Mame Blurriness

[Oldskool]

This is something that has befuddled me for a while now.

For whatever reason, MAME (to me at least) seems blurry by default.

I've noticed it in the text screens (press OK to begin) as well as in gameplay.

In MAME32, if I uncheck "stretch using hardware", this seems to do the trick. I then add scanlines, and everthing is to my liking.

This "blur" thing seems to be fairly new as I don't remember it in old versions of Mame. As I remember, they were always clear.

Can anyone shed some light...........?


 

[JoyMonkey]

I think this is to do with changes to DirectX and how it uses hardware on more recent graphics cards.
I first noticed this a couple of years ago when I got a new graphics card (think it was a GeForce 256). Actually it was probably about the same time that DOS Mame was given a back seat to the current Windows based executeable (May 2001 - Mame37b15), perhaps that's got something to do with it.

[Howard_Casto]

Most video cards add the blur by default when streatching images.  To reduce or completely remove it enable direct3d in the mame.ini and set the filter mode to "sharp"  If that doesn't work then you are sol as this is a complete hardware issue and has little or nothing to do with mame itself.  

[Minwah]

Just turn off hwstretch / stretch using hardware.  As HC says with that on most video cards blur by default.

I suspect hwstretch 'on' became the default when the hwstretch option was added some time back...

[RacerX]

This used to bug the heck out of me.  Then one day I decided to check the MAME FAQ page, and, what do you know? The answer is there...

http://www.mame.net/mamefaq.html#s13