Some games showing up as very small on screen.

[Luckydevil]

I'm sure this has been covered here before and I did a few searches, but I'm not exactly sure what I am searching for.

I'm using Mame32fx and an Arcadevga card with a 25" WG monitor. I used Gavin Bensons Utility to automatically set all of my resolutions for me.

Most of the games show up perfectly and fill the whole screen. Other games come up very small in the center of the screen.

I am dying to play DoDonPachi and it is one of the games showing up small. 

I looked through the properties of the game in Mame32fx but didn't see where I could change the resolution anywhere.

Can anyone help please or let me know what I should be searching for to find a post on this?

Thanks guys.

[youki]

Hi,

I don't know mame32fx.

But i suppose you could look in the Ini directory for the Ini file that corresponds to the game.

Open it with notepad , and change the resolution.

And may be add something like :
noka 1

(not sure of the syntax, but it is something to see with keep aspect ratio)

[Luckydevil]

I looked in both of the ini files and neither had resolutions for the games in them. The resolutions do show up in Mame32fx when you look at the properties of each individual game, but I don't see any way to actually change them. I found a Mame32fx message board, so I guess I'll go ask over there.

Thanks for the help though.

[youki]

Ini files which are in the INI folder you should have.  Mainly if you are using an ArcadeVGA and used a resolution generation tools . (like avres)

You sure , you don't have any ini files in a Ini folder somewhere?

[Luckydevil]

I have an ini folder in my MAME directory with two .ini files in it. Neither one of them had any resolutions for the games though. Am I looking at the wrong ini files?

[youki]

In your mame folder , you don't have a INI folder ? 

[dax]

I am having a similar problem and it shows up with both AtomicFE and MameWah.  I'm using Mame 0.69 and I can call mame from the command line and the resolutions work perfectly, but from within MameWah or AtomicFE, they come out in weird, high resolution modes with very small screens.  I have yet to figure out exactly what the problem is.

I'm beginning to wonder if there is some stretching/sizing mode I may have turned off in the cfg, but also, I am not seeing the games pay attention to the ini resolution settings when called from AtomicFE or MameWah.  I have been working on this issue for months and I'm completely stumped.

[youki]

That 's strange. Because for Atomic , i know it works.

Is your INI folder is in the MAME Folder?

What you can try to workaround the problem , is to use a .BAT to run mame.

Ex :

Said you have your MAME installed in   C:\emulators\mame\
Ini folder  should be    C:\emulators\mame\ini

With the notepad create a .BAT file called : RunMAME.BAT  with

Code: [Select]

c:
cd \
cd Emulators
cd Mame
Mame %1
Then specify as default emulator : RunMAME.BAT   (instead of MAME.EXE on the Folder Tab of AtomicManager if you use it, on MAMEWah i don't know where but you should be able to do the same thing).

If you want give a try. It should not make difference because Atomic set the default folder to the emulator one when it run the game. But just it case.

[dax]

I was thinking of doing the same thing Youki..... creating a .BAT to invoke things and see if that works.. plus in the batch file I can create my own log showing what parms are being sent to Mame.

I'm going to do this and report back to you.

I moved MAME.INI into the \mame\ini directory when I discovered that it doesn't seem to read all the config information from the file if it's in the \mame directory.  I do not know why.  I recognize that mame first seems to look in the default path for mame.ini, but then it checks ini/mame.ini and reads that file.  So to avoid confusion, I moved the file from \mame into \mame\ini.  Should this have any impact on any of the FEs?  I am thinking not, but you might know for sure.   Thoughts?

[dax]

dupe

[Fat_Trucker]

Are you running the games with all the Bezels turned on?. This can dramatically reduce the playing area. If this is the probem simply check artwork crop or turn the bezels off altogether.

[dax]

Oooh, oooh.. that's a very interesting idea..... would this also be the case if artwork was turned on?

But if bezels were turned on and the bezels weren't available, wouldn't this be ignored?

[Fat_Trucker]

Strictly speaking no but try turning it off. Also put your mame.ini in the mame folder rather than the ini folder.

[dax]

I made sure everything was turned off in mame.ini.  I even tried 3 different mame versions and I still have resolution problems with MameWah that do not present themselves when I invoke Mame manually from the command line.

Is it possible that when invoked from windows/mamewah, under win98, mame will not change the resolution?  Is there some setting in MameWah or mame that would force it to keep the current resolution operating under, regardless of the game's ini file settings?  This is my best guess so far as to what the problem is.

[dax]

Lucky, are you running under Win98?  Maybe we can isolate this to an incompatibility with some of the FE software running under Win98??

[Luckydevil]

I got both of my problems fixed.

For the bezels I just turned the artwork off and a lot of the games I was having problems with went to full screen and look great now.

For the vertical shooters I was having problems with, hardware stretch was turned off. So I turned it on and also set the zoom to 3 and now they look fine. It was weird though because just turning on hardware stretch with the default zoom of 2 would just crash the computer. Setting the zoom to 3 was the key for me.

[dax]

I'm going to try that now and see if that helps me too..

[edit]

Unfortunately this didn't work on my setup.  I tried all sorts of different configurations of the settings and nothing made much of a difference.   Back to the drawing board for me, and nobody around here apparently has a clue what is wrong.

[Luckydevil]

dax- have you tried upgrading to xp? Win98 has a lot of stuff that XP got rid of or improved on.

[dax]

dax- have you tried upgrading to xp? Win98 has a lot of stuff that XP got rid of or improved on.

I am aware this may make things better, but the problem is I don't want to pay for an OS I shouldn't need - it's overkill and it probably wouldn' run well on my P3-450 anyway.  This is a dedicated PC for the arcade cabinet and it's plenty fast enough to run the FE and Mame.  It would uber suck to have to shell out money to Microsoft just because of some configuration issue.

[dax]

So far, the only thing that seems to have made a difference is if I modify the command line execution format and add -resolution 800x600.  This seems to make some games appear larger, but also they appear more square with some unusual aspect issue that doesn't seem to change depending upon the ini aspect setting.  I'm still confused as to what's going on.

As it stands, ArcadeOS works well, but I really want to use MameWah.  But there seems to be some differences in behavior with 0.69 i686 version it seems.. I really am at a loss - but it also creates the same problem with .102 so I am not inclined to blame it on the mame version.  It could be a win98 issue though.