MONITOR RESOLUTION TOOL FOR MAME

[Blacksmith]

 
With the help of a few good people from this forum group, I finally was able to get my arcade monitor up and running on my mame machine.  I am running my mame pc with an ArcadeVGA card, Windows XP, J-pac to Jamma harness, and Wells Gardner 25" monitor.
Now that I have a picture, I need to start tweaking it to get things right.  When I'm on the windows desktop the picture is decent, but a little hard to read the icon descriptions.  When I switch to Emuloader (my front end) and load up a game, the picture rolls until I stop it with the remote adjustment knob and the colors seem a little blah.  I believe that my problem lies in the resolutions on the screen, as another forum poster had mentioned (dabone), and he suggested that I download and install the mame resolution tool, which I did.  Problem is I don't really know how to run it or configure ini files.  Can somebody out there who has experience doing this, walk me through it?  I read over the text file, but it didn't really help me.  Also, I am using itunes as a music program on my pc and when I run that program the screen goes kind of yellowish which I really don't understand.  Keep in mind, this stuff is all pretty foreign to me so I need things broken down to the most basic steps and terminology.  I'll post current screen pictures.  Thanks.

[Blacksmith]

C'mon, there has to be one computer/monitor whiz out there that can walk me through this nightmare!  I've got the mame resolution tool program up and running, just not sure what to do with it.  IMO the instructions are sketchy at best for the novice like myself.

[krick]

My arcade cab is down at the moment but I'll try to help if I can.

I ran my ArcadeVGA with Win98SE on my arcade monitor and I can definitely say that 640x480 looks awful because of the interlacing.

I run my windows desktop and mamewah both at 640x288 (non-interlaced) and it looks great other than the 60Hz refresh rate which can be hard on the eyes sometimes when there is a lot of contrast (black text on white backgrounds).

I don't use hardware stretch on vertical games. I just adjusted the vertical size on my arcade monitor so that vertical games aren't cut off. This makes horizontal games run with a small amount of "letterbox effect" but I don't think it's really noticeable.

Oh, and in my mame.ini, I use the following settings for an arcade monitor...

artwork 1
use_backdrops 1
use_overlays 1
use_bezels 0
artwork_crop 1
artwork_resolution 0

It's amazing how much cooler space invaders looks with the backdrop...

http://www.macmame.net/artcade/invaders.html

[dabone]

Ok, lets try a quick walk thru..


First load the res tool, tell it where mame is, (Mame exe location, tell it where you want your ini files , and then select you available mode list.

Select which arcade vga card list you have (7000 series or 9200 series, the 7000 series avga card has 2 vga connectors, the 9200 series has 1)

[dabone]

After you load the list it should look similar to 4.jpg.

Now click remove non-60 hz modes.

[dabone]

Select yes, then select generate native mode list.
(this might take a min.)

[dabone]

Now select file-generate ini files.

When the next windows comes up, select the following options.

[dabone]

Now select ok and the ini files will be created.

[dabone]

Now this is just a dead simple walkthru, there are many other options you can set,
(native res for each resolution, artwork flags, hwstretch, etc.)

After you do this play some games and see if things look good, if they don't just get in there and play with more settings.



Later,
dabone