ARpiCADE Forums

Hi,
Can anyone point me in the right direction of how to adjust the screen size for specific games?

I've got a pi3+ connected to the raspberryjamma with arpicade 3.x installed. I have an original arcade monitor (15khz) so I've set the hdmi section of config.txt to hdmi_mode=8 (240P).

The games I'm having problems with when set to 240P are:
Donkey Kong (dkong.zip)
Fogger (frogger.zip)
Galaga (galaga.zip)
Pac-man (pacman.zip)

The problem I have is those games are skinny and stretched so I can't see the bottom third of the game. And when I say skinny, it's about quarter to a third of the screen width, but in the middle. They're fine if 480i but I don't like how shaky it is.

Thanks

What version of MAME? In .106 you can make a lot of video adjustments via the built-in MAME menu (accessed by the TAB key on a connected USB keyboard.)

Hi Kevin_S,

I've got them in .106. If you're talking about the in-game video adjustments, the only thing it lets me do is double, triple or quadruple the size. Video details shows it as the original size.

I have worked it out though, and please let me know if this is incorrect. I added the rom names to the advmame.sh file in the 'nosdl' section. It doesn't fit the whole screen, it's about half of the screen in the middle, but it's top to bottom of the screen. Which is the same as what 480i displays it as.

I first tried changing the game settings in mameinfo.txt which made the game fit the whole screen but it was too big. I couldn't see the bottom inch or so of the game. And the only setting I changed was 'rotate', which I changed from '90' to '0'.

Thanks

I forgot to add, the arcade machine is a standup. Which is a horizontal monitor (correct me if I'm wrong) and I assume that these games are meant for cocktail machines.

Those games are meant for vertically orientated screens. Essentially they will look off when running the system at 240p due to the lack of screen real estate (ie. the amount of physical lines to draw on). That is why they looked OKish when you had the system running in 480i...

As you have discovered, changing to a different version of MAME (or rendering method) can give different results but one way or another all will have some sort of issue as you don't really have space to display most rotated titles accurately.

Basically, if the original game res was 320x240 on a vertical monitor you need to fit 320 lines of information on 240 lines to display it on a horizontal monitor at 240p (so instantly 80 lines must be discarded or combined with other lines). Depending on the original game resolution some will look better than others when rotated on a 240p screen.

It may be worth trying a Retroarch based MAME for rotated titles as Retroarch lets you adjust the picture however you like.

I thought that might be the case.

Which mame version is retroarch?

Thanks

MAME 078 is a Retroarch core (lr-MAME2003-plus), FBA is also an RA core.

I’ll give that a go.

Thanks Dee2er.