Making Mame display smaller?

[LeedsFan]

I will try to explain exactly what I want to achieve, then maybe someone can help me how to go about this.

I'm building a bartop using 15" LCD screen. However I don't want to use the full screen area as it's out of scale for the cab dimensions. I want the games to appear on the screen smaller, as if I were using a 10" or 11" monitor.

Now I've tried various methods to achieve this. I created a generic bezel for use with my games and then created a batch file using Romlister. I copied the generic bezel into a separate folder using the rom names.... but of course I forgot that the zipped folders within each archive still hold their original names. Doh! 

I tried to use the artwork files unzipped, but that didn't work either. Seems Mame will only look for zipped files in the artwork folder. Had that worked I could have unzipped the entire artwork folder then just pulled out the seperate .lay and .png files with Romlister. 

So then I tried to run Mame in windowed mode from MaLa. Now this looks fine. It automatically brings each game up in a decent sized window. I can get rid of the windowed outline by bodging with some carefully placed black tape. (Won't be able to see it on the finished cab). But of course I have to enable Mame to run in windowed mode from MaLa.... which means I get flashes of the ugly Dos box whenever I exit a game.  Unless there is a way to hide the Dos box while running in windowed mode?

I wondered if there was a way to make Windows XP itself appear on my monitor with a black border all around. I figured if I could shrink everything at source then everything else will follow suit. But I can't find anything on Google about doing that. I'm sure there's a way within Mame/MaLa to do what I want, but I just can't put my finger on what to do.

[boxman]

Does your monitor not have screen size controls? All of my monitors do apart from my HDTVs.

[LeedsFan]

Does your monitor not have screen size controls? All of my monitors do apart from my HDTVs.

Yeah, but I can't adjust it to anywhere near what I would like. I can reduce to "zero" on the scale but it only reduces the size by about an inch all round (so 0.5" border). Still too big.

[boxman]

Hmmm, sometimes monitors also have a zoom option as well as the scale ones. Other than that I have no more ideas.

To get rid of the dosbox thingy have you tried right clicking on the dosbox executable and selecting "run minimized" ?

It's been a few years since I used windows but I remember that setting was in the properties somewhere.