4:3 aspect ratio and rotating HD LCD monitor

[paulstevens]

Not sure where best to post this, sorry if in wrong place...

 

So I did some searching on Vertical games, Vertical monitors, Portrait monitors, rotating monitors, and I have not found yet what I'm looking for, which is basically this:

 

I have a cabinet that once upon a time had a 27" CRT horizontally mounted that was 4:3 aspect ratio.  I want to put an LCD in there to fill up as much of the physical space as possible with as big of a displayable picture as possible.  Putting in a standard 16:9 LCD monitor can fill it up in the horizontal direction, but vertically it is still wanting.  16:10 monitor does not help much.

 

Is it possible to do the following:

- mount a 16:9 LCD monitor rotated vertically so that the monitors vertical dimension (say 1080 or bigger) lies in the cabinet horizontal plane, and the monitor's horizontal dimension (1920, say) lies in the cabinet vertical dimension?  Okay - I know people do this and various Windows and other settings support it.  What I want to know specifically is this:

- When mounted this way, can Windows, HyperSpin, RocketLauncher, Mame, support the following:

-- Create a 1080x810 box (4:3) inside the rotated 1920x1080 (now 1080x1920), and place that box in the center of the screen, such that it looks like this crude ASCII drawing:

 

+------------------------+ --- ---------
|                        |  |      /\
|       blank area       | 555     
|                        |  |      
+------------------------+ ---      1
| Active Display Area    |  |       9
|                        |  |       2
|  this box is now 4:3   | 810      0
|  1080 x 810            |  |       
|  display HS, RL, MAME  |  |       t
|   in here              | \/       a
+------------------------+ ---      l
|                        |  |       l
|     blank area         | 555
|                        |  |      \/
+------------------------+ --- --------
|<------1080 wide ------>|

 

Any advice on how to do that, if it is even possible, will be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks!!!

[paulstevens]

I should add that, if it helps to stick with standard numbers, can the box be made to be 1024 x 768?

 

Once upon a time 1024x768 was the "native" resolution of HyperSpin and all its themes.

 

Thanks!

[Metalzoic]

Hmmm... this is a good question and could be awesome if it worked (and worked flawlessly).

You could potentially fit a much larger screen in a cab sideways like that and end up with maximum vertical games and edge-to-edge 4:3 games too. Plus any 16:9 games would be no smaller than they would be on a standard horizontally mounted screen. The only immediate downside is the cab would need to look a bit weird and un-arcade like to pull off a large screen. It would end up looking like this (although wider since it would only be worth doing with a 37" or 42"

 

 

I can say I've never seen anyone mention setting it up this way. Does RocketLauncher have a setting for defaulting horizontal or vertical?

[Metalzoic]

Just measured my bedroom 42" and it's 24.5" top to bottom. So I bet a lot of 42" screens would work in standard width arcade cabs 25-28"'s wide or so. Mine could slide right into my cab sideways with .5 inch of room on each side.

 

...Now I want to build one. No, I want to build a bunch and sell them.

[bleasby]

It is simple to use RocketLauncher on the box area if you set to use the RL bezel feature. All emulators should use only the "box" area without the need for any additional configuration.

It shouldn't be difficult also to rearrange the fade screen coordinates to concentrate all the info on the box area. 

The only limitation is the pause screen, as it was designed to take full advantage of your screen area, so it will fill your entire portrait screen when launched and not onmly the "box" area.

 

Also, RocketLauncher has a setting for rotate automatically any of its menu contents to any screen orientation that you use (RLUI > Settings > Main Settings > Screen Rotation Angle).

I don't know if you would even need that but it doesn't matter if you use windows on a portrait monitor or not for it to work.

[paulstevens]

Several cabinets I've looked at recently have enough inside area to accommodate a 42" screen vertically with some of the "unused" area already hidden.  The monitor would slide under parts of the top of the cabinet and area below or under the control panel.  So, a cabinet like that would not look as freaky as Metalzoic fears.

 

So it seems we'd lose the coolness of the Pause feature in RL, but seemingly Bezels and most other features would work?  I'll have to look into this further.  Thanks for the replies. 

[Metalzoic]

No pause is no loss at all. I've used it a total of once in the past year.

However if you were going to run pc games that way (if they even can) you'd take a huge hit to resolution unless it was a 4k screen.

Sent from my SM-G935V

[bleasby]

No pause is no loss at all. I've used it a total of once in the past year.

 

I completely disagree. I use the pause features everyday. 

Did you never needed a walkthrough to help you on a complicated game? 

 

Anyway, maybe in the near future I could work on something that could surpass the pause limitation for your use scenario.

No promises or ETAs although. 

[potts43]

I love PAUSE too!

[paulstevens]

One baby step at a time...Rotating Windows7 / video card options to display vertically as 1080x1920.

 

Set (via HyperHQ or manual edit to HyperSpin->Settings->settings.ini)

[Resolution]
FullScreen=false
Width=1080
Height=810

 

With those settings, HyperSpin appears perfectly centered and full width with correct aspect ratio and also appears to be located precisely as speculated in the ASCII drawing in the first post.

 

Question - is it possible to move the HS window from where HS / Windows7 decides to place it?  There is no frame that can be grabbed with the mouse and dragged to wherever, and I don't see any X,Y coordinate settings in settings.ini for window placement that I can set.

 

Interestingly, with HS running and then changing screen rotation back to normal Landscape orientation (1920x1080), I can see HS dynamically reposition the location of the window, so HS is doing something to tell Windows7 where to place the HS window.

 

How can I control that?

 

Thanks

[bleasby]

I believe that HS automatically places its windows always centered in relation to your resolution whenever the HS window loses focus and its reactivated.

 

I was able to move it horizontally (and resize it) by using the bellow ahk script, but as I said above, HS moves its window back to the center as soon as you reactivate the program.

This is a very bad limitation in my opinion and I don't know if there is any hidden setting that could avoid that. 

winmove, HyperSpin ahk_class ThunderRT6FormDC, 0, 0, 640, 480

[paulstevens]

It is simple to use RocketLauncher on the box area if you set to use the RL bezel feature. All emulators should use only the "box" area without the need for any additional configuration.

 

What would happen with Bezel Background images and Bezel Overlay images in this use scenario?  (I'm at work and cannot try until much later after I get home)

 

Do the background and overlay images expand to fill the entire screen as well?

 

It seems like only the bezel image (.ini file actually) dictates where only the emulator will be displayed.  My guess is the .png images will expand to fill all available area above and beyond the .INI coordinates.  In this case, they'd probably extend way above and below the "blank areas" in that ascii figure.

 

Thanks.

[bleasby]

The bezel background image will be resized to fill the entire screen. You can also simply don't use any bezel background image if you like.

The bezel image will be placed centralized on your screen fitting either the width or the height entirely, in a way that your bezel image does not lose its aspect ratio, but fills at least one of these monitor dimensions.

Therefore, you will only fill your entire screen with the bezel image if you deliberately uses a image that has exactly your portrait monitor aspect ratio.

Sent from my XT1068 using Tapatalk

[paulstevens]

The horizontal bezels and games work properly in this orientation as is (I use mainly Metalzoic's modified collection of all the bezels created by the talented artists out there- thank you all!), but I'll have to edit the vertical bezels and their ini files for them to display properly.

 

So far what little I've been able to do is working as expected.

 

btw I'm doing mame only on this for now.