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New Video
New Video
Since its inception 9 years ago, MAME's video system has defaulted to
a mode where it tries to change resolutions on you. And since the
first port of the core to Windows 5 years ago, it has defaulted to
using your graphics card to stretch the video to that resolution.
I'm sure a lot of you out there have taken a lot of time to tweak the
current set of video options to make them work the way you like. But
every once in a while, you need to take a step back and re-evaluate
the situation. The current video system has been in place for 5 years
now without much substantial change. And with the recent rewrite,
you're almost certainly going to want to rethink the way you have
things configured.
At the highest level, there are really three different ways you can
configure the new system. Placing yourself into one of these three
categories will help you get the initial settings right. From there,
you can tweak with the settings to figure out what works best.
Category 1: Bells and whistles. People who fall into this category
would include anyone with a modern system and a decent video card
(decent in this context means at least 16MB of VRAM and built in the
last 5 years or so -- we're not talking cutting edge here). Any decent
video card will be able to render the simple MAME graphics at pretty
much any resolution without breaking a sweat. Configure your desktop
to the video mode you want (preferably something high like 1024x768
or greater with a high refresh rate, unless you are running on a
fixed-mode LCD, in which case just match what your LCD panel is),
and tell MAME to leave the resolution alone. In this day and age,
there is little reason to switch resolutions at all, unless you
fall into Category 3, below. In this mode, you will have full access
to artwork options, and you'll get your artwork scaled to full
resolution and with full alpha blending effects. Vector games will
look crisp, you can use decent fonts, and you can see a whole lot
more of the world when using the graphics/tilemap viewer. This mode
uses Direct3D, so you should configure yourself like this:
Category 3: Anal video mode types. These are the guys who have
generally built their own cabinets and set them up with a CRT display
where they have several dozen carefully hand-tweaked video modes that
approximate the original video modes the games ran at. They want MAME
to pick that hand-tweaked mode and use it, drawing one pixel on the
screen for each pixel in the original game. They don't give a whit
about artwork or anything other than the raw pixels going to the
right place. Fortunately, you can still configure MAME for this case
as well:
So, I recommend starting with these initial options and then tweaking
from there. One additional option you might want to try in
combination with the above is the -prescale option. -prescale takes
an integer parameter from 1 to 8, and specifies a magnification
amount by which the screen pixels are expanded before they are drawn
to the screen. Why is this useful? And how much of a performance
impact does it have? Well, that depends on the mode you are running
in.
Finally, you may be wondering about effects (and yes, scanlines are
an "effect"). Effects are no longer hard-coded into the system.
Rather, you can provide a PNG file in the artwork directory that will
be loaded and overlaid on top of screen bitmaps. See the description
of -effect in windows.txt for more details.