Mame and resolution switching... what am I doing wrong?

[Rattanee]

I've set up my mame cab a while ago, installed soft15khz and with a fixed resolution everything was working just peachy.
I just got this urge to try and set mame up to use all the native resolutions of the games, but I keep getting rather unacceptable results.

First of all, the only video mode where performance is acceptable is gdi. Ddraw makes the sound stutter, d3d has graphic artefacts all over the place. I'm not sure what's up with that.

Anyways, I read up on all the switches in the mame ini, and set everything up. Game performance is pretty good, I have no tearing, but there is something definitely wrong with the scaling. I have scaling turned off, sticking with the aspect ratios, and what happens is when I start a game, the game info window appears, and that looks pretty much great, but as the actual game starts up, it's like the game is squashed. The width doesn't fill the screen, and when moving up or down, I've a sneaking suspicion that some lines are missing from the image aswell. I don't quite know how to describe it better, it's as if the entire game was not up-scaled to a larger resolution, but downscaled to smaller then the actual resolution being displayed by the hardware.

Anyone have any idea how to fix this? (I'll try and add a pic or two in a bit.)

[Rattanee]

Here are the pics so you guys know what I'm talking about.

(Yes the game is deliberately sideways, my monitor is rotatable, also horizontal games do the exact same thing.)

[headkaze]

Alot depends on your graphics card and drivers. For using DirectDraw you will likely need to install an older driver. Something else that might be worth checking out is GroovyMAME.

[Calamity]

In order to prevent undesired stretching:

- If you're using ddraw: turn -hwstretch off
- If you're using d3d: make sure the resolution matches the one of the game *exactly*

As you see this makes d3d not very useful in most situations if you're trying to go pixel perfect.

[Rattanee]

using the gdi setting as ddraw makes mame stutter on the sound, and d3d produces artifacts galore... basically even the mame frontend screen is a garbled unreadable mess...

Using Nvidia (older card, don't know the model off the top of my head) and soft 15khz.

[Calamity]

gdi is actually not meant to be used at all with MAME, it's incredibly slow.

Either ddraw or d3d are the way to go.

ddraw is not the cause of your sound stuttering, it's the combination of video synchronization options and wrong refresh video modes what causes the stuttering.

You could give a try to GroovyMAME, even with a nvidia card it should allow fluent video and audio with ddraw and the video modes installed by Soft-15KHz.

[Rattanee]

ddraw is not the cause of your sound stuttering, it's the combination of video synchronization options and wrong refresh video modes what causes the stuttering.

You mean vsync and other options?

[Gray_Area]

You can try GroovyMAME. You can cut your teeth on AdvanceMAME. Or you you can do a lot of reading - in the wiki and elsewhere. Probly should do this anyways.