getting full(ish) screen WITHOUT HWstretch

[rampy]

Hi,

I'm looking for tips/pointers on getting full screen satisfaction (well ninja warriors can be letterboxed, and vertical games can be horizontal boxed ) from MAME in windows98.  I use a PC monitor.  

Everything looks great using advancemame, but I'm trying to transition over to regular mame for a few reasons:

1. advancemame in 98 is using the DOS version and if a FE tries to "hide" the dos box bad things happen... i.e. it's hard to "hide" windows look..

2. advancemame doesn't have that nifty suprress "ok/disclarimer" command line switches.

3. performance reasons.

4. some other reasons that i've forgotten

In advancemame I get appropriately sized screens with scanlines and it looks pretty durn good for a PC monitor (purists hold your lunch in if you can)

If I use regular mame, hwstretch makes everything gross and fuzzy... and means I can't use the old school scan line (i can use the new school scan lines like scan25, but they don't look as good in my opinion)  how do you guys approach display sizing if you're running a PC monitor?

*shrug* I hoped this make's sense... I'd like to hear your approach(es) to this issue.

rampy

[)p(]

Advance mame has been able to pass those screens for a long time and I did not have problem with hiding the dos bxes with win98 when i was using advance mame. BUT I also moved on a while back to regular mame after I found out that I really liked the look behind the monitor glas of regular mame using a fixed resolution of 640x480 with hardware stretch turned on for all raster games.
edit: and noscanlines

peter

[Minwah]

I too quite like unstretched with scanlines when using a PC monitor...

I just used 'auto' resolution.  But I did find I had to add some custom resolutions (using 'Rage3D Tweak' for my Radeon) in order to get the best size from some games.

With this setup I was able to get pretty good results with nearly all games.  Custom resolutions could be crucial tho as I found some games were displayed tiny without.

[Chris]

What I would do is find the closest multiple of the vertical resolution and set it, and use the -nohws -sl parameters to disable hardware stretch and add scanlines.

So let's look at Pac-Man.  MAME.DK sayds Pac-Man's vertical resolution is 288.  288 is close to 300, so let's double that for a vertical resolution of 600.  We'll use 800x600 mode.

So in our mame\ini folder, create a pacman.ini.  In that file, put:

scanlines 1
hwstretch 0
resolution 800x600

That should get you the old-school look with a nearly full screen.  you can copy this ini for all the vertical ames with a vertical resolution of 288 (Galaga, Ms. Pac-man, etc.).

Now, Centipede's vertical resolution is 256.  A multiple of 3 gives us a vertical resolution of 1024x768, so we'll use that resolution and Centipede is now full screen!  

scanlines 1
hwstretch 0
resolution 1024x768

Nw Tron gets tricky.  The vertical resolution is 512.  A multiplier of 2 gets us 1024, for a resolution of 1280x1024.  The higher the resolution, though, the more horsepower MAME needs, and not all monitors are going to support resolutions this high.  If your monitor does, though:

scanlines 1
hwstretch 0
resolution 1280x1024

At this very high resolution, the scanline effect will be so subtle as to be almost unnoticeable, but Tron will be running full-screen.

--Chris

[rampy]

What I would do is find the closest multiple of the vertical resolution and set it, and use the -nohws -sl parameters to disable hardware stretch and add scanlines.

Thanks for all the tips (although I'm still soliciting options/opinions on the subject).

Chris, do you do this for *every* game (does everybody?) ?  Is there a more general setting that can be done ?  How do you find the games native resolution?  

thanks again!

rampy

[Chris]

Chris, do you do this for *every* game (does everybody?) ?  Is there a more general setting that can be done ?  How do you find the games native resolution?  

I do this for games in which MAME doesn't pick the best resolution on its own.  You'll find that if you set:

hwstretch 0
scanlines 1

In your MAME.INI, MAME will pick a good resolution much of the time, but may need some help on some games.  I had assumed you had already tried this and needed more fine-tuning...

MAME.DK wil tell you the native resolution... MAME itself will if you don't skip the OK prompt.

I just tested with Pac-Man, and MAME picked the odd resolution of 720x576, which I didn't even know my video card supported... but it was full-screen!

--Chris

[Wade]

Rampy,

   I'm not 100% sure about my mame settings (I would have to check to be absolutely sure), but as far as I know, I have always used mame with no scanlines, tweak on, and no hardware stretch.  I have yet to load a game that didn't fit the screen perfectly or look perfect.  I had the same results with a Trident 9680 and an ATI Xpression+ card (Mach64 chipset).

I was afraid I would spend a lot of time with video settings as it seems to be discussed so often on this board, but it has been a total non-issue for me since I initially got my cabinet working.

I have a D9200, but I basically use it as a regular vga monitor.  I tried 15khz modes and they might have been more authentic, but they were hard on my eyes.

Wade