Horizontal Vs. Vertical Monitor

[DarkKobold]

I was reading Andy's page on the AVGA, and he said that there was a distinct difference between a horizontal and a vertical monitor. I recently (well, 2 months ago) purchased a horizontal cab, and stole the monitor to use in my WIP cocktail cab, which is vertical. Is this going to create a scan lines problem? I was quite confused by this. Thanks!

[Minwah]

Could you give a quote that you are referring to?  Or exactly where on Andy's site that part is?

[DarkKobold]

From :

http://www.ultimarc.com/monfaq.html

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.

Will This still apply if Advance Mame is run, or if a trident is used? So confused!

[bloodyviking77]

Hi there,

I'm no expert, but I believe that what Andy's faq is referring to is the method of displaying vertical games on a monitor oriented horizintally (and vice versa).

For eg, if you want to display jr pacman (a vertical game) on a monitor mounted horizontally, then you need to effectively "shrink" the vertical height of the image. advmame does this with its "resize" option, using a couple of different effects - check out the pics at http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/blit.html

re-reading your earlier post, orienting your "horizontal" monitor vertically in your cab won't present any trouble.

[Minwah]

I suppose you may have the scanlines foing the 'wrong way', although this won't cause a problem as such, and I think will be perfectly fine.  Many people use horizontal screens mounted vertically