Vertical game on horiz. monitor

BeagleBoy

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I've got a spare 27" monitor that I'm thinking of making into a multigame.

Anyone try running vertical games centered on a low-res 27? Obviously, I'd be losing quite a bit of resolution. Just wondering how bad it would look.
 
I'm confused. Are you saying you want to play vertical games on it while the monitor is mounted horizontally? That will work fine as long as you turn your head 90 degrees.
 
Yes, but no. I want to play the vertical games centered in the horizontal monitor. Think mame on a computer monitor.

Assuming I could make it work (probably by using mame) I want to know what an older 80's game would look like shrunk down on a low-res monitor.
 
Yes, but no. I want to play the vertical games centered in the horizontal monitor. Think mame on a computer monitor.

Assuming I could make it work (probably by using mame) I want to know what an older 80's game would look like shrunk down on a low-res monitor.

I play them regularly in that configuration on a horizontal 25" monitor and they look great. Never had anyone even really notice that they were playing it on a horizontal monitor.
 
Yep. My setup uses and ArcadeVGA card. You can also use a regular graphics card with some soft15khz software but I've never tried that. To me it's worth a few dollars to just buy the Ultimarc stuff to put it all together since it seems solid and doesn't require as much fiddling. I run Mame but it works fine with a variety of emulation software.
 
Yes, but no. I want to play the vertical games centered in the horizontal monitor. Think mame on a computer monitor.

Assuming I could make it work (probably by using mame) I want to know what an older 80's game would look like shrunk down on a low-res monitor.

since I think you are planning to use a 25in monitor and they were ogiginally made for a 19in monitor I'm pretty sure they will look fine. Probably pretty close to how they do originally on a 19in. I do know that they don't look as good full sized on a 25in because they were never designed to be on that size of monitor so you see more detail than you should and they don't look quite right.
 
since I think you are planning to use a 25in monitor and they were ogiginally made for a 19in monitor I'm pretty sure they will look fine. Probably pretty close to how they do originally on a 19in. I do know that they don't look as good full sized on a 25in because they were never designed to be on that size of monitor so you see more detail than you should and they don't look quite right.

Yeah I agree. They do seem just about right on a 25" monitor mounted horizontal but I never liked playing those old vertical games on giant 25" vertical monitors. Not so much because of the detail but because the games were designed for smaller monitors that size....so say you are playing Galaxian, on a small monitor you can see all the bad guys at once with your peripheral vision. But on a giant monitor you have to keep scanning around the screen more and it's easier to screw up.
 
That's what I was hoping to hear. Thanks!

I hear you on the ultimarc stuff. I was thinking about going the soft15KHz route, but it seemed a bit too much of a hassle, and I like the idea of being able to read the BIOS setup when necessary.

My plan is to use it for 19" vertical games, and for 25-27" horizontal games. That way, I won't have games stretched out.
 
OK how about a third option. I was thinking about doing all the same stuff, but I don't like older classics on 25" monitors. Obviously vertical games would look great, but horizontal games would run the full 25". Anyone know a setting that allows you to run a horizontal game scaled down to about 19" size? I know this would be a HUGE stretch, but it would be cool to have a 25" H monitor running 25" for newer jamma horizontal games like NBA Jam, but then use a horizontal 19" area for the classic horizontals like Crazy Climber. I think the old classics on a 25" look like crap. Hide this behind a smoked plex bezel and you could hide the borders on the monitor pretty cleanly.

I guess the other option would be to use the MAME bezel feature for those games. That would be interesting too.

Anyone ever think to do this?
 
Never thought of it myself but it seems like it could be done by tinkering with the various resolutions. It would take some work since you'd have to go through them game by game and set each one up unless you figured a way to classify them into groups and do them all at once somehow.
 
OK how about a third option. I was thinking about doing all the same stuff, but I don't like older classics on 25" monitors. Obviously vertical games would look great, but horizontal games would run the full 25". Anyone know a setting that allows you to run a horizontal game scaled down to about 19" size? I know this would be a HUGE stretch, but it would be cool to have a 25" H monitor running 25" for newer jamma horizontal games like NBA Jam, but then use a horizontal 19" area for the classic horizontals like Crazy Climber. I think the old classics on a 25" look like crap. Hide this behind a smoked plex bezel and you could hide the borders on the monitor pretty cleanly.

I guess the other option would be to use the MAME bezel feature for those games. That would be interesting too.

Anyone ever think to do this?

Totally doable -- MAME lets you manually specify the zoom amount. Pretty sure you can do it on a game-by-game basis with a little INI hacking.
 
For what it's worth, I had a multi/mame running with a horizontal mount for years but then got tired of the bastardized vertical compromise and put all those games into a separate machine, a dynamo cabinet that used to be a P.O.W. and most recently a PIGSKIN kit (remounted monitor sideways, of course).

Highly recommend using Soft15Khz program and installing a compatible video card.

For the benefit of playing scrolling shooters (Raiden, Sky Shark, etc) with the best results, I found the key setup to be:
1) enable "sync to monitor refresh"
2) enable auto frame skipping

This results in smooth, "tear"-free scrolling and best non-stuttering sound at the cost of a dropped frame once in a while (hardly noticeable, in comparison).

Hope this helps.
 
i've had good success running like this as well... arcadevga on 15" horizontal low res... most vertical games run great... i usually end up tweaking the vertical size since the horizontal games only run ~240 lines and vertical games run more (when rotated)... they go off the screen when tweaked for horizontal games...


good question about horizontal games, because i always thought they were too big as well... i'll play around with what i can but i have a feeling that you won't be able to perfectly, since the video card is putting out low res signal for that monitor, its not going to have enough lines to put, say, 100 above the picture and 100 below the picture... but because of the above reason, if you don't tweak the vertical size when going back to horizontal games, they are inevitably shorter (in physical size on the glass, but the same number of drawn lines)

hope that makes sense, then you'd have to adjust for the 25" horizontal games to bring the height back up if you want those full screen

(same will go for horizontal but thats easier to fudge in the resolution settings since the horizontal resolution can go way higher)

- gwarble
 
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