a result given the choice I also favor having the horizontal image slightly expanded than the reverse, but that's just me.

As for what I did with my setup yes, I maintained aspect ratio for all resolutions but at the time I hadn't realized all I needed to think about was adjusting the v size and I could have had all resolutions correct with a single v size change. However ultimately as it turns out my tv's cannot accommodate most larger resolutions fully so instead I have to live with moderate overscan on 240p content and as such having the horizontal porches set to maintain the 4:3 ratio allows me to just play the games without bothering with any geometrical settings and just live with some overscan on the higher res content. I really like that Groovymame allows one to set things up any way one wants.

I do have one thing I can't figure out and that is what alternatives are there for times where I would want to force a higher res game to fit in a 224p image (such as 240 or 256) and not have texts look weird at times (like they do in R-Type or ZeroTeam). Is there no hlsl or other shader that I could apply in these situations so that things still look smooth (aside from going to 480i)?
I'm trying to figure this out as I don't intend to go shopping for new tv's at this moment (although eventually I would like to get an arcade monitor for Groovy).

Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 14, 2019, 03:08:53 pm
and given the reasonable assumption that the intention was to fill a 4:3 screen it does imply that some (and I hate to use this word, can’t think of another) stretching is mandated to fill the picture, either vertically or horizontally.  How MUCH stretching seems to be the question.

Your reasoning requires to introduce "stretching" because you're based on an anachronism: the concept of square pixels.

There are two separate concepts to realize about: screen aspect and pixel aspect. Pixel aspect was rarely 1:1 (square) in the CRT era.


The only way that I can make sense of that statement is to assume that the CRT guns are doing one of the following 2 things:

1.) Increase the beam height to fill in the additional vertical space but keep the gaps between the lines the same....or
2.) Keep the beam height the same but increase the gaps (space) between them to fill the screen.

I would think it would be the latter, but perhaps neither.  I would love to know how in that video the vertical was increased but it does not affect the aspect ratio.  I guess I've spent to much time in photoshop, cause in trying to reconcile how the horizontal picture stays the same but the vertical is expanded and it does not affect the aspect ratio.....well that makes my brain hurt.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 14, 2019, 04:00:28 pm
I don't think people were asking those kind of questions back then. The only tv's and monitors we had in arcades and at home were 4:3 so it wouldn't have made sense for game designers to purposely want to miss out on screen space by using resolutions such as 5:4 or 3:2. If you look at CPS games in their pixel resolution then you'll notice everything looks fat, that couldn't possibly be what they intended right? They purposely drew the characters that way knowing it would be stretched inwards to properly fit the screen. :)
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 14, 2019, 04:09:47 pm
I don't think people were asking those kind of questions back then. The only tv's and monitors we had in arcades and at home were 4:3 so it wouldn't have made sense for game designers to purposely want to miss out on screen space by using resolutions such as 5:4 or 3:2. If you look at CPS games in their pixel resolution then you'll notice everything looks fat, that couldn't possibly be what they intended right? They purposely drew the characters that way knowing it would be stretched inwards to properly fit the screen. :)

I believe Calamitys comment says that no stretching takes place, that’s what I’m trying to understand.  When I make those adjustments using my TV’s menu it certainly appears to change the aspect ratio to me.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Neilalphazeta on February 14, 2019, 04:14:01 pm
I think it's because the tv has no horizontal pixels, it looks like this (in the case of aperture grille, but shadow mask is the same idea with a different shape):

(https://i.imgtc.com/GjK2sLK.jpg)
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Recapnation on February 14, 2019, 04:22:47 pm
I believe Calamitys comment says that no stretching takes place, that’s what I’m trying to understand.  When I make those adjustments using my TV’s menu it certainly appears to change the aspect ratio to me.

You're confusing "analog scaling" (as shown in the video) with "analog display" (as explained in the other thread). Obviously the former alters the pixel's aspect ratio and with it, the picture's aspect ratio. If you do it to just fill the screen for every game as it should be, you'll have different pixel aspect depending on the resolution, whereas the picture's aspect will always be of 4 : 3.



Quote
The “designing for RGB” vs poorer signal standards seems like a silly argument to me as SCART in Europe provided for a RGB connection, so how could developers design console games for the inferior North American composite/RF and ignore the European RGB?  In addition as you pointed out they developed the games undoubtedly on RGB monitors, so there’s that.

Well, "European RGB" was for sure ignored by the Japanese manufacturers -- they never gave a ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- until the DC/GCN. But RGB in Japan was a little bit more availaible than in the US. There're official RGB Super Famicom cables since day 1, for instance.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 14, 2019, 04:28:27 pm
I believe Calamitys comment says that no stretching takes place, that’s what I’m trying to understand.  When I make those adjustments using my TV’s menu it certainly appears to change the aspect ratio to me.

You're confusing "analog scaling" (as shown in the video) with "analog display" (as explained in the other thread). Obviously the former alters the pixel's aspect ratio and with it, the picture's aspect ratio. If you do it to just fill the screen for every game as it should be, you'll have different pixel's aspect depending on the resolution, whereas the picture's aspect will always be of 4 : 3.


Sounds like we are saying the same thing, that the intention on the part of the game designers was for adjustments to be made to the Display via hardware to fill the screen which renders a 4:3 image. 

If however you did not adjust the vertical height then wouldn’t you agree that the picture has a different aspect ratio?  I mean physically the picture looks different, regardless if the resolution stays the same.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Recapnation on February 14, 2019, 04:35:42 pm
It's a yes when we're talking about small aftermath adjustments, but that's not what I or Calamity were addressing. It was this:


Quote
You’ll have to explain that one, as the ratio of pixels describes the ratio of the picture.  A 1920x1080 resolution is a 16:9 picture (division of both equals 1.77777), how could a resolution of 400x254 be a 4:3 ratio when the math works out to (1.574 vs 1.333)?  I’m confused.
Title: Re: How to adjust all games to all fit in screen
Post by: Arroyo on February 14, 2019, 04:37:45 pm
It's a yes when we're talking about small aftermath adjustments, but that's not what I or Calamity were addressing. It was this:


Quote
You’ll have to explain that one, as the ratio of pixels describes the ratio of the picture.  A 1920x1080 resolution is a 16:9 picture (division of both equals 1.77777), how could a resolution of 400x254 be a 4:3 ratio when the math works out to (1.574 vs 1.333)?  I’m confused.

I’m with you that pixels don’t have to be 1:1 on a CRT, that makes sense.  Thanks for clarifying.