Some questions about scanlines in MAME

[Firepro4Life]

I am working on tweaking MAME v144 for use with my Makvision 2929 monitor and I am running into an issue involving scanlines. I can get them to work using the scanlines png image effect, but the problem is 1) I don't want them to be used on certain (mostly vertical) games and 2) it seems like the scanlines look like crap on all Capcom games (they look fine on many other games). I've also messed around with the hlsl settings but they don't seem to do anything after I changed them (and yes, I did install the DirectX 9 end user runtime).

So my questions are:

1. Is there a way to have MAME use scanlines for only certain games?
2. Anyone know how to get better looking scanlines for Capcom games in MAME? I've played around with Winkawaks, which uses alternate scanlines, and these games look perfect. The only problem is that Winkawaks doesnt seem to be the most stable program and I would like to avoid have to configure yet another emulator and get it to work with hyperspin if I can.
3. Is there anything simple I've overlooked that could be causing this? Please help!

[nexusmtz]

If you enabled scanlines by changing your mame.ini to include:
effect     scanlines

You can disable scanlines in a particular game by adding a line to its ini, e.g. dkong.ini:
effect    none

It also works the other way around. (none by default, and scanlines in the game ini)

If you don't like the effect that scanlines.png produces, and you can't get HLSL working, you can add other png effect files to your artwork directory, and specify those instead.
http://www.google.com/?q=mame+overlay+effects+png+download

When trying different settings, I find it easiest to enter them on the command line, e.g. mame dkong -effect none until I find the settings I like, instead of changing mame.ini or gamename.ini each time.

--nexusmtz

[Firepro4Life]

Ahhh......thanks, that definitely helps part of the problem. I knew there had to be a way to switch scanline preferences by game. As for the other overlay effects out there, I tried those previously as well, but for some reason, nothing looks right when it comes to capcom games, so I was just curious if anyone else had that same problem or if there was a very specific overlay needed to compliment them.

[keysta75]

did you ever solve this problem because I'm having a similar problem. Scanlines in fba looks good for capcom  games and so on but when it comes to vertical  I can't games to stay at it's correct aspect ratio while maintaining scanlines in full screen. Every vertical game is stretch and they look horrible. And fba runs a tab bit slow.

[MacGyver]

The way I use scanlines and avoid having them on Taito (games that don't work at all with hlsl) and other games that don't work well with scanlines is to have a copy of mame.ini that doesn't have scanlines enabled renamed to the game rom (ie. carnevil1.ini) and stuck in the mame->ini directory.  When mame runs that game, it will use the custom ini it finds instead of the mame.ini.  The method works well if you have only a few games that need different configs, if you need a lot of games changed, I would either use a script to create the vanilla ini files (Romlister makes nice batch files), or create a batch file that works from rom lists to run mame against different configs (for in loops).

[Gray_Area]

I cut the ---That which is odiferous and causeth plants to grow--- and use MAMEUI or MAMEPGUI, so I [mostly] don't have to mess with ini files.

Now, MAME has a heirarchy of ini: mame.ini, [type].ini (genre, vertical, horizontal, vector, etc), and then finally game ini. What's wonky is the 'type' will sometimes over-ride 'game'.


On scanline effects:

- png effects are drawn, hence they correspond to certain resolutions. If you can re-draw them, they'll fit for other games. I tend to use scan scanrez2, which fit 224 resolution games, horitonal and vertical. For 288 games, I run at 800x600 and use 'scanlines' or 'real_scanlines'.

-hlsl: you need to at least set the scanline_alpha to 1.0 . There's a thread at MAMEWorld that's an archive of settings people have created. I think it looks great. However, with vertical games run horizontally, I've found you need to run at least 1280x1024, and maybe need a much higher dot pitch, to not get the moireffect.

[Firepro4Life]

did you ever solve this problem because I'm having a similar problem. Scanlines in fba looks good for capcom  games and so on but when it comes to vertical  I can't games to stay at it's correct aspect ratio while maintaining scanlines in full screen. Every vertical game is stretch and they look horrible. And fba runs a tab bit slow.

No, I never did quite get it perfect. I ended up making two separate configurations of MAME on my system (and in hyperspin), one for games that need scanlines and one for games that dont/look bad with them. Basically the only games that could still use them, again, are all the capcom games. They still look great running on a CRT monitor and all, but just a tad off (maybe I am being picky). Maybe the next time I have to take my system out of the cab for something I will try some of the ideas posted here or use FBA for capcom games and see how that goes. I really hated all the configuration that went into the setting this system up and now I just want to play it when I can.