Blurry Picture in MAME

[xixit]

Hi!

 

I am a newbie at emulators, and I have no idea what Im doing ;-)

 But I wanted to try out Hyperspin, and first of installing MAME.

However......all the games I run are soooooo blurry. I have been trying different settings inside the mame emulator,

but whatever I do, nothing seems so change.

I have a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 and a ASUS ROG pg278q 27" gaming monitor.

What can I do to get a sharper image?

[Metalzoic]

What are you running for filters, scanlines etc...? Any HLSL or GLSL on or anything.

Screenshot might help so we know what you actually mean by blurry.

[xixit]

4 hours ago, Metalzoic said:

What are you running for filters, scanlines etc...? Any HLSL or GLSL on or anything.

Screenshot might help so we know what you actually mean by blurry.

What is filters?

What is scanlines?

What is HLSL and GLSL?

How do you take a screenshot?

As I said.....I dont know anything about these things. I just click on a game and run it, and it's blurry and pixelated. It's the same with Genesis games running under mame. I tried NES games with NesTopia and it looks ok, except there are som very thin horizontal lines all across the screen....

[phulshof]

Fair enough. I'll safely assume that you just downloaded MAME, added some roms, and started playing, so you're using the default settings of whatever you downloaded. Can you post a link to the location you downloaded MAME from so we might have an idea of what those default setting might be? Oh, and which Windows version are you using?

[xixit]

So here is some screen shots. If you look at these when they are not fullscreen, they look ok i guess? But when they are stretched out on my 27" widescreen (as they are when playing the games) they look terrible. Maybe thats the only problem? maybe I cant play games fullscreen? 

 

Its not completely full screen.....there are bezels on the sides, as you can see.....but stretched out vertically.

[phulshof]

Those screenshots don't look blurry to me, even at full screen view. They're blocky, for sure, but that's what you get at 320x240 resolution on a 27" screen without using scanlines. Could you take a picture of your screen when it's blurry so we can get a better idea?

Also, like I asked above: Where did you download MAME from, and which version of Windows are you using?

[gigapig]

You can of course use Bi-linear filtering which should get rid of some blockyness, you can switch that on in RLUI under the module settings or set it in the Mame ini. For the Mame in look for this section I think...probably set filter to 1.

#
# OSD ACCELERATED VIDEO OPTIONS
#
filter                    0
prescale                  1

Best thing though is to use shaders like the other guys have mentioned if your PC can handle it.

[xixit]

Before trying to build something myself, I wanted to see what it was all about, and give it a try. So I searched for smaller pre made drive, and found this;

I am running Windows 10 Pro

Off topic; I am using my Macbook Pro while surfing this website, because I cant access hyperspin-fe.com om my windows computer. Im just getting a message saying "This site can't be reached, hyperspin-fe.com took too long to respond" And I have tried both Explorer, Google Chrome and Firefox....

Here is another screenshot from HERO on the Atari 2600....and that is blurry.....the other ones perhaps are more pixelated...

[xixit]

26 minutes ago, gigapig said:

You can of course use Bi-linear filtering which should get rid of some blockyness, you can switch that on in RLUI under the module settings or set it in the Mame ini. For the Mame in look for this section I think...probably set filter to 1.

#
# OSD ACCELERATED VIDEO OPTIONS
#
filter                    0
prescale                  1

Best thing though is to use shaders like the other guys have mentioned if your PC can handle it.

Shaders?

[gigapig]

12 minutes ago, xixit said:

Before trying to build something myself, I wanted to see what it was all about, and give it a try. So I searched for smaller pre made drive, and found this;

I am running Windows 10 Pro

Off topic; I am using my Macbook Pro while surfing this website, because I cant access hyperspin-fe.com om my windows computer. Im just getting a message saying "This site can't be reached, hyperspin-fe.com took too long to respond" And I have tried both Explorer, Google Chrome and Firefox....

Here is another screenshot from HERO on the Atari 2600....and that is blurry.....the other ones perhaps are more pixelated...

@xixit Please familiarise yourself with our forum RULES, linking to prebuilt drives is not allowed. You should also contact the seller of the drive if you what to change it or you are unhappy with it, although I would doubt that they care or you would get a response.

Shaders change the look of the game by adding effects like scanlines and filtering like this.

[phulshof]

I'd stay away from pre-made drives, and simply download the latest version of MAME from http://mamedev.org/ if I were you. That will also make it a lot easier to find a corresponding set of games. That Atari 2600 shot does look blurry to me; pixelation is to be expected for these old systems (that's why we use scanlines etc. to reduce the effects on large screens), but without your mame.ini file it's hard to know what the cause might be.

 

If I were you I'd start with a fresh MAME install, and try some games in there to see if you run into the same issues. If not, we can help you from there with setting up things like scanlines in case you want to reduce the pixelation effect.

[gigapig]

5 minutes ago, phulshof said:

I'd stay away from pre-made drives, and simply download the latest version of MAME from http://mamedev.org/ if I were you. That will also make it a lot easier to find a corresponding set of games. That Atari 2600 shot does look blurry to me; pixelation is to be expected for these old systems (that's why we use scanlines etc. to reduce the effects on large screens), but without your mame.ini file it's hard to know what the cause might be.

 

If I were you I'd start with a fresh MAME install, and try some games in there to see if you run into the same issues. If not, we can help you from there with setting up things like scanlines in case you want to reduce the pixelation effect.

And as it's a prebuilt drive we don't know (and I doubt the owner even knows) if Mame is the emulator used to run H.E.R.O for the Atari 2600. More likely to be Stella.

[xixit]

I have now tried a clean install of mame, and tested some games.....and it looks the same. I guess thats how it should look with a "larger" screen....or at least this screen that I have.....because I have seen a lot of youtube videos of people playing emulators, and it doesnt look bad at all. I don't know why the screen shots look fine.....because in real life it's so much worse...

 

NES looks better though.....except there is small horizontal lines across the screen...

[phulshof]

Those small horizontal lines are probably scanlines, though I'd have to take a look at your mame.ini to see what you've got in there. Scanlines are an emulated feature of what CRTs used to have: small gaps between the pixels on your screen. Probably your downloaded drive was using a different emulator for the Atari 2600 to make the screen look so blurry, as gigapig mentioned.

Are the MAME games blurry of simply pixelated? Pixelated is only normal if you watch a resolution 320x240 (scaled to your monitor's resolution for sure, but that's the base) on a large screen, and you can make things look seriously better by using scanlines or even filters as gigapig showed you in a post above. Since my arcade PC cannot handle BGFX filters, I'm using a simple scanline effect to create those small gaps between the pixels. It makes those old games look a lot better on large screens, and after all: that's how they used to look as well. The old CRT screens weren't exactly known for their sharp pixel image, which for these kinds of resolution was actually a good thing.

 

As a simple example of what scanlines look like (left: without, right: with scanlines):

Hmm, looking at this picture for a longer time: the left does look more blurry than the right. I guess that's an added side effect of blowing up a low resolution image on a large screen.

[xixit]

I wish I could access this site on my windows computer.....I don't know whats wrong? I now have to move files over to my Mac with a USB memory, and then post them here....

[xixit]

mame.ini

 

Is this what you wanted to look at?

[phulshof]

8 minutes ago, xixit said:

mame.ini

 

Is this what you wanted to look at?

This is from your new install I presume? Looks pretty standard. Video mode is set to auto; what that results to on your system is anyone's guess of course. If you know how to run programs from the command line you could run MAME with -verbose to get a bit more information for us to work with. All in all though, it looks like your standard MAME ini file.

If you want to play around with simple scanline effects, have a look at the provided artwork files, and pick an effect to add (effect line in your mame.ini or -effect <effect name> if you're running it from the command line).

[phulshof]

These are two effects I created for my own use; perhaps they're of some use to you as well. (Yes, they are incredibly small; one is 4x4 pixels, and the other is 4x2 pixels).

[xixit]

3 minutes ago, phulshof said:

These are two effects I created for my own use; perhaps they're of some use to you as well. (Yes, they are incredibly small; one is 4x4 pixels, and the other is 4x2 pixels).

First of all I want to say thank you for trying to help me.....but I don't understand anything....and I don't know what to do with those tiny tiny pictures :-/

[phulshof]

Put them in your artwork directory, e.g. as scanlines1.png and scanlines2.png. Then change the line in your mame.ini file that lists "effect" by adding scanlines1 or scanlines2. See if that looks better to you. On my system I also had to change the line with "video" from "auto" to "opengl", but that may just be a Linux issue.

Sent from my SM-G920F using Tapatalk

[phulshof]

17 minutes ago, xixit said:

First of all I want to say thank you for trying to help me.....but I don't understand anything....and I don't know what to do with those tiny tiny pictures :-/

No worries; we all started from scratch at some point in the past. That is however a very good reason we advise people not to get a pre-setup drive. If it works out of the box, which it rarely if ever does, it's a quick way to get something working, but since you didn't build any base knowledge it's almost impossible to figure out how to fix the inevitable problems you'll encounter.

[xixit]

6 minutes ago, phulshof said:

No worries; we all started from scratch at some point in the past. That is however a very good reason we advise people not to get a pre-setup drive. If it works out of the box, which it rarely if ever does, it's a quick way to get something working, but since you didn't build any base knowledge it's almost impossible to figure out how to fix the inevitable problems you'll encounter.

I didn't pay for that drive....it was something that was free to download, and I just wanted to check it out. If you want to compress the picture, top and bottom....how do you do that? Now I have bezels on the side and the picture is stretched out vertically....maybe that would make it look better. And sorry if my english is bad...

[phulshof]

11 minutes ago, xixit said:

I didn't pay for that drive....it was something that was free to download, and I just wanted to check it out. If you want to compress the picture, top and bottom....how do you do that? Now I have bezels on the side and the picture is stretched out vertically....maybe that would make it look better. And sorry if my english is bad...

It's not so much about payment, at least to me it isn't, but it's about learning how and why things are set up the way they are. It's relatively easy to help you get started if you download the official releases of e.g. emulators, but incredibly hard to help you if you're using something someone else set up, and you don't know what is set up where or how.

From the screenshots you showed us, I'd say things are working just fine. Remember that old games were generally in 4:3 or 3:4 rather than the 16:9 current monitors/tvs use, so it's only natural that you have black bars on the side. You can fill those with nice graphics using bezels, but perhaps that's something for another time.

Don't worry about your English; it's 1000 times better than my Swedish, I assure you.

[volumetric]

Have you thought about running the Mame core from within retroarch? Retroarch comes with shader support built in, and I'm pretty sure the actual shader setup is a bit more straightforward than doing it in standard Mame. I would recommend the crt-geom shader myself.

[gigapig]

8 minutes ago, volumetric said:

Have you thought about running the Mame core from within retroarch? Retroarch comes with shader support built in, and I'm pretty sure the actual shader setup is a bit more straightforward than doing it in standard Mame. I would recommend the crt-geom shader myself.

That is a good idea but maybe a little advanced for some,  even with a little emulator knowledge. Nothing we can't guide someone through though. 

Xixit could also watch my old video on setting up glsl in RLUI.