Mame Arcade Cab - some but not all games upside down

[robotgreg]

HI

I'm almost finished setting up mame on an arcade cab using groovymame as the starting point and then mamewah as the front end.

All roms are there and seem to load fine but some are upside down. Checked the vertical ones and seems to be around half. Not checked many horizontal games but have found at least one which is upside down and would expect many more.

I've got the vertical games to display full screen rather than with a border so in mame.ini have norotate set to 1. (ie I physically rotate the monitor when I want to play vertical games).

Looking on line it seems like the solution is to add a game.zip.cfg file for the games which need flipping back right way up ie by 180 degrees with the text:

video_rotation = 1

But this doesn't change anything.

I don't understand why some games are fine and some upside down and seems to be no common factor but assume something must be driving this.

Regardless of what's causing it, I'm happy to add a file for each game that's upside down to correct it, so wondering what am I doing wrong please and how can I get these games to display the correct way up.

A global solution would also be ideal but I guess in order for it to work it needs to only apply to some of the games not all and can't see how that could work until I could find out what's causing it in the first place.

Any help and advice very much appreciated.

[MartyKong]

Not sure I can be of much help since I never had this problem. So, just throwing it out there. When these problem games are launched from the Mame emulator directly are they oriented correctly. This would point to a front end problem. If showing from Mame launch you could tab in game and look under video options to try to change. Just spitballing ideas until a more knowledgable answer shows up.

[Haze]

the problem is he's turning off MAME's automatic rotation, which is the feature that causes rotation to orientate to the desktop and instead saying "I want to do it manually"

Some games with vertical monitors had them rotated 90 degrees, some had them rotated 270 degrees.  One of things that contributed towards Billy Mitchell's videos being conclusively worked out as emulation based is that older versions of MAME actually got that wrong, treating it as a game with 90 degree rotation rather than a 270 degree rotation, thus meaning the video scan traveled in the opposite direction and different parts of the image drew at different times.

Once you turn the option to adjust to screen off, you're on your own, either you have to manually specify the rotation you want for each game, or you have to make it possible for your monitor to rotate in either direction. 

MAME is doing what you're asking it to, but since you have an exotic config, where your physical monitor is rotating (MAME has no way to know this - your monitor does not report back that it has been rotated) you end up on your own.

FWIW A small handful of games (usually gun ones) even used a mirrored display, with the natural rendering being y flipped even on a horizontal screen.

[themadsinger]

This is sorted now.  There was a setting in mame.ini for mame which corrected it.  Some games were defualt to right rotation and some to left but mame knew which was which and with the right setting rotated the all to be the correct way round