Setting screen resolutions?

[Popcorrin]

This is an area that is of some confusion for me. I was wondering if someone could shed some light on this subject.
 
When u speak of playing a game in it's native resolution does it fill the entire screen or is it shrunk to match that resolution?  Normally does mame use hws to fill the entire screen and does that mean all the games are being played at 640x480 or some other standard resolution?

Correct me if I am wrong but is there a couple of options for getting games to play full screen?  The first one being changing the monitor's resolution to match the game's resolution which would be more authentic, correct?  If so what is the best way to set this up?

The second option would be to use hardware stretch to change the games resolution to match the monitor's resolution?  Less authentic but the easier option of the two?  

Is there a tutorial I could read that would explain this to a greater extent?

Thanks in advance.

[JoyMonkey]

I'm no expert on this subject, but here's how my brain sees it:

Lets say a games native resolution is 256x240 at 60Hz. A PC with a normal video card running on a PC monitor will more than likely not be able to display this resolution correctly. PC monitors only support a small handful of different resolutions, almost none of which are arcade 'native' resolutions. Also, standard VGA cards these days don't even try to handle low resolutions that old arcade games demand.
To get native resolutions to display properly you've got two options:

1. Use an old Ati Rage card and AdvanceMame on an arcade monitor.
The old Rage cards have good support for odd low resolution modes and you can configure AdvanceMame to use the correct ones easily (though it can be a bit time consuming)

2. Use an ArcadeVGA card on an arcade monitor.
ArcadeVGA has 28 of the most common native resolution modes built in and should display them perfectly with minumum tweaking needed.

I haven't looked into the issue for a couple of years, but this was my understanding of it when I last did. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[Minwah]

1) Normally does mame use hws to fill the entire screen and does that mean all the games are being played at 640x480 or some other standard resolution?

2) Correct me if I am wrong but is there a couple of options for getting games to play full screen?  The first one being changing the monitor's resolution to match the game's resolution which would be more authentic, correct?  If so what is the best way to set this up?

3) The second option would be to use hardware stretch to change the games resolution to match the monitor's resolution?  Less authentic but the easier option of the two?  

1) More or less.  It can also use different resolutions depending which modes your video card has available.  If you have resolution set to auto it will just select whichever it thinks best...

2) Yes.  What JoyMonkey said

3) Yes again.  IMO hwstretch isn't very authentic looking, but is a piece of cake to get working - good enough for the time being if you need to save up for an arcade monitor + ArcadeVGA

[Tiger-Heli]

When u speak of playing a game in it's native resolution does it fill the entire screen or is it shrunk to match that resolution?

Depends whether hws is turned on or not.

Normally does mame use hws to fill the entire screen

Depends whether it's on or not, but I think it is on by default.

and does that mean all the games are being played at 640x480 or some other standard resolution?

Not necessarily, I played most games at 800x600 with hws on, but default is auto resolution, where MAME will pick what it thinks best, not necessarily 640x480.  Also, I played a little bit with this in Cruising USA last night and found some interesting stuff -

If switch resolution is turned OFF, mame will use what it thinks best, regardless of any resolution you manually set.

And manually setting resolution is tricky as well - 1024x768, 800x600, and 640x480 worked fine, but 512x384 was blocky, but ran at 1024x768 according to the monitor, and I believe 320x240 ran at monitor setting of 640x480 (although it was noticeably lower than 640x480 res).

Correct me if I am wrong but is there a couple of options for getting games to play full screen?  The first one being changing the monitor's resolution to match the game's resolution which would be more authentic, correct?  If so what is the best way to set this up?

The second option would be to use hardware stretch to change the games resolution to match the monitor's resolution?  Less authentic but the easier option of the two?  

Is there a tutorial I could read that would explain this to a greater extent?

The problem with option 1 is you will probably run out of monitor memory resolutions before you set up all your games, unless maybe if you can work through advanceMAME like joymonkey said.  I have a very detailed page on setting this up in standard MAME here - http://www.mameworld.net/emuadvice/display.html

NOTE - the page was written before MAME supported hws and I haven't used any of the concepts since then, but I think it's still valid.

[Popcorrin]

Thanks for the responses.  I think I'm starting to grasp how it works.