Vertical Games on an Arcade Monitor

[savj14]

Before I get into anything here is my current setup:

- 27" WG D9200 Arcade Monitor
- ArcadeVGA
- Mame32 v0.106

I'm not a huge fan of the black borders when playing Vertical games like Pacman. I have tried hardware stretching but it looks terrible and defeats the purpose of using an Arcade monitor.

I have also heard of using in game Bezels, but that just seems to make the game too small. But I am thinking I don't have this setup correctly in Mame, as the image is not completely filling the monitor. What should I set the resolution to in Mame when using Pacman as an example?

Are there any other options besides hardware stretching, black borders, or bezels for Vertical games? 

[NOP]

just to get the stupid questions out of the way, i assume you're using your monitor in horizontal position and are trying to play vertical games on it? 

have you done all the setup instructions here:
http://www.ultimarc.com/avgainst.html

[savj14]

just to get the stupid questions out of the way, i assume you're using your monitor in horizontal position and are trying to play vertical games on it? 

have you done all the setup instructions here:
http://www.ultimarc.com/avgainst.html

Yes and Yes. I have been playing with different resolutions for Pacman, Frogger, Contra, Donkey Kong, etc. Seems like the best result I can find is by using 448x384.

Is the best resolution for these games or should I be using something different?

[NOP]

well, according to MAME, pacman's native resolution says: rotate="90" width="288" height="224"

but with the rotate in there, it's actually 288 high by 224 wide, or at least that makes the most sense to me since it's a vertical game.

Could you 2x the resolution and set it to 576x448?  Can you monitor do 576 in height?  (since it's a horizontal monitor and that's the Y axis for the game)
[wow, this stuff is like thinking about time travel]

That'll still give you some vertical bars on the side, but should at least fill the screen out more and give you the same aspect ratio.

i admit i'm pretty much talking out ---my bottom--- here, since my system is already a vertical monitor and only does resolutions in the pac-man/frogger era anyway, so mine just worked.

[garnerb350]

savj14....I think you are going through the same thing me and Bender and a few others are dealing with...We have horizonal monitors and we want the "Dead Space" to be covered...Do a search for Electronic Bezel...

Basiclly what i ended up doing was that took all the vertical artwork and changed the bezels to where they would cover everything and not lose the size of the actual game when i was playing...

Regretfully, this is a work in progress...( busy with other things), but in a nutshell basiclly whatyou do is take photoshop and modify the actual png file that is your artwork...

[krick]

Basiclly what i ended up doing was that took all the vertical artwork and changed the bezels to where they would cover everything and not lose the size of the actual game when i was playing...

Regretfully, this is a work in progress...( busy with other things), but in a nutshell basiclly whatyou do is take photoshop and modify the actual png file that is your artwork...

Why go through all that trouble?

Fire up the game...    TAB -> Video Options -> View -> Cropped

That does exactly what you want.

With the new support for vertical.ini, you should be able to make these settings for all vertical games at one shot.

[Ummon]

Or...you could not see them (the, um, 'borders'). One's conceptions are indications of the boundary conditions of their mind. Although, if you hadn't bitched, I might not've known of the crop feature relative to bezels. Hmm. Maybe I'll check it out.

[savj14]

Basiclly what i ended up doing was that took all the vertical artwork and changed the bezels to where they would cover everything and not lose the size of the actual game when i was playing...

Regretfully, this is a work in progress...( busy with other things), but in a nutshell basiclly whatyou do is take photoshop and modify the actual png file that is your artwork...

Why go through all that trouble?

Fire up the game...    TAB -> Video Options -> View -> Cropped

That does exactly what you want.

With the new support for vertical.ini, you should be able to make these settings for all vertical games at one shot.

Excellent, I'll give this a shot and see how it turns out. How do you go about doing this all in one shot for all Vertical games though? Sorry I just upgraded from Mame v0.106, so there's quite a bit new for me here.

[krick]

Why go through all that trouble?

Fire up the game...    TAB -> Video Options -> View -> Cropped

That does exactly what you want.

With the new support for vertical.ini, you should be able to make these settings for all vertical games at one shot.

Excellent, I'll give this a shot and see how it turns out. How do you go about doing this all in one shot for all Vertical games though? Sorry I just upgraded from Mame v0.106, so there's quite a bit new for me here.

There was an ini option to crop artwork in mame 106.
Just go into your mame.ini and set...

artwork_crop            1

I think it works the same way as the TAB menu option in the new artwork system, but I'm not positive.


vertical.ini (and horizont.ini) is only supported on the latest version of MAME (0.132).

All you need to do is make a new file called vertical.ini and copy any settings from your mame.ini that you want and change for vertical games.

The setting is still the same in MAME 132...

artwork_crop            1

However, now that I think about it, you probably don't need a dedicated vertical.ini in this situation.  Just modify the setting in the normal mame.ini file.

[savj14]

I tried using a Cropped Bezel with Ms.Pacman and it would not display. If I switched to Full it would no problem, but the game was too small of course.

I am trying this using Mame32 v132. Any reason why the Cropped Bezel will not show up but the Full Bezel will?

[krick]

Are you using directdraw instead of Direct3D?  I think for proper resolutions on an arcade monitor, you should be running DirectDraw.  Check out newvideo.txt in the mame/docs folder and see if anything there helps.

[savj14]

Are you using directdraw instead of Direct3D?  I think for proper resolutions on an arcade monitor, you should be running DirectDraw.  Check out newvideo.txt in the mame/docs folder and see if anything there helps.

I'm definitely using DirectDraw, Hardware Stretch unchecked, Resolutions to fit checked. I'll post my INI files here and see if there's anything noticeable.

[savj14]

I removed some of the unnecessary things.

mame.ini
# CORE PERFORMANCE OPTIONS
#
autoframeskip             1
frameskip                 0
seconds_to_run            0
throttle                  1
sleep                     1
speed                     1.0
refreshspeed              1

#
# CORE ROTATION OPTIONS
#
rotate                    1
ror                       0
rol                       0
autoror                   0
autorol                   0
flipx                     0
flipy                     0

#
# CORE ARTWORK OPTIONS
#
artwork_crop              1
use_backdrops             1
use_overlays              1
use_bezels                1

#
# CORE SCREEN OPTIONS
#
brightness                1.0
contrast                  1.0
gamma                     1.0
pause_brightness          0.65

#
# CORE VECTOR OPTIONS
#
antialias                 1
beam                      1.0
flicker                   0

#
# CORE SOUND OPTIONS
#
sound                     1
samplerate                48000
samples                   1
volume                    0
volume_adjust             1

#
# CORE MISC OPTIONS
#
bios                     
cheat                     1
hiscore                   1
skip_gameinfo             1
confirm_quit              0

#
# WINDOWS PERFORMANCE OPTIONS
#
priority                  0
multithreading            0

#
# WINDOWS VIDEO OPTIONS
#
video                     ddraw
numscreens                1
window                    0
maximize                  1
keepaspect                1
prescale                  1
effect                    none
waitvsync                 0
syncrefresh               1

#
# DIRECTDRAW-SPECIFIC OPTIONS
#
hwstretch                 0

#
# DIRECT3D-SPECIFIC OPTIONS
#
d3dversion                9
filter                    1

#
# PER-WINDOW VIDEO OPTIONS
#
aspect                    auto
resolution                auto
screen0                   \\.\DISPLAY1
aspect0                   auto
resolution0               auto
view0                     auto
screen1                   auto
aspect1                   auto
resolution1               auto
view1                     auto
screen2                   auto
aspect2                   auto
resolution2               auto
view2                     auto
screen3                   auto
aspect3                   auto
resolution3               auto
view3                     auto

#
# FULL SCREEN OPTIONS
#
triplebuffer              1
switchres                 1
full_screen_brightness    1.0
full_screen_contrast      1.0
full_screen_gamma         1.0

#
# WINDOWS SOUND OPTIONS
#
audio_latency             2
sound_resync              0

[Ummon]

I thought I remember it being this way from a ways back, and I just tried it out in 131.3 : bezels only work with D3D. (Just put the zip from here - or a torrent file, cos they're large and there's a fuckload of them - in your artwork folder.) I know they used to work, but probly not in native res mode, and I think the .lay file format has changed.