mame scanlines

[pubjoe]

Never realised .pngs were used for scanlines! Can you use shades of grey for levels transparancy?

I suppose if you want a near perfect effect, you could make a different png (the same pixel size as your screen depth) for each resolution, IE: 288x224 should use a png with exactly 224 light lines and 223 dark lines. Would it be possible to configure a different scanlines.png to be used for each individual game or res?

[cools]

Yeah, MAME uses the full alpha channel.

The perfect effect part comes from using a resolution 2x the size of the game res... No need to have different effects for different games or resolutions.

[pubjoe]

Yeah, MAME uses the full alpha channel.

The perfect effect part comes from using a resolution 2x the size of the game res... No need to have different effects for different games or resolutions.

So scanlines.png is not full screen no? Does it "tile"? (I know there is a pic attached above but I'm viewing on my phone.)

[cools]

Yeah, it tiles

[pubjoe]

Yeah, it tiles

Right right... That makes more sense then!

[AeroCityMayor]

I might be missing something here...

No disrespect to fagin, but this is the standard scanlines.png from Windows MAME (which I think is included), also known originally as scanlines_ag.png - Aaron Giles scanlines effect. It's the one I've been using, and it's awesome

Not quite.



On the left is the Standard scanlines.png included in MAME, and fagin's Real_Scanlines.png one is on the right.

Like I said, I see a minor improvement, and have substituted it for the original scanlines.png I was using.

HTH

[cools]

Woops, you are of course correct

(I was also wrong about the alpha channel - but it does use the grey level!)

[cools]

Had a play with the darker scanlines this morning, they're a lot more authentic than the 50% ones.

The following shots are all taken on a 640x480 31k screen.

img_2885.jpg

Closeup of Gunforce 2, which runs 320x240 so scales up 2x perfectly and fills the screen.

img_2891.jpg

1942, runs 256x224. Doesn't quite fill the screen. If I was running 512x480 the top and bottom of the game display would touch the left and right of the monitor. The left and right of the game would not fill the height of the monitor without tweaking the monitor.

img_2888.jpg

Galaxian.

[fagin]

Cools,
Are these the scanlines I provided or another png?

[cools]

The one you provided.

[Oh_Mutants]

Hi,

Please bear with me as i'm very new to Mame (Have an old Raven Games Supergun i used to use with my now kaput CRT, but picked up a cocktail cab with a PC built in so want to run my 1942, Dig Dug etc on that ). I'm running Mame with EasyMame as a frontend because, well, it's easy to set up for a mame newcomer like myself). I want 1942 to run with scanlines, how do i actually go about applying the PNG image?
Sorry if this is a really stupid question, but like i say i'm new to Mame Thanks in advance.

[AeroCityMayor]

Hi there d00d,

To provide the correct answer, we'd need to now which version of MAME you are using.

If you are using a more recent version (after .107) then you need to download the scanline effect you want to use and place it in your artwork folder.

Next you will need to edit your mame.ini with notepad. This should be in the ini folder.

Find the line effect and replace the none with the name of the png you have downloaded to your artwork folder without the .png extension.

e.g. I use the one mentioned earlier in this thread so my line looks like this:-

Code: Select all

effect       Real_Scanlines

HTH

[Oh_Mutants]

Cheers alien_mame, that helps greatly
FYI i'm using mame .129 (the latest as of a couple of weeks ago). I'll give it a go and see how i get on, thanks again.

[Lettuce]

I always found whatever scanline effect i used it used to have a big hit on the contrast and vividness of the on screen colours when i compared the screen with a scanline effect applied to one that was in a standard 15khz mode with no effect applied . Also why on the 2 scanline.pngs on the previous page do the black lines fade from black to white, why are they not just solid black bars and then white, rather than the fade effect??

[AeroCityMayor]

Agreed! Some are worse than others though and the effects vary greatly from monitor to monitor.

The "fade" effect I'm guessing is to soften the scanline as they don't appear completely sharp on real hardware on a standard monitor, at least not on the monitors I've had.

HTH

[fagin]

You are right the effect is never going to be as good as a true arcade monitor. I now have mame running on a cab with a svga screen along with two other cabs with tri-sync monitors (one for Horizontal and the other for Vertical games). The difference is vast between an arcade monitor and a PC one, but you have to take that on the chin unless you go to the extreme of doing something similar to what I have.

TBH... the effect is fine for 95% of people..... but if you want that bit more you know what you will have to do!

[Rossyra]

If you wan't scanlines to look right on a tate, you need a png with lines running vertically instead of horizontally.

Just rotate the standard scanlines.png 90 degrees in photoshop or whatever.

If anyone needs the vertical scanlines and lacks the software to do this I can email you the png

[Rossyra]

Vertical orientated scanlines.png on a tate...

[pubjoe]

Unless I'm missing something... Those pictures are horizontal scanlines on a vertical game.

From the looks of the pictures, the .png would have displayed more authentically had you not rotated it.

A monitor physically draws scanlines end to end. A horizontally orientated monitor has horizontal scan lines, therefore a rotated monitor has vertical scan lines. So the emulated lines should run vertically also. ...Not horizontally I'm afraid.

Unless of course, you just prefer the look of horizontal scanlines.

[Rossyra]

Sort of, they appear like horizontal lines on a vertical game, but the png has vertical lines so when rotated they orientate horizontally.

Bear in mind this is an emulated pixel-doubled image running at 640 x 480, horizontal scalnies don't look anywhere near as nice compared to the vertical ones, at least not on my monitor anyway.

It's not authentic, but it looks a lot better in my opinion. Although you can see the 'real' scanlines in the pic, you can't see them even 2 feet from the screen. Vertical scanlines on a vertical game just look ugly on a tate to me, authentic or not...