What parameters (features) do you specify when using MAME? (scanlines? sai?)

[sofakng]

My cabinet is almost complete so I'm trying to configure MAME, MAMEWAH, etc, etc.

So... I'm wondering what parameters (options, features, whatever) that you use with MAME.

Do most people use scanlines?  If so, which scanline option do you use?

Do most people disable hardware stretching?

Do most people use RGB filters?

Do most people use sai filters?  Anti-aliasing?

I'm pretty sure most people use -mouse, but what else?

[simplygriff]

I have an option set up in MAMEwah to disable hardware stretching only when I'm playng a vertical game.  I access this by pressing coin-up in mamewah  I also use -joystick because I use usb controllers.  I have bezels turned off though with arrtwork.  It was messing up my double dragon's.

I'm interested to know if people use scanlines and which setting they use.  
-G

[Minwah]

Depends entirely on what screen type etc. poeple are using/  Arcade monitor people will never use scanlines, rgb filters, sai filters, but might use hwstretch on some games.

Why not just make a mame.ini and play around with it til you have it how you like?

[Howard_Casto]

Hwstretch doesn't hurt anything, it works just great even on arcade monitors as they have very limited options on what resolutions they can display without having to crawl in the back and adjust the monitor to stretch it to full screen.  


Thus the name hardware stretch.  

There are many opinions on this, but at least in a windows environment, they way you are supposed to setup mame, regardless of the monitor is this:

1.  Play with different resolutions /refresh rates and figure out which one gives the best picture with no physical adjustment on your system/monitor setup.  The higher the resolution/refresh, the better.  Ideally, it should be the highest resolution that monitor supports.  

2.  Turn all of this auto crap off in the resolution, and refresh rate.  

3.  Set it to that ideal resolution / refresh you found earlier.

4.  Turn on hwstretch and set the d3d "effect" to either none or sharp.  


Now, like magic, games all display full screen without any adjustment!  Games that run on a lower resolution than the manual resolution you set are automatically scaled up via your video card, with 0 effect on performance. Why this is such a difficult concept for everyone to grasp is beyond me.

 Are there exceptions?  Of course!  But I can count the exceptions on my one hand and it is far easier to setup the bulk of your games like this and go back and tweak a handful of games than the other way around.  

Conclusion:  Hwstretch is your friend!  You should almost always use it.  


For those nay sayers that say "but hwstretch makes things look blurry"  I suggest you look above and properly set the "effect" flag.  If it still gives you trouble then throw away your pos video card and get a new one as any "blurring" you get comes directly from how your vid card handles stretching.  It's not mame's nor the hwstretch option's fault.  


For additional nay sayers that say "but I have an arcade vga"  to you I say this. You can't display all the games properly anyway, even on the ultimarc site it admits to this.  Hwstretch may not give the best picture on all games, but at least it can shrink/stretch the display for you so that it is actually visible.  So no, it won't give good picture quality in some cases, but a crappy picture is better than no picture at all imho.  And like I said, you can always go back and manually tweak a few problem games, what hwstretch does is keep you from having to even worry about the bulk of them.  It's there to make your life easier, so take advantage of it!


Ok, I'm done.  Flame away!

[Jakobud]

Howard, with Hardware stretch, what happens to vertical games being displayed horizontally on a horizontally mounted monitor?  Does it maintain the aspect ratio of the vertical game?  Or stretch it all the way out to 4:3 ?

[Howard_Casto]

If keep_aspect is turned on (why you would ever turn that of I dunno)  then all games retain their aspect.


 Seems you've been keeping score.  WAAAAAAY back in the day when hwstretch was first added they had problems with this, it was soon fixed, however and that stuff isn't an issue anymore.  

[Lilwolf]

btw, my monitor handles 3 resolutions native.  320x200, 320x240 and 640x480.

I added to JFront the ability to pick the closest resolution and hwstretch only if needed.

but I couldn't see the difference between that and just keeping it at 640x480 and ALWAYS doing HWStretching.

So now, I don't let mame change resolutions, HWstretch, and I don't get the change in resolution clash and clicks.   Its also much faster to launch mame.

HWStretch is a good thing... if your hardware can handle it!

[atog]

I've been using MAME since '97 and this is the first time I have heard of SAI filtering, what are you guys smoking?

[simplygriff]

When I have -hwstretch on my vertical games display sideways on my horizontal monitor.  That's why I use -nohwstretch to play the vertical games.  Is there a better solution for this?
-G

[sofakng]

I have a couple of questions...

1.  Play with different resolutions /refresh rates and figure out which one gives the best picture with no physical adjustment on your system/monitor setup.  The higher the resolution/refresh, the better.  Ideally, it should be the highest resolution that monitor supports.

I'm using a Toshiba 27A33 TV with a Radeon 7000 AGP video card.  It's connected using S-VIDEO (later it will be component... but not anytime soon).

Windows has the resolution set to 800x600 and for some reason it doesn't seem like I can change that.  However, I can still set MAME to 640x480 or whatever else...

Aren't TV's native resolution 640x480?  Should I force MAME to ALWAYS use that resolution?  Which refresh rate should I set?

When I have -hwstretch on my vertical games display sideways on my horizontal monitor.  That's why I use -nohwstretch to play the vertical games.  Is there a better solution for this?

Just curious... How do you set MAME (or more specifically, MAMEWAH w/MAME command-line) to use -nohwstretch only for certain games?  If you change mame.ini doesn't it use that for ALL games?

[simplygriff]

Using Mamewah you have an option to set up a button to run mame with specific options you set beyond what is in the ini file.  I can't remember off the top of my head where you set it up. I think it's under emulator options.  You can have 2 of these set up.  Check the MAMEwah Read me.  SO anyway  I have one of these set up to be -nohwstretch.  So I push the 1P coin button for vertical games instead of the 1P start.  most of the time I forget what games are vertical and have to exit and redo it but this works well for me.
-G

[Minwah]

1.  Play with different resolutions /refresh rates and figure out which one gives the best picture with no physical adjustment on your system/monitor setup.  The higher the resolution/refresh, the better.  Ideally, it should be the highest resolution that monitor supports.  

2.  Turn all of this auto crap off in the resolution, and refresh rate.  

3.  Set it to that ideal resolution / refresh you found earlier.

4.  Turn on hwstretch and set the d3d "effect" to either none or sharp.  

I almost totally disagree with this method.  For PC monitors / TV's, fine, but for arcade monitors there's no way you want to run at the same resolution all the time.  I agree it will get you a fullscreen image, but not the 'best'.

I mean, why does the ArcadeVGA support so many resolutions if you should only be using 1 ??  As I've said before, hwstretch is handy, but stretching an image in general is bad if it can be avoided.  I only use hwstretch for games which cannot be displayed natively by my monitor (ie med/high res games).  Programs like my AVGA MAME Res. Tool can make ini files for every game to specify resolution, rather than using MAME's 'resolution auto' setting.

[Howard_Casto]

I mean, why does the ArcadeVGA support so many resolutions if you should only be using 1 ??

Simple, your monitor might only support certain resolutions.  Not all arcade monitors support the same resolutions (or support them well) so arcade vga gives you the choice to choose which one you care to use.  Don't take this the wrong way, but that was kind of a dumb question.  Similar to asking why regular video cards support multiple resolutions.  

While I'll agree that the 640x480 interlaced mode is crap explain to me why it's better to have to manually adjust the horizontal and vertical hold (that means getting into the back of the monitor itself) of your arcade monitor to stretch a 230x166 screen to fullscreen 320x240 rather than hard setting mame to 320 x240 and having hwstretch do ti for you via software?  Like I said, you will have to tweak a few, but for the bulk of the games hwstretch is your friend.  

It's just common sense man....  changing maybe 10 ini files tops is a lot simpler than having to worry about resolution changes by your monitor with virtually every game or having to author hundreds of ini files.  Some monitors handle resolution switching well.  Most, particularly older arcade monitors, do not.  

I'll repeat it once more, unless hwstretch is downsampling (making the screen smaller) there is NO visible difference between using hwstretch and not using it.  The only difference is you don't have to have access to your monitor's adjustments incase the screen doesn't come in at the proper size/ratio.  

Lilwolf is usuing a similar arcade monitor setup, he says it works fine for him and just like I said, he cannot tell a visible difference.  If you are reluctant to take my word for it perhaps you should take his?

[Minwah]

Simple, your monitor might only support certain resolutions.  Not all arcade monitors support the same resolutions (or support them well) so arcade vga gives you the choice to choose which one you care to use.  Don't take this the wrong way, but that was kind of a dumb question.  Similar to asking why regular video cards support multiple resolutions.  

OK maybe a dumb question to an extent for the point you gave, but the point I was making is that Andy made as many resolutions close to game native resolutions available as possible on the card, so that we can run as many games as possible at (or close to) their native res.

While I'll agree that the 640x480 interlaced mode is crap explain to me why it's better to have to manually adjust the horizontal and vertical hold (that means getting into the back of the monitor itself) of your arcade monitor to stretch a 230x166 screen to fullscreen 320x240 rather than hard setting mame to 320 x240 and having hwstretch do ti for you via software?  Like I said, you will have to tweak a few, but for the bulk of the games hwstretch is your friend.  

Well my screen runs all the modes the AVGA can do without ever having to adjust the v-hold/any controls so maybe I'm just lucky.

It's just common sense man....  changing maybe 10 ini files tops is a lot simpler than having to worry about resolution changes by your monitor with virtually every game or having to author hundreds of ini files.  Some monitors handle resolution switching well.  Most, particularly older arcade monitors, do not.  

Fair enough if your monitor can't handle it...but if it can, IMO it is common sense to run games at or near to their native res.  And with progs like my AVGA MAME Res. Tool, you can create thousands of suitable ini files in like 1 minute tops.

I'll repeat it once more, unless hwstretch is downsampling (making the screen smaller) there is NO visible difference between using hwstretch and not using it.  The only difference is you don't have to have access to your monitor's adjustments incase the screen doesn't come in at the proper size/ratio.  

That is just not true, unless my hardware is totally on another planet.  How about an example...lets say I run Bank Panic at 240x240 (native 224x224) - it looks *perfect*.  If I run it at 320x240, it looks perfect quality, but obviously I have black borders left/right.  Now if I switch on hwstretch, it fills the screen but looks *very* blurry.  Now if I switch on effect sharp, it looks better, but to my eyes nowhere near as good as how it looked @ 240x240.  I realise if I picked a higher res. it would look better, but still not perfect.

Lilwolf is usuing a similar arcade monitor setup, he says it works fine for him and just like I said, he cannot tell a visible difference.  If you are reluctant to take my word for it perhaps you should take his?

I am not just not taking your word for it, I know basically you know more about MAME than most, so I am happy if you can teach me something else.  But in this case I just don't agree.  If this works for Lilwolf then great, but for me it honestly doesn't.  

The point I really want to make is that stretching, no matter how, is not arcade accurate, and never will be.  Running at native res. where possible *has* to be better than running at a higher resolution, and stretching - I don't see how you can argue that?