Vertical games on horizontal monitor

[Tithis]

I was planning to build my own machine, but quite recently an ad appeared on Craigslist selling MANY arcade cabinets. The one I'm considering is listed as

Double Axle $150.00 works 25'' monitor nice convert to ?

Conversion of a game few collectors want, cheap and with a 25" inch monitor. I'm sure the KLOV gods wouldn't approve, but it seems ripe for a MAME conversion to me. My only concern is I quite like many of the vertical classics and I'm not sure how they would look on a horizontal monitor. Anyone have any experience?

The guy is supposed to send me some pictures tonight and if it looks decent I'll probably ask to see it tomorrow and possibly buy it if it checks out in person.

[Sarver Systems]

I recently worked on a candy cab, the monitor was designed to be switchable from horizontal to vertical.

We swapped it to be in vertical position, threw in a jamma board, and it looks just fine!

[Tithis]

I want to keep it horizontal and I've read arcadeVGA and the like can run vertical games at their native resolution on them. It said the only issue would be the scanlines being in the wrong direction, I was just looking for any personal experience people may have here.

Anyways I'd say there is a pretty good chance I'll buy it. He is going to send me some pictures tonight and if they look decent I'll ask to look at and possibly buy it tomorrow after work.

I've seen two upright pictures of it



First one would be ideal for a MAME conversion, 2nd one I could work with if I had to.

[Sarver Systems]

The image will display sideways though.

[Tithis]

From ultimarc's monitor FAQ.

Vertical games on a horizontal monitor.

Providing the monitor is capable of displaying the resolution (rotated) then we still have a good picture. Although the scan lines are in the wrong direction, there is still a 1 to 1 correlation with the game pixels. So we can get away with this cheat usually. If you set the resolution to be exactly that of the game, with the V and H swapped, then the game will fill the screen. Now this is not exactly what you want because it will look very strange. (great on a horizontal game though). You need to deliberately introduce side borders. Easy to do: you just run at a higher horizontal resolution. Galaga runs fine at 352x288 for example. If you calculate the aspect ratio of the original game, this is pretty much the rotated equivalent of it. Bear in mind, though, that arcade monitors are designed to display approx 240 visible lines and we are asking it to display 288 lines in this mode. This means that something has to go, and what goes are the top/bottom borders, which are normally off the screen. So the picture will be taller than a 240 line picture.

[Sarver Systems]

Swapping H for V signals. Didn't think of that.

Let us know how it works!

[adder]

i play quite a few games which are originally vertical 256 lines (eg. 1942, commando, scramble) on a horizontal monitor and im happy with how it looks, and dont care about the scanlines being the 'wrong way'
one thing i did notice: if you try to pull your screen in even further to display games like pacman (288 lines), the scanlines are not so prominent (on my crt tv anyway), because the picture is so 'squished inwards' so to speak. im not saying you dont have scanlines at all, but they dont appear as strong as eg. if you have your screen sized to fit say, 240 lines.
anyway, 256 lines games look ok in my opinion

[Tithis]

Good to know.

The scanline thing isn’t terribly important to me, especially not in comparison to having a game run with a properly synced monitor. No tearing and less input lag more than make up for it   

[adder]

if you are fussy about input lag like a lot of us here consider trying groovymame which is designed to keep input lag down really low. or, if using regular mame, make sure you use vsync instead of triple buffer, as triple buffer introduces a number of extra frames of lag (which in my opinion is VERY noticeable during gameplay...)

[twistedsymphony]

if it's this style:

that's a generic dynamo cab... sell the control panel to someone who will use it and MAME it up ... no one will lose any sleep...

Also if you want it DEDICATED to vertical games you can unbolt the monitor and rotate them in these cabs without too much trouble.

If it's the other cab I wouldn't bother, the control panel area doesn't look amicable to a joystick and button setup. At best it'd be worth buying to keep the monitor and sell the rest of the cab for $50 until you can find a better platform to build from.

I want to keep it horizontal and I've read arcadeVGA and the like can run vertical games at their native resolution on them. It said the only issue would be the scanlines being in the wrong direction, I was just looking for any personal experience people may have here.

Anyways I'd say there is a pretty good chance I'll buy it. He is going to send me some pictures tonight and if they look decent I'll ask to look at and possibly buy it tomorrow after work.

I've seen two upright pictures of it



First one would be ideal for a MAME conversion, 2nd one I could work with if I had to.

[Tithis]

Gone kind of off topic now I suppose, but I confirmed with the seller it's a dynamo cab conversion. I'm going to try and setup a time to meet him to check out the cab (mostly the monitor) and then possibly purchase it and setup a weekend pickup time.