Narrow Game or Game in Half??

[raycade]

Hi,

Although my experiences with the ARpiCADE is quite good, I discovered that some games are a weird in their presentations.
While most of the other games are ok. I'm running everything lowres 240p-ish...

How can I fix those games?

ARpiCADE - Game too narrow:


ARpiCADE - Game in half? (Timber)

[dee2eR]

I think the Timber issue comes from running in 240p only mode. Timber originally ran at 480i so there's literally only half as many lines as you need to display it fully at 240p.

Not sure what the other game is offhand or which version of MAME it's in however I would recommend trying it in a different version of MAME, each version of MAME has it's quirks. MAME 078 may be good for the these games as Retroarchs scaling can be set however you like. If it's in MAME 172 (or newer) it may be worth having a look in the sliders part of the MAME menu - it can adjust the size of the image a bit.

[raycade]

Hi,

I figured the narrowing only happens with AdvanceMame.

I finally got it working. It is a bit weird actually.

I have to set the attract menu to hi-res interlaced. Then suddenly AdvanceMame is spread across the screen.
Verticals like Pengo, Pac Man, 1942 are suddenly ok-ish. Not perfect but playable.
A vertical setup will fix that.

What I find weird is that the resolution of the attractmode laucher menu is affecting the resolution and refresh rates of certain games.

I have a tri-sync that can handle all sorts of resolutions and frequencies. It would be nice if the game can switch to it’s native resolution and frequency.

[dee2eR]

As far as I'm aware you can't set a resolution for Attract-Mode. It just runs in the system resolution (as set in config.txt).

The resolution you boot in effects what res games play at, via the logic in the launchers and the resSwitch script. You're still stuck with the quirks of whatever emulator you're using though. As close as is possible on Pi hardware the games will run at their original res and frequency - it tends to work best on MAME 0.172 (or newer) as the sync to refresh options don't exist in the earlier MAME versions (assuming the original refresh rate for the game doesn't quite match the output to the monitor).

480i is low res interlaced, unless you've added one there isn't a high res interlaced option in ARpiCADE.

I think I figured out some refresh rate tricks on Pi4 yesterday, still some experimenting to do but if it turns out as good as it looks so far I will back-port the changes to Pi3 as well (assuming I can). Would prefer not to go into this further while I'm still experimenting...

Tri-res is a complicated one... I don't have a tri-res monitor so I can't try ideas for tri-res very easily. Also most monitors are not tri-res so if it was set up for tri-res most people would have issues (although having an option similar to the high res options wouldn't hurt unless accidentally picked...). Same issue with medium res, I just don't have the monitor hardware to try it... pretty sure the Pi could do it though.