Mame slider controls for screen positioning

[LeedsFan]

I see in the later versions of Mame that there are slider controls to help adjust the screen. (Hposition, VPosition, stretch etc.)
Is it possible to have a default position setup for all games?

What I want to do is make the gameplay area smaller. I'm using a 15" monitor but it's in a bartop and I only want about 9" viewable. I can set any game to fit perfectly for my needs. Mame is saving the values for each game somewhere.... but where? Is it in the .cfg file? I can't see anything in the Mame.ini file that represents these values either. As it stands at the moment I have to input the same values on the sliders for each and every game individually.  

Before these handy sliders were put in Mame I had to compile a version using a generic bezel, but in doing so Mame slowed down for some reason and gave slight sound glitches. I can resize/move the game using the sliders on later versions and still have it running at 100% with no sound glitches.    But I need to know how to set those positions as default for all games.  

EDIT:  Well I know that information is definitely held in the .cfg file for each game. If I delete that file the game comes back full screen. So how do I grab that info in those files and make a universal setting? I tried renaming one of the files to the "default.cfg" but that didn't work.

[LeedsFan]

Well having thought about this for a while I reckon that the only way to do this would be to compile your own version of Mame with your own set values. Compiling is easy but I wouldn't know where to start editing the code. The default values for those sliders is zero so I presume you could just change those for whatever you need.

I ended up pulling out 50 of my fave games into a favourites section of MaLa and then manually changed the sliders for each game.  Took me the bast part of a couple of hours to do this. Any other games I play will need to be tweaked on an "as played" basis.

One advantage of doing it this way as opposed to the my previous method (compiling Mame with a generic bezel)  is that get to use scanlines now. 

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah, as you figured out the slider settings are fairly useless unless you are willing to invest the time into setting each game manually.  In truth though there shouldn't be any reason why the default.cfg doesn't check for these values. 

I'm kind of busy right now, but maybe when things slow down I can take a look and see if we can submit a patch to mamedev. 

[LeedsFan]

Yeah, as you figured out the slider settings are fairly useless unless you are willing to invest the time into setting each game manually.  In truth though there shouldn't be any reason why the default.cfg doesn't check for these values. 

I'm kind of busy right now, but maybe when things slow down I can take a look and see if we can submit a patch to mamedev. 

That would be really cool if they added that as a patch.    Would be really useful to people who make bartops etc. and want to set the screen to a scale in keeping with their cab. Saves searching around for the perfect size monitor.

[Howard_Casto]

It's not just that.... most video cards with tv out have a so-called "raw" mode where the image is sent to the tv at the tv's native resolution.  It makes for an incredibly sharp picture... especially with svid out or higher. The problem with that is most crt tv's have up to 10% overscan area... meaning the edges of the image get cut off.  If mame had a universal adjustment setting then one could easily use this mode anyway.