Best scanlines effect?

[pmc]

I did some searching but, suprisingly, couldn't find much even though I've seen this discussed (maybe alot) before.

In my cab I have an old 21" VGA display and a GeForce4 MX video card. I run command-line Windows MAME under W2K Pro on a 2.4GHz Athlon box. Also use MAMEWAH.

For the last year, I've used normal scanlines with no hardware stretch enabled (and I leave the resolution set to auto). I like the scanlines effect and generally dislike the blurry hwstretch look. I typically don't like the regular non-stretched VGA look without scanlines. But recently, I've tuned a couple of games to use hwstretch and started to really like use of the full screen for horizontal games. With a 21" display, the additional gaming areas is certainly appreciated.

So after messing around a bit, I started to like (or maybe just get used to) to hwstretch and -effect scanlines50. I also nailed down the screen resolution to either 640x480 or 800x600 and have played with the options to force aspect ratio to remain consistant. I think that it would look better (less blurry) if I used -effects sharp along with scanlines50.

Two questions:

1) With this setup, what's the best general purpose scanlines related mame.ini configuration? I know tastes vary. I'm willing to try some different things.

2) How do I specify two arguments for -effects in mame.ini? For example, I'd like to try both sharp and scanlines50 but attempts to put both arguments on the same line in mame.ini results in them both being ignored.

I know some of you know all these settings intimately and I'd love to hear what you think.

[John]

I have a similar setup on one of my cabs (21" viewsonic monitor) but I run XP with MAME32.  I turned on D3D support and am using the scanline 75% and I really like the look.  I did notice that with the scanline turned on vector games like starwars or tempest doesn't run.  It may be just me but with it turned off it seems to work fun (guess it makes sense that you won't need scanlines on vector games)