Need crisper screen quality

[honsbeek]

Hi there,

When I play mame games, they seem a bit unclear and slightly blurry on the Monitor screen. I'm not using any flat panels, and I have a Radeon 7500 64MB ATI card. I remember not having this problem in the past ... I run Mame .81 version. . .

What can I do to make games look more crisper and Sharper...

Thank you
Ralph

[Monty]

Right; what is happening is MAME stretches the game screen to fit the monitor. Now this scaling, almost never an integral multiple one, is what gives the bluriness.

First, run MAME at maximum resolution. Your Radeon will handle that no worries. Next, use whatever frontend you have and play around with the graphics settings.

The MAME docs explain most of the MAME options (mame/docs.windows.doc). Try altering hardware stretch and clean stretch. If you're still not getting good results, you can manually set the resolution. The MAME command is:

-resolution wxh[xd] / -r wxh[xd]

Don't worry about that command's syntax- the frontend will (should) handle all that for you. Know what resolution the game ran in originally (the startup screen will tell you) and try and fit any multiple of that neatly into your monitor's maximum resolution, with a little bit left over. Then set the appropriate resolution and enable cleanstretch. You will get a black border but within that the (emulated) pixels won't be blurry.

Let me know how you get on with that Honsbeek.