Ultracade does split screen...

[Jakobud]

I have been corresponding about an Ultracade cocktail game system, and an ultracade sales rep told me for games that are 2 player simultaneous, like Street Fighter II, that the Ultracade splits the screen in two, then scales and mirrors each image, so that both players sitting at the ends of the cocktail and both see the same image.  I found that very interesting, so I just thought I'd mention that.

[Generic Eric]

cool

that'll go on my suggestion list for front ends from now on

[Floyd10]

kick ASS!!

[Jakobud]

I don't think that is a 'frontend' feature... its a feature of the emulation software that Ultracade is using...

[AlanS17]

If I got something like that to work then I could build my cocktail cabinet in true Pac style without having to put another CP on the side!

Someone want to take this challenge on? SplitMAME!!!

[vputz]

Man, I'm way too simple.  I'd just say get a vid card with dual outputs and have two monitors with a cloned image.

-->VPutz

[Howard_Casto]

ok time for a slight history lesson.....  

Sf2 and I mean the first sf2 did, indeed, have a cocktail mode.  I know because I saw it at a pizza joint back in the day when the game was new.  I did some research... it's unclear if it was an "official" release or not but how they did it was basically the same as how you mentioned but with hardware instead.  Basically I'm guessing they took the orignal signal, took out ever other line, doubled the signal and flipped one half, thus making the display.  Needless to say it doesn't look that good.  I'm guessing that's why it didn't catch on.  

edit:  interesting... apparently they have taken teh mode out of mame at this point.  I guess that means they believe it's a hack.  

Anyway thought it was worth mentioning.  

Also if you look at sf2 in mame, the warning will read "cocktail flipping is not supported."  So somebody could add this to mame.  It's been several years unresolved, so the dev team might be receptive to a slight hack  if anyone wanted to give it a go.  

Any takers?

[AlanS17]

Well splitting an image on a regular arcade monitor probably looks like crap, but on a VGA monitor it should look just fine - if a little small. A version of MAME that could split ALL horizontal games would be an interesting build for cocktail makers!

[Lilwolf]

I mentioned this years ago on the mame board....

but it was before the d3d stuff... and it was nixed real real quick.

I still like the idea.

I think another idea for mame would be to allow the screen rotation to be done in runtime and have a button hooked up to it.  For non-cocktail games, you could just hit a flip button and have it move to the other side.

[Howard_Casto]

Well splitting an image on a regular arcade monitor probably looks like crap, but on a VGA monitor it should look just fine - if a little small. A version of MAME that could split ALL horizontal games would be an interesting build for cocktail makers!

Yes but IMHO (and pretty much 80% of the community) you should be using either a tv (impractial on a cocktail cabinet) or a arcade monitor in your mame cab, so this is a moot point.  

I still think hardware is the only solution to this problem though.  People don't realize it, but it's hard to mess with the display in mame. Each game has it's own display initilization, so to change any bit of the process you have to modify every single driver.  Yes it could be done, but it wuld require some MAJOR modifications to the core video functions.  

Besides, mame isn't the only emulator out there and that still wouldn't fix issues regarding flipping the front end.  


Someone needs to contact andy....  the arcade vga already supports rotation and hotkeys for rotation, the only major thing required to do screen mirroring would be a 1 frame buffer somewhere, which I think most cards already have.  

[Lilwolf]

A don't believe Andy did anything in his card other then change the resolution / refresh tables.  Doesn't it use standard ATI drivers?