Adjusted Scanline effects

[Daskal]

Hi All! Here is a small tip if you want to have an arcade style look on an LCD or CRT monitor. Mame has some pretty neat and easy to handle visual effects, like the various scanlines etc. However when applying scanlines the screen image will inevitable suffer from brightnes loss. You can try to adjust it manually afterwards via the sliders but for me it never really looked right that way. But - I think there is a workaround for scanlies.

I figured how about adjusting the brightness of the scanlines only and not tinkering with the sliders at all. Since the visal effect files (in the artwork subfolder) are plain PNG files its really easy to play and experiment with them. All you need is a photo/picture editor - open up the scanline file you want to use and adjust the brightness of the file and save it under a different name. For my monitor it looks like the best way is to increase the brightess of the scanlines by 100% - this way the final image in Mame will have scanlines and a proper brightness and contrast at the same time. Here are some pictures for comparison:







I have attached the adjusted version of scanlines that I use if you wanna give it a try, but you can easily tailor the standard one to your needs via Photoshop etc.

[DillonFoulds]

40 views and no comments yet. :S

I'd love to test this out, but my mame's on an arcade monitor, sorry bud!

[Ummon]

This looks like a remarkable epiphany. However, on my 27" monitor, I see no effect. Or maybe hardly any - perhaps because the relatively course dot pitch on it contrasts with the effect, though with regular 'scanlines', I can see an effect. Hmmm.

I'll have to pull up my PC CRT...

[Daskal]

40 views and no comments yet. :S

I'd love to test this out, but my mame's on an arcade monitor, sorry bud!

Same here


but still I think it helps quite a lot with 19-21" LCD monitors.

[Ummon]

Okay, I tried this out a bit on my hi-res PC CRT (Dell P1130, capable of 2054x1680 or whatever; native is 1280x1024). Because they were so fine, I could barely see the lines using the scanlines100b file. So I tried out the scanrez2 and SailorSat's triadsl. To alter them, I used Arcsoft Photostudio.

scanrez2: brightness and contrast at 27 (from 0). Looks good for graphics-saturated images, though perhaps a little light. '23' might be better. (I had to start from scratch of course, when re-doing a file, as there is no 'data' recorded, obviously.)

triadsl: b/c = 35 (though a little higher might be better for some games). Might be better for black background games. Alternatively (at '35'), could be good for graphics-saturated images if you want stronger lines.


caveats:

- resolution-dependent on your monitor, ie: the native res of your monitor may best display the image without artifacting.

- the lines 'lining up' are still 'game dependent'...though less apparent in some cases.


I kinda prefer the scanrez2 (particularly as I prefer the scanlines that appear natively on a 25/27" monitor). Also, I got the best results on my 27" multisync at 1024x768. I think one reason is the courser dot pitch naturally smooths things out, whereas with the prescale at '2' in MAME over-emphasizes the fine dot pitch of my Dell, and setting the prescale to '1' makes it look like watery pastels....although, I have to mention this monitor has that issue where the whole display field is over-saturated similar to an LCD. Might look a bunch better, at least on the latter aspect, with a truly dark CRT.