Wonderful blurb in Aarons WIP Page concerning Mame video output.

[dabone]

# In general, it seems that the use of video in MAME falls into one of two categories: either you are running it with a regular VGA monitor and want all the bells and whistles; or you are running it with an arcade monitor and want just the screen with no adornments and just the raw bits. I am considering making this a command-line switch, because choices about how to handle different behaviors can be more sensibly made if your intentions are clear.




Linky...

http://aarongiles.com/?p=160#more-160


Later,
dabone

[Howard_Casto]

That particular bit of the article doesn't particularly interest me (I'm not so dumb I can't setup mame).  But the rest of it certainly does.  On the fly rotation and on the fly screen toggling/rotation/ect sounds really cool. 

Also as a programmer I am super excited about mame finally getting with the program and using a modern version of direct-x.  I use dx8 all the time and let me tell you, it is a breeze to program for.  You can do all kinds of nifty effects, everything is handled as a 3d object, and rendering text is quick and painless. Aaron is really good with the programming end of things, so he'll make a nice, sturdy base for us to all work off of.  Since this core would be based on super old, tech us younger guys will find it easier to contribute in terms of tweaking video options and such.

Also, something I'm personally interested in is implementation of directinput force feedback.  Before it would have meant combining elements of dx7 and 8 which understandably, the devs wouldn't like to do.  But with dx8 running the video, the dx8 object is already there, a person could also tack on the direct input 8 object and be ready to build the framework.  Dx8 force feedback is farily easy to do, it's dx7 that's hard.