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Main => Main Forum => Topic started by: Sylentwulf on October 05, 2004, 08:06:06 pm

Title: What resolution to use?
Post by: Sylentwulf on October 05, 2004, 08:06:06 pm

27" TV through an ati radeon 7200
Using Mamewah and Windows XP.

I'm currently at 640*480, but all the skins I want to use are 800*600.

Just wondering what most people set a 27" TV up as I guess :) Through windows 800*600 is absoultely unuseable, and I'm wondering if that's going to go through to mamewah (and emulators)

Title: Re:What resolution to use?
Post by: Crazy Cooter on October 05, 2004, 08:45:21 pm

What makes it unusable?  I always ran 800x600 with nvidia card to 25" tv.  I upped the font size though.  Are you using an s-video cable?

Title: Re:What resolution to use?
Post by: Sylentwulf on October 06, 2004, 07:54:13 am

Yeah, I'm using S-video. What I meant was, using 800*600 in windows is unuseable because I can't read ANYTHING. Tried it a bit in mamewah last night, and it's VERY hard to read any text.

Think I'm going to try re-sizing the layouts to 640*480 Although I'm not sure how hard that's going to be? (If at all possible?)

Title: Re:What resolution to use?
Post by: daywane on October 06, 2004, 08:01:11 am

did you enlarge your font?
I have 800 x 600 on 2 dif. TV's with large fonts and have no problems

Title: Re:What resolution to use?
Post by: Popcorrin on October 06, 2004, 09:25:55 am

The highest pixel resolution an NTSC TV can display is 640 x 480.  Even though it will display an 800 x 600 desktop it's not actually showing any more pixels in resolution.  That's why it is so hard to read.

It's actually not very hard to resize your layouts.  The way I did it was to resize the image first.  It needs to be 80% of it's original size.  Once you have it resized you can open up your mamewah layout designer and open up your desired layout.  Resize it to 640 x 480 and then pull up your background image and resize your artwork image boxes and gamelist boxes until they fit nicely into your resized background image.

Title: Re:What resolution to use?
Post by: Lilwolf on October 06, 2004, 09:27:23 am

Something that can help...

Try and find the true resolution of your TV.  Then set windows to that.

Then use HW stretching.  

On some devices (specifically LCD's.. but I like it for arcade monitors also) you get better results in that all stretching is done in software instead of the monitor or video card..

But for windows / frontend... Raising the font is a must for most people.

Title: Re:What resolution to use?
Post by: cdbrown on October 07, 2004, 02:29:35 am

NTSC - 646x486 60Hz or just 640x480
PAL - 768x576 50Hz

Title: Re:What resolution to use?
Post by: Sylentwulf on October 07, 2004, 09:51:20 am

It's a LOT easier to change those layouts than I thought :) Guess I'll stick with 640*480.

Suppose I should upload some of the re-sized layouts to screenshotarchive too huh?

Title: Re:What resolution to use?
Post by: GGKoul on October 07, 2004, 10:39:17 am

I have 640x480 from MAME games with LARGE font on so I can read my desktop.  But when I play Tiger Woods, the screen resizes to 800x600 and all the small print is tougher to read.

Title: Re:What resolution to use?
Post by: rchadd on October 08, 2004, 07:13:09 am

Quote from: cdbrown on October 07, 2004, 02:29:35 am

NTSC - 646x486 60Hz or just 640x480
PAL - 768x576 50Hz

this explains why when i select 800x600 there "missing desktop" at the bottom of the screen and cant see the Start  bar.

i am using PAL video monitor.