How to make DEMUL play in proper aspect ratio?

[hansolo77]

DEMUL is the emulator to use when you want to run Sammy Atomiswave and Naomi/2 arcade systems. I had my system all setup great, then I decided to do a full upgrade. All of my roms are being updated, and the extras. I'm also working on upgrading the emulators that run them. So here I am, upgrading DEMUL from 0.57 to 0.582 WIP. At first, the emulator wanted to run using the DX11 graphics plugin, but it was so slow and choppy I decided to try and downgrade it to DX10. A huge improvement! Now when I play a ROM in the window mode, it has the proper aspect ratio, but when I go full screen, it's squished in, with a tremendous amount of black on either side. I'm talking 4:3 in widowed and almost 4:1 full screen. I checked the settings and I can't for the life of me figure out what's wrong. If I set it to 16:9, the image fills the screen (except for some games have a little of black edge on the sides) but everything is pixelated like it wasn't meant for that resolution. If I use stretch, it removes the black edges and fills completely 16:9, again with the bad pixelation. The only other option is the 4:3 mode which, as I said, is squished more than it should be. What should I do?

[u-man]

You need a grafics-card that support DX11, otherwise you will get that choppy stuff. I just tried Crazy Taxi and it works. My Display has a 1920x1200 pixels. Video Mode in Demul is set to VGA.

4:3 would be correct and I wonder why its squished if you go fullscreen. I also remember that on the very first start of a rom, the game will be slow, but if you start it again, it will start with "normal" speed (some kind of caching needs to be done). This still dont explain your strange behaviour. Check your Demul .ini files.

Sorry that I cant help you better, but this is not normal behaviour of Demul. I guess this all happens outside of GameEx, as you try to configure Demul.

[hansolo77]

Yeah I actually removed everything from the previous version and tried to start from scratch as a starting point. DX11 works, but it is too slow and choppy. DX10 works great though (I think my card is only DX10). I looked at the ini files, the only thing that almost was a possibility, was the gpu ini, as it had a setting called "aspect ratio". Unfortunately, changing it was doing the same thing as if I was chosing it in the Demul menus directly.

[u-man]

What if you manually switch to fullscreen with ALT+ENTER?

What is your native Display Resolution?

What kind of Display do you use, is it a HDTV or a PC-Monitor?

You could use a solution, like in this thread: http://www.emutalk.net/threads/55159-Wrong-PAL-aspect-ratio-temporary-work-around

With WindowedBorderlessGaming you may get it to show the correct aspect ratio and still have a pseudo-fullscreen.

This is also bad news for your case:

https://code.google.com/p/demul/issues/detail?id=201&can=1&q=wrong%20aspect%20ratio&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Priority%20Reporter%20Owner%20Summary

But like I said, I dont have that problem, no matter if I use DX10 or DX11 and I tried on two different PCs.

[hansolo77]

It was working fine until I upgraded to the latest 0.58 version. I'm thinking about trying to go back to the previous version to see if it is fixed that way.

HDTV output, native resolution is 1920x1080.

I'm just trying to use DEMUL lowest resolution (640x480).

I'm a bit afraid about that bug report. Doesn't seem right to completely cut off DX10 as a valid controller. I still have a DX9 card in my spare MAME system. And what is the ArcadeVGA card rated at? I'm sure it's not DX11.

[hansolo77]

Strangely enough, I completely removed everything DEMUL related and re-extracted the version 0.57 and it defaults to DX11 as the driver to use. That's not a problem though, since DX11 on .57 works great. Once I removed everything and put the 0.58 in, it defaults to DX10, and plays fine in windowed mode, but is scrunched for full screen. I tried to switch it to DX11 (since it worked so well in .57) and it was the correct aspect ratio, but very slow. It takes like 3 seconds for the NAOMI logo animation to complete, where as it should only take about 1/2 a second (with the other driver config). I tried various configs of DX10/DX11 on .581 and .582 also, and they all do the same thing (play great DX10 windowed, scrunched fullscreen, DX11 unplayable). So I guess I'm going to have to go back to .57.

I'm curious to try that other addon program, but if it is required to always be running, I don't think I will. It'd be ok if I can configure GameEx to run it as a launchbefore or something, but I don't want it always on. I'll check into some more perhaps on Sunday (my next day off).