Question about svideo resolutions and MAME

[bardon]

I'm in the process of building my first cabinet, and last night I was working on getting the software set up with my Radeon 9550 and 27" Samsung CRT with svideo.  I had to fight a little to get TV output enabled at first (for those having problems with ATI cards, download ATITray tools http://www.guru3d.com/article/atitraytools/189 instead of Catalyst Control Center), but once I got the display mirrored I was at least getting something on both displays.  Once I got Mamewah up and running though, I fired up a test game, and noticed that the display on the TV looked like crap compared to what was on the regular 17" PC monitor I also had connected to the card.  Now I understand that the TV is going to run at a lower resolution than a monitor, but it was at the point on BombJack that there was almost no detail at all that was discernible on the sprites.  Were things really that bad on the old arcade cabinets?  Maybe years of playing MAME games on a monitor have gotten me used to up-rezed games, but there has to be a way to get things looking a little better on a TV output.

Since I gather that a lot of people have used svideo and CRTs for cabinets, are there any suggestions on how to get the "best" output from MAME?  Anything that should be tweaked in the emu/frontend configuration, or perhaps in the graphics drivers, that might improve the performance.  I believe all the games are configured to run at an automatic resolution, so perhaps setting a fixed output resolution for the TV?  I'll also see if I can find a decent calibration pattern/procedure for the TV-is there anything else that might help tweak the TV settings for use as an arcade monitor? 

Thanks for the help!

Chris

[TheManuel]

To make the best out of your TV-out image, find and set the following in your MAME ini file:
video  ddraw
hardwarestretch  0
sitchresolutions  1

This will give you the sharpest image possible but by eliminating hardware stretch, most games will not fill the entire screen.
To work around this, you should create custom resolutions (which I don't know how to do with ATI cards as my post in this forum shows) that best fit the original resolution of the game.  Of course, very low resolutions will not work so you will have to specify the exact double for some.
For example, Capcom's CPS1/2/3 games like Street Fighter look great in 384x448.  The 448 vertical resolution is twice the orginal of 224.  This will fill the entire screen without hardware stretching.  I urge you to try it.
In MAME, you can set your custom resolution in the ini file of each game or driver as follows:
resolution0 384x448@60

If you can post a picture of the image showing your complains, this might help others suggest whether you have a problem or if everything looks normal.

[Ummon]

I don't think ATI ever had a feature like Nvidia's forceware. However, I wasn't able to create custom resolutions for reasons uknown to me.

[TheManuel]

I've read you have to use powerstrip or other third party tools but have not gotten into it yet.

[bardon]

I tried running mame with the ddraw option, which seemed to help a little, but some adjustment on the TV and video card helped a lot.  I set the ATI card to output in "Video Mode", and then adjusted the contrast, brightness etc on the TV using a couple of different games.  I think I just picked a bad game to start with-Street Fighter looks fine, it was just the sprites in Bombjack that looked pretty crappy.  I'll see if I can grab some images to post to see whether more tweaking would help. 

I tried setting the resolution on the command line though, and I couldn't really see a big difference between that res and what MAME autoselected.  That might just be because it's tricky to compare without being able to see both side by side, so if it's not that dramatic, then I might just leave it as is. 

The sitchresolutions doesn't seem to exist in either the mamewah mame ini file or as a command line option to Mame.  Could it be called something else? 

Either way, I think things are already vastly improved over the first attempt, but there's still a lot of configuration to be done to get this cabinet software set up. 

[TheManuel]

I'll try your video mode suggestion as well.
What did this do for you?

The problem with MAME selecting resolutions for you is that for many games, the image will not fill the screen and/or you will get the wrong aspect ratio.  Maybe on the game you tried it was fine.

I think switchresolutions is actually switchres but you would have noticed that.  From the command line, run mame -cc and this will create a new ini file with all the parameters (backup your ini file first).

[bardon]

I didn't notice any of the games that I tried running at strange aspect ratios, but it could also be a subtle change.  Can you think of anything that might usually show up distorted on an automatic resolution setting?

I noticed that setting video mode in ATITray eliminated some of the flicker I was getting on the TV, as well as fixing the position on the screen a little.  The picture was being cut off at the top of the screen before, and now it's being cut off at the bottom (albeit significantly less).  Is there a fine adjustment for screen position/size in the emulator, or do I have to rely on the TV out card? 

[TheManuel]

Any horizontal games that do not fill the screen entirely and the gap horizontal gap is not proportional to the vertical will have the incorrect aspect ratio.  When I run Street Fighter with automatic resolution, the game is run at 800x600 (actally 400x300 doubled but that is another story) and almost fills the screen horizontally since original horiz resolution is 384.  Scaled to 2x, it becomes 768 so the gap is 32 pixels or 4%.
However, the games original vertical resolution is 224 which works out to 448 double but the screen is being rendered at 600 pixles and the gap is 152 pixles tall or 25%.  This results in the screen being squished vertically and the characters looking like they did not diet before the fight (Street Fighter the Later Years, anyone?).

MAME provides for some real-time screen adjustments by hitting ~ during emulation but I don't think those settings get saved and I imagine this is done on software so I don't know if it degrades the image but you could give it a shot.  However, by selecting an appropriate resolution for each game, you will avoid that problem altogether. 

I found on the web how to create custom resolutions for ATI cards by modifying the registry (simply adding resolutions without screwing existing ones).  It will take me a few days of playing with this but once I have it down I'll make a little write-up on this forum for the benefit of fellow S-video users.  My goal is to get get correct aspect ratio, fill the screen as much as possible and avoid hardware stretching (the scaling is done on the TV-out chip for much better results)

[Ummon]

Actually, I meant I wasn't able to add modes with the nVidia forceware.

Anyways, I think what you're doing with the registry and ati cards is the same as soft15 does fairly automatically, and could do as specifically if you entered user modes. Soft15 is really just an interface to the registry.

As for use with a tv, I thought s-video or component were just run at a flat mode - same as one would with, say, ArcadeOS on an arcade monitor - of which all games are forced to.

[TheManuel]

As for use with a tv, I thought s-video or component were just run at a flat mode - same as one would with, say, ArcadeOS on an arcade monitor - of which all games are forced to.

Agreed.  The NTSC format is fixed for vertical resolution and refresh rate to 480 interlaced 60Hz.
However, by specifying custome resolutions, the scaling is done somewhere in the TV-out chip or elsewhere in the video card with not much noticeable softening of the picture.
If you use hardware stretch instead, the picture looks more blurry.
If you do neither, then you don't get the correct aspect ratio in most games