Mamewah and screenshots

[NIVO]

Im wondering if you have the same problems as myself and cdbrown. We use crashtests screenshots just like almost everyone out there. Simply put, they look like pixelated garbage. So i tried an experiment. I went in and took my own screenshots of games using F12 and inserted them in place of the crashtest and bingo!!, no more pixelated crap. So im wondering 2 things: #1 has anyone else experienced this? and #2 is there an adjustment to be made so i wont have to go through and record a new screen shot for every game?   The res is set to 800x600 for the frontend, and has a default window size in my layout.

***An interesting side note, the game vids im working on look way better than the static screens, which is why im puzzled. Does it have to do with the fact that paintx.dll makes displaying them look like junk? or can we use an alternative for displaying?

[cdbrown]

The crashtest snaps are all resized to either 167x222 or 222x167 and the quality of the image isn't that great.  Taking your own snaps keeps the original game resolution and aspect ratio.  When opening the own snaps in windows xp picture and fax viewer, you can zoom in and out of the pic and the quality of the image isn't really affected.  When modifying the size of artwork window for the snaps, the image can be very degraded which lead me to believe this dll being used isn't as good as the standard xp png viewer.

[elvis]

The crashtest screenies are (a) low res and (b) highly compressed.  Why?  So that people don't have to download gigabytes of worthless information just to have screenshots (and likewise, so people don't have to pay rediculous hosting fees just to host gigabytes of screenshots).

The MAME32 screenshots lately have been a bit higher quality.  Check out their screenshot packs if you want an alternative.  They only release screenies for parent ROM sets, but MAMEWah is smart enough to look for a parent snap if there's no child snap available.

And lastly, for your favourite games, just take a screengrab yourself next time you are playing.  The default MAME screengrabs are uncompressed and full resolution, so they'll always look batter than the shrunk/compressed downloaded ones.

[cdbrown]

The crashtest screenies are (a) low res and (b) highly compressed.  Why?  So that people don't have to download gigabytes of worthless information just to have screenshots (and likewise, so people don't have to pay rediculous hosting fees just to host gigabytes of screenshots).

Well this is not quite right.  Take 1943 for instance - the in game snap I took was 12kb, while crashtest's version is 80kb.  ace.png crashtest=1.68kB, my snap=262B.3countb.png crashtest=83kB, my snap=24kB.  Most of the snaps I compared, the crashtest ones were larger in size, yet the image quality was lower because of the resize.

I guess NIVO was a bit strong when he said it looked like pixelated garbage, when outside of mamewah it looks fairly good.  Even in mame32 it is ok.

I am wondering why the pics don't look very good within mamewah - is it the method of resize or something else that is causing the quality to be heavily reduced.

[Minwah]

When modifying the size of artwork window for the snaps, the image can be very degraded which lead me to believe this dll being used isn't as good as the standard xp png viewer.

XP uses some kind of filtering (a bit like -hwstretch in Mame).  paintx just resizes without filtering.

I must say I've never noticed anything wrong.  I use a low res layout (360x240) so obviously the quality is not great since the artwork box is so small.  Even at 640x480 I think it looks pretty good tho (see pic).

I use a mixture of CrashTest and my own snaps but as I say I've never had any probs.

[cdbrown]

Here's the 800x600 thing.  1st is with crashtest, 2nd is with own created snap.  The snaps are on the bottom right, the video created using buddamame is on top right

[Minwah]

Here's the 800x600 thing.  1st is with crashtest, 2nd is with own created snap.  The snaps are on the bottom right, the video created using buddamame is on top right

Hard to tell the difference due to the board resizing the image...but the two example snapshots do seem to have a different aspect ratio.