vertical game on 25" horizontal monitor

[dolphinfan]

I've got a 25" WG arcade monitor running off an ArcadeVGA card. Everything works great, but Pacman and Ms. Pacman squish at the bottom of the screen. The top of the screen is perfect, and I can see the whole maze, but the fruit at the bottom is squished flat. It's as if the fruit (and ms. pacman life icons) are compressed flat into about 2 lines. I'm running at 352X288 and it's so close to fitting...if I could just tell it to run at, say, 352X300 or so!
I have played with the hwstretch settings to no avail. The nearest resolution that gets the whole screen to fit is 512X448, but the maze is about 5 inches square in the center of the screen!
My question is, are other people here running these games on 25" horizontal arcade monitors at 288 lines with no trouble? Is this maybe a hardware tweak on the monitor itself that I need to do?
And, while I'm at it, what would happen if I just set an arbitrary resolution of 352X300 in the mspacman.ini file? Could this damage the monitor?

[wpcmame]

I've got a 25" WG arcade monitor running off an ArcadeVGA card. Everything works great, but Pacman and Ms. Pacman squish at the bottom of the screen. The top of the screen is perfect, and I can see the whole maze, but the fruit at the bottom is squished flat. It's as if the fruit (and ms. pacman life icons) are compressed flat into about 2 lines.

Sounds like a monitor adjustment problem to me. Have you tried V.POS and V.SIZE controls?

[dolphinfan]

Yes, I've turned both knobs from one extreme to the other. It's almost as if the monitor is just physically incapable of fitting these games on its screen.
Do you have a 25" horizontal monitor? If so, are you able to run these games in full screen without losing the top and/or bottom?

[DaemonCollector]

It runs fine for me, I have a 25" WG set up horizontal. What res are you trying to run the game it?

[wpcmame]

Yes, I've turned both knobs from one extreme to the other. It's almost as if the monitor is just physically incapable of fitting these games on its screen.

I think it must be something wrong with your monitor. There is nothing in mame that can cause the effect you are describing and the graphics card can't control the vertical distance between lines. Maybe you should try to run the nokia monitor test program (think it is available on the retroblast site).

Do you have a 25" horizontal monitor? If so, are you able to run these games in full screen without losing the top and/or bottom?

yes, my monitor, Hantarex POLO 25", displays 288 lines without any (visible) distortions.

[dolphinfan]

DaemonCollector, I ran the AVRES utility to set the res for all games. It chose 352x288. I've tried others, of course, but I assume that 352x288 must be the accepted "standard" for the Pacman games.

wpcmame, thanks for the info. If you're able to run the Pac games with no distortion, then I've definitely got something wrong. I will download and run that Nokia mon test. Thanks for the tip.

If anything pops into your head later, please let me know. A monitor/video wiz I ain't...any further help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, guys.