Emulators on a widescreen monitor - garbage on sides

[SirPeale]

I'm working on an emulator cabinet that will use a widescreen monitor.

So far the aspect ratio is fine, but the screen displays garbage on the non-video areas.

For example: if I launch Dig-Dug, the game will display fine in the middle, in perfect aspect, but to the left and right there is video garbage.

It's not just Mame; other emulators do it, too.  But, not all of them.

Workarounds?  Thoughts?

[keilmillerjr]

Picture?

[Zero_Hour]

I run multiple emulators on my widescreen display, and have never encountered anything other than black bars (or various artwork files when configured in MAME), when running 4:3 games. Got a spare widescreen to swap out and see if you get the same results?

[Howard_Casto]

Note that some games just have garbage in the margins.  Neogeo comes to mind. 

Mame typically crops it though.  Older versions of mame were bad about not doing this so make sure you are using a recent version.

[rpgposer]

I have seen garbage as described.  Are you using Linux as your OS and mednafen as one of the emulators?  Do you have an ATI graphics card with the propietary drivers installed?
One of the reasons why I went back to win XP for my game PC.

[SirPeale]

I have seen garbage as described.  Are you using Linux as your OS and mednafen as one of the emulators?  Do you have an ATI graphics card with the propietary drivers installed?
One of the reasons why I went back to win XP for my game PC.

Yes!  It's running Ubuntu 10.10, with an ATI card.  Mame is the emu for arcade games, I haven't noted the issue with snes9x or FCEU.

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah Linux is weird man... you never know how things are going to render. 

[SirPeale]

Curses!  All the other emulators appear to work fine.  Well, snes9x won't escape upon pressing esc, but that's a separate issue.

Perhaps another Mame version, like mame.sdl, or something...

[Howard_Casto]

What version of mame are you running?

[SirPeale]

It appears to be stock Vanilla Mame.  It's the version that I can pull down via the Software Center.

Mame .139.

I'm going to try AdvanceMame and see if it's better.  I got the "static" to be stable.  But, there is a serious issue with the sound.  It's really staticy.  It isn't as much with video files, but it's still there.  When you pause a video that's playing, the "static" persists for a few seconds, almost like it's being queued somewhere.  The same seems to happen with Mame, also.  Not sure about the other emulators, yet.


At first I thought it was because I was playing the sound via the HDMI thru the TV, but it does the same thing via the speaker jack, using headphones.  I'm confident that it would do it using regular speakers, also.

[SirPeale]

Here's a screenshot.  You can see the "tv static" on the outer edges.  The stuff that's surrounding Pac-Man is Robotron: 2084.

Something is happening so that the video RAM isn't being cleared, properly.

The TV static did have a "bar" that ran through it, but once I started to play with the video settings I got it to disappear.

[Howard_Casto]

I've never seen that particular issue with mame, even a Linux flavor of mame.  That isn't the garbage I was referring to in my replies (thus why it's always best to post a pic).  It could be the version of mame, I would try to put a newer version on there as revisions sometimes have quirks, but this looks like a video card issue and seeing as how it's Linux...well....good luck with that. 

sdl mame is certainly an option, but boy is it slow. 

[Haze]

if you're running any recent version of MAME on Linux it probably *IS* SDLMAME, SDLMAME is the official linux target in the official sources and has been for many years now.

really looks like a video (and sound?) driver issue or something tho.

[rpgposer]

Sorry, had a busy family weekend.  It is my belief that this is caused by propietary ATI linux drivers.  If I were to test further, I would try swapping video cards to NVIDIA and maybe try a different distro.
Got pretty frustrated with linux and ATI, so for my cabinet PC, I switched back to XP and and NVIDIA video card.