Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum
Main => Main Forum => Topic started by: ROMconstruct on July 11, 2013, 04:03:05 am
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So with Andy at Ultimarc's help, I finally got my ArcadeVGA 3000 all set up and working with my standard 15Khz arcade monitor. The recommended setup is to allow MAME to set the appropriate resolution for the monitor so you get perfect graphical emulation for the chosen game. This works excellently well for the most part, except when running games with an unsupported resolution, or more commonly, running a vertical game on a horizontal monitor. What's a good solution for this problem? Set custom settings for every game that is vertical or has an unusual resolution? Is there a good heuristic or best practice for achieving good results, and are there tools available to help accomplish this?
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See if this link helps.
http://www.ultimarc.com/avgainst.html (http://www.ultimarc.com/avgainst.html)
Not all vertical games will fit nicely into one of these resolutions so you may have to use HW stretching on a few.
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Thank you, that's the page I referenced when setting up my MAME defaults. Are you referring to this section?:
"There is a utility which can be used to generate INI files for MAME which tell the program which resolution to run every game.
Gavin Bensons Utility is here. (Version 1.5, updated Aug 2012) This will handle the format of newer MAME versions and has a few other enhancements. Now also runs under Win7 64 bit.
This utility will scan the game list and generate INI files which specify the best resolution for each game. After running once, you don't need to worry about choosing the resolutions again. MAME will always run every game at the optimum resolution."
I guess I'll download that utility to see what it does, I just wasn't sure that the "optimum resolution" would be appropriate for vertical games on a horizontal monitor. I'm assuming I'd have to determine an alternative "non-optimal" resolution with stretching turned on for vertical games. In which case, I might just try to find one setting that works "okay" for all vertical games rather than calculate individual settings for each vertical game. (Unless there's an easier alternative.)
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You are correct on the utility. It works pretty well. The only issue I have seen is with a few vertical games in that it puts the resolution at 512x288. I didn't like the appearance so I played around with various resolutions until I found one that worked well. In a couple of cases, the only real option was to turn on hardware stretching. These were few and far between though.
The horizontal resolutions of 352 work fairly well for vertical games. I also adjusted the vertical size within mame at times as you will get some cutoff with vertical games on a horizontal monitor.