stretching issues (mame, 27" monitor w/RGB)

[ARTIFACT]

My monitor is described here:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=70143.0

(27" video editing monitor with RGB Leads / BNC ... looks like all low resolutions work fine, up to 640x480 or 800x600 not sure)

This is what is happening:

I have switchres enabled. Games switch res fine and all of them are VISIBLE on the monitor (no sync issue).

BUT

many of the games appear a tad small, inconsistently, with a HUGE black border around. On the 27" screen, it is easily 2 inches left, top, right, bottom on some regular aspect games (not vertical)

SO

Since this is happening kind of consistently across the games, I used a screwdriver to "stretch" the H and V size UP so most of the games I play a lot (Street Fighter 2) fill the screen exactly

But now, Ms Pac Man is way too stretched vertically ... and Mario Bros is stretched both ways too much (the scanlines are WAY apart)... SOME vertical games actually appear FULL SCREEN (overscan even) such as Bomb Jack and Baluka Densetsu.


What do you recommend I do? I'm lucky that my monitor seems to handle all of these resolutions fine, but I want to be able to calibrate the "base area" larger - maybe even on a game-to-game basis ("game.ini"? What is the syntax for this stuff anyway?)


I should mention that I played a bit with Advancemame the other day and couldn't get the advcfg.exe configurator to stretch the test screen to fill the screen.


Thank you in advance for sharing your wisdom ... be gentle with a newbie ... check my project thread, I put in the efforts and thank those who help me fish!

[ARTIFACT]

I should add pics to each of the points above, to clarify perhaps.

[ahofle]

Street Fighter 2 is 384x224 (1:171 aspect ratio) originally so it's not designed to fill a 4:3 (1.33 aspect) screen.  In other words, it's a tad 'widescreen'.  The original game probably had a bezel to cover the unused part of the screen so you couldn't tell.  What other games have this issue?  Check the resolution on them as well.

EDIT: I just reread your post and noticed you have borders on the sides too so that negates my theory.  Can you post pics?  Have you tried manually setting the resolution for sf2 to 384x288?

[Silver]

Sounds like mame settings to me. Whats in your mame.ini regarding video settings?

You have -switchres on, which is great, but I'm guessing you have -hwstretch off - presumably to get native screens your monitor can support.


What I suspect is happening is mame is attempting to guess the 'best' resolution when there is not an 'exact' resolution available. It's not good at this where lo-res monitors are concerned. I suspect it is often choosing 640x480 or 800x600, but no stretching, so you get these massive borders.

If I'm right, 2 options:

1) use -hwstrech to always fill the screen (as much as poss - you want to keep the aspect ratio).

2)Get down and dirty with the resolutions. Either you need to make a large variety of lo-res resolutions available to windows (you must be doing this to some extent already - powerstrip? that new lo-res program?) Then you will probably need to force games of certain resolution that is not exactly covered to use the nearest res - there are utils to help you do this like Mame Resolution Tool or whatever its called....

hope that helps...

EDIT:

If you run: mame -v -switchres (and then quit) you should see a list of all the resolutions mame "sees".

[ARTIFACT]

omg you rock


on my phone now, cant test but i will tonigh!!!
your assumptions seem quite accurate
i will post results here as well as some pics

thank you so much

[ARTIFACT]

OK

I did the following:

. I found the sweetspot with screen stretching H and V size potentiometers where MOST games will fill the screen if they should, and get borders where they should (SF2, etc)

. Games that don't look good with that default size get their own INI file... I set it to HWSTRETCH and generally it ends up looking OK... not as "sharp" as without, but at least it has correct aspect

so far so good.
thanks for the help!