MAME scanline/shadowmask simulation

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StreetFancerKombat
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Re: MAME scanline/shadowmask simulation

Post by StreetFancerKombat »

Hmm,
It's interesting to see all this, as it's changing my perspective entirely :)

I have tried running without any prescale and scan lines and I find the look to very plasticy, smeared and not like how I remember at all.

I have tired pre scale 4 and it's way way to blocky for me :( (pre scale 2 gives me a little smoothing and a little blocky, it's a nice trade off) FWIW I can run max prescale and it doesn't even touch my cpu or gpu so that's quite good :)

At the moment I'm using pre scale x2, and d3d bilinear, and cools x2 scan lines png and when playing most of my games, it does seem more arcade like? It seems to have a little grit to it. Mortal Kombat, SFII, Act Fancer, Shinobi etc all look fine?

So I guess my question is why does it look better with pre scale x2, x2 scan lines when it's not supposed to?

I can try to test the latest release for HLSL and see how it goes. But last time I ulgraded loads of my roms stopped working... So I've stuck on the 149 version as everything I play works great.

While my CPU/GPU is not a beast. The dual core AMD E-450 and HD6320 can do mame without any real issues at all... Except when I enable HLSL and it just looses a few to many frames. It's actually still very playable, but I get the odd sound issue that causes problems that really annoy me.

So in short.
The answer is:

If you are using mame to play games from a PC, to a 1080p HDTV at 1080/60 you should NOT enable any pre scaling!
You should NOT add additional "effects" (such as scanlines.png) other than HLSL!
You should play the game at its tiny native resolution scaled up via bilinear and smoothed out.

As much as my entire being is telling no, I'm gonna try that for a few days and see how It goes.

I'll maybe try HLSL if my roms don't get scuppered after an upgrade.. But otherwise If it doesn't work out, I'll fall back to prescale x2 and scanlines.png as I do think that some games benefit from this, but Id like to find the optimum look for all games under these conditions.

It's defiantly been an eye opener discussing this with you guys. I appreciate all the input and advice.
Do you recommend anything else?

Let's say I do get HLSL working.. Under my conditions mentioned previously. What settings do you recommend? :)
StreetFancerKombat
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Re: MAME scanline/shadowmask simulation

Post by StreetFancerKombat »

Hey all,

Quick question... I've moved up to mame 151 (going to get to 156 by the end of the year) and I can run hlsl a little better now. By default it works perfectly but looks awful.

I've checked the settings and checked all the forums and searched for others files etc but I can't seem to find a hlsl file that will enable scan lines only?

As I mentioned previously I am using a 1920x1080p monitor that only uses the centre of the screen for playing mame (Which I believe is 1400x1050 when cantered) I'd like to add ONLY scan lines to my games and nothing more, no bent screen, no flicker, no jitter, just scan lines.

When I disabled the options from the default ini IT made mame now run slow? Which I found strange as it was now disabling the options and therefore shoud run faster.., right? Anyway.. I clearly don't know what I am doing :) so do you guys have a hlsl config that will give me scan likes only for all my games.

Thank in advance :)
StreetFancerKombat
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Re: MAME scanline/shadowmask simulation

Post by StreetFancerKombat »

Update:

Ok I'm now using cools hlsl settings from the adapted versions from the German post.

It looks great, perfect almost.. But it's a bit jittery and unstable at times. Is there anything I can do to ease the load slightly but keep the look of this set of files?

It's the zip file containing the moded postfx, hlsl and ini folders.
Does this now completely ignore the settings contained within my mame.ini?

Cheers folks.. It's getting there, slowly but surly :)
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Mokum
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Re: MAME scanline/shadowmask simulation

Post by Mokum »

I didn't really wanted to grave dig this thread but is anyone having issues activating HLSL on MAME 0.170?
I've been using cool's settings on my previous version of MAME (0.161) and everything worked plain smoothly, but when I changed to MAME 0.170 the only thing I got is a black screen.
I thought the devs just made some modification so recent versions of MAME couldn't handle such settings. I then proceded to delete the ini files creating them from scratch but even a simple "hlsl_enable 1" will just give me a black screen...
How's that? :(
alienmame wrote:Christ on a bike man
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