Advancemame 3.5: overlays & resolution problem

UDb23

@riverstorm Thanks for this additional trial.
We definitively need to involve advmame's developer; he surely can tell to about video modes and how to setup an overlay the way it's supposed to work.
August is not the best timing as basically in Italy everybody's on holiday; so he may not respond for a while. Will try anyway.
btw: as I'm in Italy too I'll finally take holidays soon. :-D

Riverstorm

@udb23 said in Advancemame 3.5: overlays & resolution problem:

@riverstorm Thanks for this additional trial.
We definitively need to involve advmame's developer; he surely can tell to about video modes and how to setup an overlay the way it's supposed to work.
August is not the best timing as basically in Italy everybody's on holiday; so he may not respond for a while. Will try anyway.
btw: as I'm in Italy too I'll finally take holidays soon. :-D

I need to take a holiday soon too. Here we can bank 416 hours (about 10 1/2 weeks) and I am at 412. I loose them when I hit my cap.

The thing is we are right in the middle of a forklift firewall upgrade. We have about 100 zones, 700 rules, 400 address objects and service groups. A fair amount of Natting, IPSec tunnels with our major cellular carrier for mobiles in our law enforcement vehicles and also to the State for Metro Communications (our 911 centers). We import a lot of AD groups via LDAP for content filtering & application layer filtering and what not.

Several security services like, Intrusion Prevention, GEO-IP filtering (country blocks), RBL's (for email), gateway antivirus, etc. It's a bit of a monster upgrade and I am the whole team doing it. One person.

Our main reason for forklifting and switching vendors is better logging as I think we'll see a few people get fired due to severe surfing habits. I really dislike policing others surfing but I get my marching orders from my director who receives requests from other departments. That lovely chain of command.

We are a small organization (about 1000) and don't really have dedicated "duties" in I.T. (like you might see in a bank). My next project will be VMWare and SRM, then the network core (switching fabric replacement), routers & storage management (NetApp and a Cisco UCS chassis) to finish out the year. Oh and Windows certificate services (several certificates expire in a few months for AD authentication, wireless, etc.) which I honestly hate working on as it's not my strong suit. CA's and subordinates, doling them out via group policy. Rinse and repeat next year. :)

Anyway long story short I need to take a holiday soon too or I'll start loosing the hours. When you get back from holiday or if he responds just let me know if you need any help testing.

caver01

@riverstorm Just don't become so overworked that you accidentally block your own access to retropie.org.uk!

Riverstorm

@caver01 said in Advancemame 3.5: overlays & resolution problem:

@riverstorm Just don't become so overworked that you accidentally block your own access to retropie.org.uk!

Right! I have a little "test" VLAN on it's own subinterface that doesn't need logging or any geo-ip filtering of course as there's no viral threats coming from the UK! ;) Since I also do all the switching I can tap the routing from the core to the internet switch upstream. Actually I could bypass it all by terminating a drop in the WAN VLAN but keeping most of the security services in place is good and getting to retropie.org.uk is an essential work service! ;)

UDb23

@riverstorm I understand your situation very well; continuing to accumulate holidays but not being able to actually take them due to important business matters.
Same happens to me.
As soon as you complete/solve one situation, another project or issue already started.
As important our Business Life is, and it is, still we need to find and dedicate some time for ourselves. Also taking no vacation and accumulating stress does NOT improve quality of our work ;-)
Hope you can get the holidays you deserve soon.

Riverstorm

@udb23 said in Advancemame 3.5: overlays & resolution problem:

Also taking no vacation and accumulating stress does NOT improve quality of our work ;-)

Agreed. I was reading an article that said people who take their vacations are actually more productive and feel better overall.

We do have some small trips planned for area events (within a 5 or 6 hour drive) over long weekends and we have a bigger trip planned for Trinidad & Tobago to do the Carnival experience (like a Mardi Gras).

My significant other has quite a bit less vacation per year so mine accumulates faster. I take a day or two hear and there to go to a movie or some other activities for the day but getting away from the tech...mostly...for a few weeks is very refreshing! ;)

Things are flexible now with planning/implementation but once the go live date for the cut over/transition is set it will be a busy few weeks. Plus we carry on-call phones and we do get calls all hours of the night, weekends and holidays. Even on vacation they will pick up the tab for international rates when leaving the country (which we do about half the time). I guess the perk is a new iPhone every year with all the bells and whistles of unlimited data, hot spot, etc. etc. but honestly I would trade it in a heartbeat and buy my own phone/plan to not carry it.

UDb23

Created a request for support on the advancemame forum.
Hope the developer can find time to help on this matter.

Riverstorm

@udb23 said in Advancemame 3.5: overlays & resolution problem:

Created a request for support on the advancemame forum.
Hope the developer can find time to help on this matter.

That's great it'll be interesting to see if it's possible. Everyone getting back to work now that the holiday is over?

UDb23

Advancemame 3.6 is available. Changes mention : "Fixed screen size computation using backdrops."
Anybody tried if this fixes the overlay issues ?

mediamogul

@udb23

I was going to ask if this only affects custom overlays, but I see you've tested the Mr. Do's Arcade files as well. That's really strange, as they display correctly on mine. I play space invaders somewhat frequently and other than the old artwork being super low-res, the aspect and placement are fine.

UDb23

@mediamogul said in lr-mame2003 driver improvement and backport:

being super low-res

The image files used by the overlay are good res, so that's already an issue.
What screen resolution are you using ?
What does advmame show if you check the resolution during invaders gameplay?

mediamogul

@udb23

I've looked at my screen res versus the game's display and they appear to correspond, but I want to check some potential inconsistencies later this evening. I'll get back with you.

caver01

@mediamogul I will throw in the test I recently did with backgrounds for INVADERS and WARLORDS. Both of the old artwork backgrounds are nice, high res, but they seem to only render at game resolution, even if running the game at double, or triple magnification. So, nice clean backgrounds are completely wasted and converted to awful pixelated versions. I suspect overlays will do the same.

This problem goes away, however, when you run vector titles, probably because they can render at native display resolution and the background follows suit. So, asteroids deluxe and Omega Race can have gorgeous background art.

mediamogul

@caver01

I'm actually doing a little testing and research right now. It looks as though all artwork is applied before any resizing is done. Also, in the official documents, the method for resizing raster games is noted to be independent from the method handling vector games. This of course jibes with what you've already noticed. Ideally, to get higher quality artwork, the software would need to first resize the game and then resize the artwork to fit. However, I wonder if that wouldn't affect performance. Outside of this though, my aspect ratio and placement are as they should be. I'm glad I looked into this tonight, as I discovered a few settings that have increased performance enough to run 'Spider-Man: The Video Game' without any audio issues.

caver01

@mediamogul your assumptions align with mine. It also explains why the rgb effects get applied to the background. I have over the years used old versions of mame that do this correctly. High res backgrounds that match display resolution, and scan lines and rgb effects that only apply to the game graphics layer (which looks fantastic done properly). It seems like an order of processing issue.

UDb23

@caver01 @mediamogul Thanks for the additional testing; surely that's the reason for the issue.
Maybe @amadvance can fix this.

Libretro overlay implementation shows that it's possible to get high res overlays without affecting performance.

It would be really nice if libretro could support also backdrops.