Vertical setup & horizontal games

[KillerCroc]

I'm using the ArPiCade vertical menu setup (Pac-Man theme) and I can see some horizontal games have been made to work vertically, like 10-Yard Fight. This is awesome.

How will you go about deciding which games to add next re: horizontal titles?

[dee2eR]

Running horizontal titles on vertical monitors seems to be a love or hate thing. Even the people that like it have differing opinions on how to set them up, some games look good stretched to vertical, some look awful like that and look a lot better in the correct 4:3 ratio with black borders. I'm mainly trying to make it easy for people to make the system do what ever they want easily, to that end I focus on the Vanilla releases.

If you want to try adding some yourself, any horizontal game that wasn't too wide originally to fit at least most of the horizontal resolution on 240 lines (or 256@56 or 288@50) should work pretty well on a vertical monitor eg. Moon Patrol works well. Once you need to run 480i to fit the picture on the screen properly the results are not as nice (still OK as long as you don't mind interlacing). Depending on the emulator used you can have a lot of control over the image size or very little to none at all, so it can take a little testing to find whats works well.

EDIT: sorry just realised you were having trouble accessing the SD card you got with the system. Suggesting you try to add games yourself seems silly now...

[KillerCroc]

Thank you for the info. I'm going to try playing around with a few titles; it looks as though I can now access the ROM / associated folders on the SD card, so this might work.

If I add horizontal titles, I'll simply re-run the rom list generator, and they should show up on the vertical game menu - is that right?

[dee2eR]

Thats right, don't forget if you're using the default all games list to also combine the arcade and console gamelists after you have rescanned the roms.

[KillerCroc]

Okay! This worked out well, for the most part.

I can't seem to tweak too much in the video portion of the MAME menus, though. Any suggestions on "common" parameters people use in an attempt to stretch a horizontal game on a vertical screen?

[dee2eR]

For advmame edit the launcher ( /boot/launchers/advmame.sh ), find this bit:
#we don't want full width stretching for a vertical game
if [ $rot == 90 ] || [ $rot == 270 ]; then
export -n SDL_DISPMANX_IGNORE_RATIO=1
fi

and comment (#) it out. A bit further down in the file will be a similar bit, hash that out too (although it won't matter if you miss the second bit). This should stretch vertical games to fill the screen, at least for advmame.

This particular trick will only work for advmame. For the other MAME versions it will vary, I think you can achieve it only editing the launchers though.

[KillerCroc]

This worked perfectly. Thank you!