Vertical Monitor Config Help

[dwight]

Hi,

I've recently spent many hours configuring GameEx, MAME, and Daphne to play nicely on my vertical oriented arcade monitor and thought other people might be interested in how to configure their vertical setups. I'm using an ArcadeVGA card, J-PAC, CGA arcade monitor, and an Intel core2duo 2.8GHz system. In my case, the screen must be vertically oriented to fit in a cocktail cabinet and to be far enough away from the CPU etc to not zap them with static.

While MAME and GameEx can rotate the display, Daphne doesn't like video modes it doesn't recognize, and depending on the GameEx Theme you are using, you might find GameEx ignores your instruction to rotate 90 degrees or -90 degrees.

My solution was to rotate the display in Windows using the ATI Catalyst drivers (CCC) that come with the ArcadeVGA. To begin, I set my resolution to 640x480. Rotating the screen only seems to work with resolutions between 640x480 and 800x600 - outside of this, I don't even get an option to rotate the screen.

I right click the red ATI icon in the bottom right hand corner of the screen (the notification icons).

Choose the "1. Ultimarc ArcadeVGA2", "Rotate display", and choose either Right (90 deg/CW) or Left (-90deg/CCW).

This should rotate the screen if it doesn't - check you are running SP2 and not SP3 for Windows XP. Only the latest ATI drivers work with Windows XP SP3, and the Ultimarc drivers will need an update. I don't know how Vista or Win7 users will go with this. You can downgrade to SP2 if you need to - do a search on the net/Microsoft's help site and you'll find what you need.

With Windows in Portrait mode, now you can start setting up your front end and emulators. Open the Advanced config for GameEx, go to displays, and ensure "Rotate" is set to "No" - You don't need to rotate because you've already done that in Windows. If you're only going to run MAME, you could skip rotating Windows and let GameEx and MAME do the work - but thats another story.

Next, open and edit MAME.INI (in the root of your mame dir) and change either AutoROR or AutoROL from 0 to 1 (don't change both at the same time) - just try them one at a time and keep the one that displays the image the correct way up for your config. This will mean Vertical games play at the full resolution, and horizontal games will play with big black borders top and bottom and a smaller screen - but won't be stretched. All the other rotate options here should be "0" (ROTATE/ROR/ROL/FlipX etc). If you really want horizontal games to look right you'll have to make achoice to either mount your screen horizontally, and play horizontal games right, or mount your screen vertically and play vertical games right. Or get fancy have a screen that rotates mechanically.

If you are using an ArcadeVGA card, you are probably also using tooIs to set proper resolution for all your mame games. I use ArcadeVGARes by Gavin Benson. Set this to "Horizontal" because Windows and the AutoROL/AutoROR setting in MAME.INI will look after the proper rotation for you. If you set "Vertical" in this tool, you'll find the screen rotates too far or the wrong way.

Next I open GameEx Advanced Config again, go to my Daphne settings, and set my command line in daphne to -x 480 -y 640. This tells Daphne to rotate the image, but I've found it will only work if I've first set Windows to 480x640 (Portrait) mode (otherwise it complains about not being able to find a compatible resolution). If you're using a higher Res, you'll need to change this as appropriate e.g. -x 600 -y 800. For those interested, this is the Daphne Command Line Options setting I use:

vldp -blank_searches -min_seek_delay 1000 -seek_frames_per_ms 20 -homedir C:\daphne -sound_buffer 2048 -volume_vldp 42 -volume_nonvldp 42 -fullscreen -x 480 -y 640

I don't know if that's great, but it works for me.

So that's it, happy gaming! if anyone has any better ideas/configs, please post them.

Regards,

Dwight.