Issues with vertical desktop set-up and switchres

[spanner]

Hi,
I have set up a vertical cab (15khz) with GroovyMame & CRT_emudrivers (with the appropriate settings from what I can gather).

My windows desktop is rotated (vertical), but when I launch GroovyMame it comes up with a switchres error (stating it's unable to choose a correct resolution for my set-up) and displays Mame using my desktop resolution.  If I change the windows desktop aspect back to normal (hori) it all works fine.

I need to retain a rotated desktop for my frontend, so is there any way around this?

[Calamity]

Hi spanner,

I admit I have never tested this with a rotated desktop setup. GroovyMAME supports vertical monitors but expects the OS to report modes in the normal orientation. It would be nice if you could post a log of whatever game to see how modes are reported in your system.

[spanner]

Hi Calamity,
Thanks for your response.

Logfile is attached.

[Calamity]

Thanks for the log, spanner.

Yeah, I see the problem, GroovyMAME is filtering out all resolutions in your system, probably because they're being reported as "portrait" modes. So there's nothing you can do to fix this with current GroovyMAME I'm afraid. Is it totally impossible to rotate your frontend instead of the desktop?

[spanner]

That's a pity.

I'm using mamewah which doesn't support rotation as far as I'm aware.

Do you suggest any other FE that is simple to setup and supports rotation?

[69mustang]

That's a pity.

I'm using mamewah which doesn't support rotation as far as I'm aware.

Do you suggest any other FE that is simple to setup and supports rotation?

Mala is pretty easy to use and can rotate.

http://malafe.net/

[spanner]

Thanks for the information.  Will look into that.

[arcadepcnut]

im so glad someone posted this and so disappointed at same time. I have been trying to get hyperspin to work on my horizontal machine and also on vertical machine. I cant get it to run on horizontal for some crazy reason. got it working on arcadev machine and now im dealing with the groovymame issue.

I have a permanent vertical 25" cabinet. running only vertical games. to administrate this machine I have desktop rotated in portrait using calamity drivers and a HD4850 ATI card. 640x480. works beautiful. hyperspin loads and works great. launch groovymame and the image was rotated wrong direction. finally figured out in mame.ini to get it the right way. Every game I load I get switchres : could not find a video mode that meets your specs. if you leave mame.ini with ddraw you get a tiny image in the center of the screen. if you do d3d this is the best option but its still not right and looks like crap.

Is there ANY workaround? im upgrading this machine from mala to hyperspin and just dumped money in new motherboard and ram and processor to run hyperspin and now I have to go back to mala and rotate destop back to horizontal and hurt my next every time I  have to administer on this machine? can I donate to you to fix? is there anything that can be done? should I not use calamity drivers? switch back to my older arcadevga? please advise. im sure me and the OP are not the only ones with dedicated vertical machines are we?

I have attached my logfile for tigerheli and will be willing to test anything you want me to test
thank you in advance!

[arcadepcnut]

Thanks for the log, spanner.

Yeah, I see the problem, GroovyMAME is filtering out all resolutions in your system, probably because they're being reported as "portrait" modes. So there's nothing you can do to fix this with current GroovyMAME I'm afraid. Is it totally impossible to rotate your frontend instead of the desktop?

\
Mr. Calamity. As far as I know its impossible to rotate Hyperspin. also it is nice to have the deskotp vertical as well just in case you have to maintenance the machine so you don't get a crick in your neck. im too old to turn my head sideways for more than 20 seconds.
is there anything else that can be done. All my resolutions are reported correctly in arcade_osd and they all look beautiful.


UPDATE: I just tried irotate instead of CCC ATI utility and it rotates the desktop (side note: and hyperspin appears faster) and then launch groovymame and same thing happens. Does anyone know if there is a way to rotate or launch irotate right before frontend loads and then unload before launching the game in groovymame? is there an alternative to groovymame that will calculate the resolutions correct?

[Calamity]

I feel your pain, arcadepcnut. I'll see what can be done but can't promise anything. By now, I'd suggest this:

- Use a frontend that is capable of rotating.
- Ask the HS guys to add this capability to their frontend (good luck).

I intend to have a dedicated vertical cab too quite soon. But I don't think I'll be rotating the desktop, I'll probably live with the broken neck. The way I see it, forcing the system to report portrait resolutions may be fine for LCDs, which consist on a boring dot grid. But in the CRT realm, naming the resolutions that way is quite lame, because horizontal & vertical resolutions are very different animals. Of course something can be done so GM deals with this specific thing (I'd just prefer not to do it!  )

is there an alternative to groovymame that will calculate the resolutions correct?

Make sure to let us know!

[arcadepcnut]

I feel your pain, arcadepcnut. I'll see what can be done but can't promise anything. By now, I'd suggest this:

- Use a frontend that is capable of rotating.
- Ask the HS guys to add this capability to their frontend (good luck).

I intend to have a dedicated vertical cab too quite soon. But I don't think I'll be rotating the desktop, I'll probably live with the broken neck. The way I see it, forcing the system to report portrait resolutions may be fine for LCDs, which consist on a boring dot grid. But in the CRT realm, naming the resolutions that way is quite lame, because horizontal & vertical resolutions are very different animals. Of course something can be done so GM deals with this specific thing (I'd just prefer not to do it!  )

is there an alternative to groovymame that will calculate the resolutions correct?

Make sure to let us know!

thank you for your replies. Hyperspin 2.0 is at least 2 years old and never released. It will support rotate. But I quit holding my breathe over a year ago. What I was doing before was mala and desktop rotated the wrong direction. This worked fine. but mala was boring and hyperspin looks so good. Also I spent 150$ to upgrade the machine and don't want to go back to what I had before now with wasted horsepower (I cant think of one vertical game that runs better on a core2duo 3.0ghz that didn't run on a 3.2 Pentium D ).

But your basically saying its not a good way to do things in software, It can be done but most likely not.

I was just thinking that if the option is checked in vmmaker.ini that I am using a monitor with rotated desktop (what does this rotatingdesktop line even do?) .
; Monitor orientation

   MonitorHorizontal = 0   ; 0 = Rotating monitor: horizontal and vertical games at their native resolution
            ;     Suitable for users that physically rotate their CRTs
            ; 1 = Horizontal monitor: horizontal games run at their native resolution and
            ;     vertical games are rotated to fit in horizontal monitor   

   RotatingDesktop = 1   ; Specifies if both desktop and monitor are rotated

I would think that if this option was enabled you just reverse the resolutions. IE you get reported 320x240 and you change to 240x320. But im no programmer.
How much work would this be in hours for you? I have spent so much time trying to get this up and going I would be glad to donate to your time. I have done a lot of searching and im sure this feature would be of use to more than just me. But I cant think there are a lot of us dedicated vertical people.


So please if you can spare one more second. ive wasted a lot of your time already and really value your input because you have helped this community so much with your drivers and groovymame. Im using your software on both of my machines....
whats the percent chance of groovymame supporting vertical monitors with vertical desktops?
is there any other solution besides these two options:
a) leaving desktop sideways and getting a rotating frontend aka mala and using groovymame to rotate.
b) using ati CCC to rotate desktop and rotate frontend. telling groovymame to used D3D and stretch.

Option B defeats the entire purpose of groovymame and the ATI drivers but right now that's the one im using.

Thank you sir!

[Calamity]

Well, let me express it this way: if it's technically possible*, I'll support it, but can't promise how soon it'll happen.

* I mean, if modelines are properly recognized even when the desktop is rotated... I've never tested that, but you said ArcadeOSD was launching the modes fine?

Regarding VMMaker, yes, the purpose was to support rotated desktops, but just to add the proper options when creating ini files for regular MAME builds, and I considered that feature deprecated now that we have GM.

a) leaving desktop sideways and getting a rotating frontend aka mala and using groovymame to rotate.

This is the only real option right now.

b) using ati CCC to rotate desktop and rotate frontend. telling groovymame to used D3D and stretch.

Option B defeats the entire purpose of groovymame and the ATI drivers but right now that's the one im using.

Not only it defeats GM purpose. It subordinates the quality of emulation to the election of a certain frontend. That's an error IMHO. My point of view is not frontendcentric. But that's me.

[arcadepcnut]

Thank you again for repling. One last thing.

Yes arcade OSD reports all 101 modes fine and they all display properly on my machine. I took a snapshot of all the modes as it shows them and they all looks fine when displaying the test patterns

[arcadepcnut]

ok I figured out something if anyone else wants to use this to get vertical mame working with hyperspin without having to compromise to bad.

 Im using Calamity's wonderful software to make this work.
 Calamity 9.3 driver
 ATI CCC for 9.3 (you don't really need it. we will be using irotate for the rotation)
 Irotate software
 Hyperspin
 Groovymame

 My setup in case I didn't explain well enough is a permanently vertical mame cabinet.
 I used hyperlist to filter only vertical roms into and XML and just copied over the mame.xml in the database folder. You probably want to back it up and just call it mame_allgames.xml

 I have my desktop rotated 90degree with irotate on bootup.
 Hyperspin displays fine but squished a little in this mode. You may want to fix it at some point. But overall its ok.

 I have Groovymame configured for rotated screen. But when hyperspin calls it it cant find a video mode. So groovymame displays the game vertically.
 If you have mame.ini specifying ddraw you get a tiny little window in the middle of the monitor. if you specify d3d it will stretch the image and sort of fit the screen but either way you will get the nasty message
 Switchres : could not find a video mode that meets your specs

 Well I wanted to run HYPERspin and I want to run groovymame.
 Well what I figured out is edit the mame.ahk script in the \modules folder
 That way you load irotate with boot. It will set desktop back to horizontal before loading groovymame so groovy gets reported the right resolutions it is looking for. Then after exiting the game changes irotate back. Hyperspin is the wrong direction for 1-2 seconds then it appears right. I only tested this on two games because I have to go. But so far so good.
 Added this near the begining
If hideConsole = true
 SetTimer, HideConsole, 10

 ;i added this line
 Run, C:\Program Files (x86)\iRotate\iRotate.exe /rotate=0
 ;end add

 Run(executable . A_Space . romName . A_Space . fullscreen . A_Space . cheatEnabled . A_Space . videomode . A_Space . useBezels . A_Space . useOverlays . A_Space . useBackdrops . A_Space . mameRomPaths . A_Space . sysParams . A_Space . romParams, emuPath, winstate)


 Added this near the end
Process("WaitClose", executable)

 ;i added this line
 run, C:\Program Files (x86)\iRotate\iRotate.exe /rotate=270
 ;end add

[cools]

Why not rotate all the Hyperspin assets (and use a fixed theme instead of the fancy animated ones) instead of rotating the desktop?

[arcadepcnut]

This turn out to be easier to do. I looked for a while for a vertical theme and could not find one and would have had to create one myself. plus I wanted hyperspin on vertical machine to look like the one on my horizontal machine. lastly all tools that run on the arcade machine are now properly oriented so you don't have to turn your head if you want to change something on the machine. this was less time for the same result.

Also if I didn't want to run the fancy hyperspin themes...whats the point of upgrading the hardware and why not just use another frontend like mala?! to me personally that's what sets hyperspin apart.

[cools]

True. Aspect ratio being wrong irritates me no end.

[arcadepcnut]

For real? this irritates you? I cant even tell the difference.

Well now that I posted side by side I can but lets just say....FOR NOW this is working great.

[Calamity]

Hi arcadepcnut,

Thanks for sharing your solution. Hopefully in the near future we can support this kind of setup in a more straightforward way.

[spanner]

For information I used MALA.  Easy to set-up (as suggested) and it works a treat with the calamity drivers, vmmaker and groovymame on a hori desktop.

[cools]

Breaking my neck on a vert cab at the moment... Shame rotated desktop isn't supported with Groovy. No matter, I'll stop messing with settings now.