Vertical games on horizontal monitors - e.g. Pacman

[zorrobandito]

I have a horizontal monitor and want to play Groovymame-driven, vertical oriented games. 1942 works well (224x256) but pacman with its significantly longer vertical resolution (224x288) starts to wrap around at the top of the screen. Basically a vert res of 288 pixels is a bridge too far for my arcade monitor. I've tried a few things such as manually setting resolutions both higher and lower than the native resolution and switching to d3d and hwstretch but I either get a compressed, interlaced image or one that is about 10-20 pixels too tall. To manually tune it out using vertical position controls of the monitor unacceptable detracts from the other games as well as MAMEWah's GUI. In the short-term I've switched back to mame 0.99 which looks OK but I'd like to get the sharpness that comes with groovymame.


What are my options?

[Calamity]

You have basically two options:

- Use a vertical resolution of 288 and manually tweak your monitor potenciometers to bring the picture inside the screen area for that specific game, then tweak it back for horizontal games. That's what I do BTW.

- Use a virtualized (interlaced + stretched) resolution for vertical games above a given vertical resolution. You do that by specifying that value in a monitor_specs line:

monitor_specs_0  15625-16200, 49.50-65.00, 2.000, 4.700, 8.000, 0.064, 0.160, 1.056, 0, 0, 256, 448

...here everything above 256 will be calculated as interlaced. You need to add this line both to mame.ini and vmmaker.ini (in vmmaker you need to set MonitorType ="CUSTOM" too and format differs a little bit.)

[zorrobandito]

I understand the improvement that the manual method will deliver but it's a PITA for me to do.

Your second suggestion worked a treat! I don't know the other threshold settings in the string, is this likely to have an impact?

[Calamity]

I understand the improvement that the manual method will deliver but it's a PITA for me to do.

Your second suggestion worked a treat! I don't know the other threshold settings in the string, is this likely to have an impact?

The value we changed is the "active lines limit", resolutions above that are virtualized
The next value "448" is the "virtual lines limit", resolutions above that are only interlaced but not stretched. Resolutions below virtual lines limit / 2 are also virtualized (< 224 here).

So:

[---, 223] virtualized
[224, 256] progressive
[257, 448] virtualized
[449, ---] interlaced

[zorrobandito]

Ah, I see. Thanks for that. Though useful info, what I meant was that I don't know the actual limitations of my monitor, so making the settings specific might be difficult. However, with your explanation, I will do some experimentation and see if I can establish the limits.

[galaxian77]

You have basically two options:

- Use a vertical resolution of 288 and manually tweak your monitor potenciometers to bring the picture inside the screen area for that specific game, then tweak it back for horizontal games. That's what I do BTW.

- Use a virtualized (interlaced + stretched) resolution for vertical games above a given vertical resolution. You do that by specifying that value in a monitor_specs line:

monitor_specs_0  15625-16200, 49.50-65.00, 2.000, 4.700, 8.000, 0.064, 0.160, 1.056, 0, 0, 256, 448

...here everything above 256 will be calculated as interlaced. You need to add this line both to mame.ini and vmmaker.ini (in vmmaker you need to set MonitorType ="CUSTOM" too and format differs a little bit.)

I've been using Groovy Arcade for some time now, and I had set up individual "ini" files per the vertical game I played... never got them 100% correct, but this has helped me ! All those vertical games (well 99% of them) display "full" screen on my horizonal arcade monitor now (you can see the high score and / or number of bombs left! Thanks for this ! It's helped me no end.