Making Mame look better on a TV?

[Tahnok]

AdvanceMame does not support my video card (Radeon 9550) so I was wondering if there was anything else I could do to make it look better. Right now text is unreadable and games are blurred. Any ideas?

[tyweed]

Yes, i feel your pain .I also have a tv a 31"  to be exact and it is blurry when you need to read text on pc games and in the desktop. However , the games should not look bad?

and as for visual pinball on a tv it looks like #$%

I'm sorry I can't help ya! just thought i'd let you know you are not alone!

[Todd H]

Try -effect sharp.

[elvis]

AdvanceMame does not support my video card (Radeon 9550)

Care to expand on that?  AdvanceMame supports almost every modern video card through either the svgalib hack for win32, or native svgalib and/or SDL.  ATi's in particular work quite well.

What exactly is it not supporting?

As for blurry text, try switching to SVHS/SVideo input as opposed to RCA/composite and see a world of clarity difference.

[Lilwolf]

What is your windows resolution.

What is your mame settings.

I've heard different people say different items...

I take it this way... your video card will do some stretching to get your video to display on your monitor.   Then mame will stretch the game to run on your windows.  IE, two stretches.

Try and set your physical desktop resolution as close to your physical tv resoltuion and let mame stretch (hwstretch)

then try letting mame go to the games native resoltuion and see how well the windows -> tv stretch looks.... 

One should be the 'best'

[Tahnok]

Try -effect sharp.

Alright, I'll try it once I get MameWah working again.

Care to expand on that?

[maraxle]

The reason I am running composite is because the TV is about 20-25' away. An S-Video cable of that length would cost quite a bit. I suppose I will have to though if that is what will solve it.

Composite will always look blurry, particularly on text.  S-video should make a huge difference.  Try moving your PC closer and use any extra s-video cable you have lying around before you invest in a long cable.  That'll give you an idea of what kind of output you can expect.  If it's still not clear enough for you, at least you didn't buy that expensive cable...

[jimboc]

I'd go with the s-video if possible, but I've been able to get my TV display to look pretty darn good (in my eyes), even in composite.

Here are some of the tweaks that have worked for me:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=30361.msg260473#msg260473

This actually might get more responses in the Monitor/Video forum as well.

--Jim

[GGKoul]

My 29" TV resolutions are set to 640x400. 

Also, this "blurry" text issue in PC games is an with a Arcade Monitor too.

[Lilwolf]

You might find the real resolution in the manual. 

but it will be something closer to 640x480... most lower then that (but some high defs are higher).

So you are taking a game that runs at 320x240 originally... scaling it up to 1024x768 to windows... then scaling it back down to your TV resolution.   I would expect some blurry lines.

try forcing mame to 320x240 (or original resolution to a game) and see if that helps.

[GGKoul]

try forcing mame to 320x240 (or original resolution to a game) and see if that helps.

How do you do that??