I've been using MAME on and off and recently I downloaded vmame64 and noticed that it's doing an awesome job of scaling the video output; I had never been able to get it working this good in the past so I'm not sure if some code was updated. I'm running Vista at 1680×1050 and MAME is scaling the game to fit a full-screen 4:3 area but the pixels aren't square. I'm not using any filtering and I'm using D3D and I've tried various settings. I figure that since I'm not running at the actual native resolution of the game that it'll never be perfect.

It's CPS1/2/3 and NEOGEO games that I can easily see this on. In the past I was able to get 384×224 out of my video drivers on a Sony 17" CRT monitor but has anyone had luck getting these resolutions to work on an LCD?

Thats not how lcd's work. They always and only do native resolution. Best output is to have mame do the stretching and have the output be the lcd's native resolution. Why? otherwise you have some software stretching, then some hardware stretching... Stretching a stretched image sucks.

Anyway, it isn't mame... its the monitor

> I've been using MAME on and off and recently I downloaded vmame64 and noticed
> that it's doing an awesome job of scaling the video output; I had never been
> able to get it working this good in the past so I'm not sure if some code was
> updated. I'm running Vista at 1680×1050 and MAME is scaling the game to fit a
> full-screen 4:3 area but the pixels aren't square. I'm not using any filtering
> and I'm using D3D and I've tried various settings. I figure that since I'm not
> running at the actual native resolution of the game that it'll never be perfect.
>
> It's CPS1/2/3 and NEOGEO games that I can easily see this on. In the past I was
> able to get 384×224 out of my video drivers on a Sony 17" CRT monitor but has
> anyone had luck getting these resolutions to work on an LCD?
>
>

I'm on the fence on whether or not it's MAME or the monitor. I know that correctly modifying my nvidia drivers will get me the output I want on a CRT but the Wii Virtual Console games that are straight emulations are all scaled to 480p and look perfect on my 50" LCD TV. That's NES, SNES, Genesis, PC Engine, and NEOGEO games that all look to be scaled perfectly to 480p, have no ugly filtered look and the pixels are perfectly square. On the other hand, emulated games I've downloded from Xbox Live are all windowed, usually have filtering, and the aspect looks like crap because they let you stretch it vertically and horizontally out of proportion. I'm not sure how Nintendo does it but their video emulation is pretty darn clean.

I tried to mess with my nvidia driver but my CRT (I have an LCD as primay and CRT as secondary) keeps saying 'out of sync'. In older nvidia drivers I could get it to display 384×224 easily but setting the frequency in the new nv_disp.inf file has changed and I can't get it right so I get the sync error. :(

> Thats not how lcd's work. They always and only do native resolution. Best
> output is to have mame do the stretching and have the output be the lcd's native
> resolution. Why? otherwise you have some software stretching, then some
> hardware stretching... Stretching a stretched image sucks.
>
> Anyway, it isn't mame... its the monitor
>

If the base resolution is not 4:3, when you scale it to 4:3 there is no way to make the pixels square. That's just the way it is. A 384x224 game is closer to 16:9 than it is 4:3, but the game's true AR Is 4:3, so therefore, if you're squishing those pixels into a 4:3 AR, they won't be square.

If you want less "blurring" the best setting would be use 1.) Your monitor's default resolution (1680x1050), 2.) Use your monitor's default AR (16:10), 3.) Keep AR correct in MAME options 3.) Use D3D9, 4.) Up the prescale to 4 or greater.

That's going to be as pixel perfect as you're going to get. I'm running a 1680x1050 LCD and it works absolutely fine at those settings.