Television underscan

[jdiggy]

Athlon xp 3200, WinXP pro, radeon x800, mame32ui, outputing via s-video to composite connection on 27" crt tv (via s-video to composite connector, yes composite not component).  The picture quality looks great.  The only problem that I have is that there is always a black bar at the bottom of the screen.  The black bar is not present when sending another signal to the tv via the composite (I have tested it with N64 system).  Is there anyway to stretch the vertical output without adjusting from the service menu such as via powerstrip or soft 15?  I'm new to this scene and all help is appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[MonMotha]

The control panel provided by your drivers will sometimes have an option to adjust the overscan/underscan amount on the TV output.  Ideally, one would crank it all the way to as overscanned as it gets, since that tends to disable the downscale and improve visual quality greatly (though it also chops off quite a bit of picture on your average TV).

[jdiggy]

So does that mean that the best option is to set full overscan and then adjust picture in service menu?

[MonMotha]

That would in theory get you the best picture but is also probably the most amount of work.  Unfortunately, the TV output on most PC video cards sucks, so you'll never be able to get anything really "good" looking out of it, but full overscan + adjustments on the TV should be as good as it'll get.