MameWah Questions: DOS and Veritcal Support

[Superdude]

I looked at the offical MameWah site and seen this:
MAMEWAH is an ArcadeOS inspired frontend for DOS / Windows commandline M.A.M.E. (NOT MAME32) under Windows 98/ME/2000/XP. MAMEWAH is designed to hide the Windows environment and also to be controlled purely by arcade controllers (joysticks and buttons). Of course, the perfect place for MAMEWAH, is on a home arcade cabinet! (Go on ... build one!).

1) Can you run MameWah if your operating system is DOS?  (IE No windows of any kind)

2) Does it support vertical monitors?

Thanks

[Howard_Casto]

No
No

thanks for playing (copyright planetjay 1984)

[Minwah]

No
No

thanks for playing (copyright planetjay 1984)

Thanks Howard

Vertical monitor support is not built into MAMEWAH, it is possible however...if you have a video card with rotation features (eg Radeon) or have some portrait software (eg PivotPro).

If you have either of the above, then you can design a layout with a resolution like 480x640, 600x800 etc.  I have only tried this briefly so I'd be interested to hear how it goes if you decide to try it...it seemed to work pretty well tho

[Superdude]

Thanks guys for your answers!  

[rampy]

Minwah,

FWIW I'd like to place a vote for native rotation in mamewah... if you can ever get around to it (and if it's not programatically a pain)

Even if it wasn't a full on rotate teh whole thing... more like a  rotate option for each element in the skinner....

*Shrug*  The radeon drivers for the AVGA card only do rotation in win2k/xp and in this instance the machine is too anemic for that platform.

rampy

[Howard_Casto]

Minwah,

FWIW I'd like to place a vote for native rotation in mamewah... if you can ever get around to it (and if it's not programatically a pain)

Even if it wasn't a full on rotate teh whole thing... more like a  rotate option for each element in the skinner....

*Shrug*  The radeon drivers for the AVGA card only do rotation in win2k/xp and in this instance the machine is too anemic for that platform.

rampy

i've discussed this with minwah, peter and pacmanfan.  

The thing is software rotation is so slow that it wouldn't be worth it.  (That is until one of use finds a better solution.  We are all working on solutions.) I certainly can't speak for minwah, but myself I don't have any need for rotation, so it's not at my top priority right now.

Peter is the only exception as rotation is sorta built in for shockwave apps.  Lucky stiff.  

[rampy]

I understand that software rotation is slow... that's why I'd wanna avoid pivot pro/ et al...

I was just blue-skying that instead of turning the whole display individual elements could be rotated ...

I understand that it's not a high priority for FE, authors unless they already have a vertical setup... I was just hoping that an uberskinner would allow for the rotation of elements (of course the performance of which would depend on how the display engine is written... but i digress

Worse case scenario a user can skin a narrow mamewah, make the element sizes vertical size and use a photochop script to rotate al the images... That only leaves rotating the text/list boxes up to some industrious FE author
*shrug*

Rampy

[Howard_Casto]

Well the probablem with that is mamewah is written in vb and unless he's using another display library on top of vb, rotation of objects aren't supported for vb, period.  Also they aren't supported on any visual studio langauge, for that matter.  Directx and opengl are the only popular libraries that can easily rotate objects.  So needless to say pmf and myself have a better shot at this point, but we are both running into misc issues that make it not worth it. His already has rotation included, but it's sorta slow and he's having some random problems.  I actually have the beginnings of rotation in mine too, but it's equally bad (and incomplete) so I'm not going to activate the code yet.  

So it'd doable sorta.  But to be honest your better off buying a good video card that supports rotation.  No matter how optimized any of us can get it, software rotation will always give slightly poorer performance.  

[Minwah]

I had a good look into vertical orientation a long time ago - as Howard said, it is pretty difficult using VB

A thought:  Software rotation should be OK for MAMEWAH itself since it is not too demanding.  If the rotation software could be stopped upon launching an emu, it would not be a problem.  I don't know if this happens anyway when the resolution changes to a normal horizontal one, or if it is otherwise possible to stop the rotation software while the emu is running ?

[rampy]

Thanks for answering guys...

HC --> the vid card supports it, when paired with the "right" operating system =P

Minwah... Ok thanks, I understand.  

Rampy

[Howard_Casto]

I had a good look into vertical orientation a long time ago - as Howard said, it is pretty difficult using VB

A thought:  Software rotation should be OK for MAMEWAH itself since it is not too demanding.  If the rotation software could be stopped upon launching an emu, it would not be a problem.  I don't know if this happens anyway when the resolution changes to a normal horizontal one, or if it is otherwise possible to stop the rotation software while the emu is running ?

Pivot pro always worked great for lazarus and rd, and since mamewah is the same sort of animal, I see no reason why you couldn't get decent performance using it.  Also these software rotation programs only effect window gdi apps so your emulators should uneffected.  

[Minwah]

Pivot pro always worked great for lazarus and rd, and since mamewah is the same sort of animal, I see no reason why you couldn't get decent performance using it.  Also these software rotation programs only effect window gdi apps so your emulators should uneffected.  

Great, that's the part I was unsure of.

[AlanS17]

I used that Pivot software once in a Win2k environment and it worked very well. I didn't notice any performance hits. I wasn't trying to run anything major, but nonetheless ti worked well for me. For a basic frontend I wouldn't be concerned.