Resolution--fine tuning ??

[pacman]

I have found many information scatered everywhere in this forum but nothing really clear and consolidated I am using an AVGA together with Hantarex 25'' horizontal monitor and basically I am trying to find the best tuning to play both H and V games with the best resolution.

I have used AVRES (Hardware stretch on and only 60hz) to set up INI files and did the following :

- I launched a vertical game (1942) and tuned the v-shift pot to make it fit the top and bottom of the screen.

Then I launched a few H games with different resolutions but was very disappointed to see black borders on top/bottom/left/right of the screen. If I adjust pots to have them full screen then of course I loose settings for V games...

At that stage I do not know if AVRES choose always the best resolution...Is there any way of tuning this better?

Also the V-hold is not stable when switching from different resolution or going back to XP desktop (640x480) and have always to make little adjustments.I believe this is a pot issue??

There is no way of getting the MAME Resolution Tool working on my XP...alway a 'Run time error 13-type mismatch' prompt message when I double click on the icon 

[wpcmame]

Arcade monitors always display the same number of lines regardless of resolution. If you adjust your monitor for 256 lines (e.g. 1942) you will get a 16 line black border for all 240 line games. Games with more than 256 lines will be cut off.

There is nothing you can do about it. If you want all games to fill the screen you need to use a resolution which fill the screen (in your case 256 lines) and then use stretch.

(A common cause of 'Run time error 13-type mismatch' is that the programmer didn't consider different locales. Don't know if that is the case here but you could try to alter the national settings for number and date formats)

[pacman]

OK it is much more clear now...

So let's say that if I want all V games to fit I need to adjust monitor using a games which display in the max resolution of 288 lines. Then I enable Hardware Stretch in MAME and H games will also fir the entire screen right? 

If I use HS always enabled for all games then what is the issue with refresh rate?? 

Reguarding MAME tool, my local settings are configured to central europe..I will try to set them differently and see what happen...

[wpcmame]

So let's say that if I want all V games to fit I need to adjust monitor using a games which display in the max resolution of 288 lines. Then I enable Hardware Stretch in MAME and H games will also fir the entire screen right?

[pacman]

But if I use 640x480 for all V games this will flicker isnt'it??

all horizontal games look bad

What do you mean?

So as far as i understood the best is to stretch V games in 640x480 and then set the monitor to display 280 lines for H games ?

[wpcmame]

Sorry if I was unclear.

The game display will look best if you don't use any (or integer) stretch. Unfortunatly this means that some games will have borders or be cut off since the monitor will always display the same number of lines regardless of resolution.

I don't mind the borders but if you do, you need to think about which games are most important for you to display correctly. Basicly there are 3 monitor options:

240 visible lines: Most horizontal games will display without stretch but all vertical games need stretching. This seem to be the most common setting around here.

256 visible lines: All horizontal games and many vertical games will display without stretch but most horizontal games will have a thin (16 lines = 6%) border. Don't know how common it is but MinWah (creator of mameWah) uses this setting.

288 visible lines: All games will display without stretch but horizontal games will have a 16% border.

What I do is that I use the fact that the monitor tube isn't square. On my monitor approx 8 more lines are visible in the middle than in the corners. By adjusting the monitor to ~280 lines in the middle, ~272 lines is visible in the corners which equals a 10% border on horizontal games. A few vertical 288 line games will be slightly cut off but I don't mind if the text "Player 1" is missing at the top.

When you mention flicker I assume you mean interlace flicker. There are some myths around interlace but here is how it works:

When you display a non-interlaced image, the monitor draws only every second line creating what is called scanlines (thin black lines between the graphic lines) on the monitor. The size of the scanlines depends on the monitors' sharpness (distance between display elements). Arcade monitors generally have a rather blurry image so the scanlines are thinner than the lines containing graphics. PC monitors are sharp so the scanlines becomes the same size as the graphic lines and are much more visible.

When you display an interlaced image, the monitor will still only draw every second line but in every second frame it will swap the position of the graphic lines and scanlines. The effect is that the display will be without scanlines like when you display mame on a PC monitor.

The problem here is that with interlace each line is only updated every second frame. If neighbouring lines differ a lot in intensity (e.g. a thin white horizontal line on a black background) the display will flicker.
However, when you display a non-interlaced image like a mame game in an interlaced display the following happens: mame scales the game image by drawing every line twice. This means that neighbouring lines are identical and there is no flicker (well, if you look close, you can notice a slight flicker in a very bright areas) and the only effect is that the games display without scanlines.

Most people around here want to have the scanlines since that is how the games were displayed in the arcades. Personally I don't like them so I run all games in interlace.

When you stretch a game, the graphic card filters the image to make it look better but it doesn't include the scanlines in the process so the result will usually not be very good. The stretching also works better with more lines so it is best to use interlace for stretched games.

[pacman]

Wow!! That's an explanation!!!

 I will give a closer look to all of this.

So the best is to keep only resolutions with 240 lines in AVRES and create INI files again. I think I will try the most common one as you said. I do not mind having V games stretched but would like to have H games in full screen

Thanks for your help!

[pacman]

Well although this is clear now I was wondering how do I setup AVRES utility to force my AVGA to display 240 lines ? (BTW are those calles H lines or V lines ?  ). What about screen width then ? Is the 320 the best one to use for H games also?

Does anyone have the AVRES txt file correctly setup for AVGA9200 ??