Mame resolution question (sorry purists)

jehuie

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Ok I hate to post this here but I think it's to basic of a question and nobody over an arcadecontrols has tried to help yet....

So I'm putting together a Mame cabinet for a friend (and it's become a huge headache). Anyway, I'm running on Win XP, ArcadeVGA card, Hyperspin, and all works well EXCEPT.....

The resolutions are all screwed up. I tried using a couple different resolution tools to set them and they seem to work. They created nice .ini files and they appear to have correct values in them. But the games still are displaying at funky resolutions.

My test case is Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. The resolution according to Maws says it should be set at 320x224. If I run it at that or one of the nearby supported resolutions, it draws a perfect box around the edge of the screen and it looks great. But when the game starts, it's very small. There is a black border around the entire thing that's like 4 inches wide.

I've looked and looked and looked and looked at the options but I can't figure it out. What am I missing?

Thanks guys!
 
I know that there is a "full screen" setting that can be used in mame in order to keep the image from being "windowed". You might want to look into that...
 
Thanks. It's running in full screen mode. Here's some pictures for visual aid:

Here's the promising screen with the white box around it properly displayed (although slightly cut off)
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And here's the sad sad version once it starts to play.
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To eliminate any possibility of conflict (IE using Hyperspin) download mameui (if you're already using it then use a FRESH install)and manually invoke a game. If it works you know it's a config issue. If it doesn't work then I'd assume it's something with the video driver causing this.
 
Yeah, good idea....I'll go grab Mameui and see what happens. The display I showed pics of is from command line (not going through Hyperspin). I just ran it from the C: Prompt and manually typed in the resolution option. I also deleted the mame configuration file so that I could eliminate any strange configurations in there. It should be a plane vanilla install.

But yeah, I'll go give that try.
 
And just to elminate this as a chance... are you using the correct output port on the ArcadeVGA? I know one is setup purely for arcade while the other port is set for PC use.
 
im in the same boat! id offer my .02 cents, but thats not my thing. my neighbor is the computer guy and im the arcade guy

i did email him this link... maybe he will read it!
 
thing is, I know a forum where they might be able to help as they're some of the smartest mame people I know... but I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post it since they deal with roms/chds/etc for mame as well.


edit, I'll send a PM as that will be safer.
 
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im in the same boat! id offer my .02 cents, but thats not my thing. my neighbor is the computer guy and im the arcade guy

i did email him this link... maybe he will read it!

I think there might be a hardware stretch switch that needs to be added to the mame.exe command line.

I also seem to recall something about telling mame what kind of monitor your using...

As an example, "mame.exe pacman -monitor arcade"

I'm pretty sure thats what the command like should look like. Its been a while since I had to manually configure Mame though.

Matt
 
It looks like mame is squashing the game to play on a vertical monitor (the aspect ratio seems out on the game, but not on the information page)

What are the rotation settings in MAME.INI or ini\mwalk.ini?

Also you probably want to make sure you have -switchres and -video ddraw specified in the command line for MAME.


EDIT:
I just ran it from the C: Prompt and manually typed in the resolution option. I also deleted the mame configuration file so that I could eliminate any strange configurations in there. It should be a plane vanilla install.

Oops just saw this.
 
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i used to have the same problem, i dont remember how the hell i fixed it though! i think in my case the computer didnt have the proper graphics drivers installed or was too old. havent had a problem since and have built multiple MAME cabs...
 
Well here is my 2 cents...

What kind of ArcadeVGA card are you using? Reason why I ask is that, it comes with a tool AVRES to use, and can auto-set your mame resolutions...

Which is all fine and dandy. HOWEVER. the newer ARcadeVGA 3000. Does not support some of the resolutions, that the older ArcadeVga card supports.

For example. I had an older ArcadeVGA AGP graphics card. I use GameEX as the frontend and used AVRES(from Ultimarcs page) to autoset the resolutions for all of my mame games so it would be correct for this card.

For example: Avres tool, would set games such as Mortal Kombat at 400x256. So it would play full screen using an arcade monitor. Well I later upgraded my system and slapped a new ArcadeVGA 3000 PCI-E In. Ran the AVRES, and it would put some games in the correct res, and others not. So I did some digging and found out that. The new card doesn't support exactly the same resolutions as the old one. And Ultimarc never updated AVRES to refect this...
So I looked deeper and Low and behold. The new 3000 will not support 400x256 but it supports 401x256. But I didn't know this, so everytime I went to play MK, it would put it in a small screen such as what you are seeing. So I went in manually and edited the INI file for Mortal Kombat to 401x256. And it works great.

Sure wish Ultimarc had updated or created another version of AVRES to reflect this...

Also these are the settings you need in your mame.ini for it to use your Arcade monitor properly:

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

#
# DIRECTDRAW-SPECIFIC OPTIONS
#
hwstretch 0 <-------MUST

And also under:

#
# FULL SCREEN OPTIONS
#
triplebuffer 0
switchres 1 <-------MUST
full_screen_brightness 1.0
full_screen_contrast 1.0
full_screen_gamma 1.0


That is what I have and it works great. But like I said, depending on your VGA card version, you may have to play around with the individual .ini files of the games, to get the correct resolution....

Good luck!!!


l
 
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