Make Mame look as good (hi-res) as AdvanceMame for Vector roms?

[FlightRisk]

I had been using Advmame on a Pi for all my vector games because out of the box it used 1080p and the vector lines were thin and sharp. It also has a ton of options for bloom, and a lot more. It is amazing. I also have a Windows PC gaming machine and wanted to use Mame on that. But I was wondering if regular Mame has settings to do all that Advmame can do with Vector games like BattleZone, Tempest and Star Wars. Out of the box, when I run a game like BattleZone, the line thickness is much greater. It is clear it is running at something much less than 1080p. While the game still looks pretty good, the lines for the letters in the score at the top are too thick and it runs together just like a 320x200 image would look if you zoomed it out too much.

[Lordmonkus]

I don't know what AdvanceMame looks like with vector games but you can adjust the vector settings if Mame when using HLSL by editing the vector.ini in the \ini\presets folder.

Below are some screenshots of how mine look but of course you can adjust to your taste and hopefully find something to your liking.

[FlightRisk]

Do you have control over the line thickness which, I assume, is a function of the screen resolution? My current settings seem to be lower resolution than Advancmame. Compare this from Advancemame to yours:

 

[Lordmonkus]

#
# CORE VECTOR OPTIONS
#
beam_width_min            1.00
beam_width_max            4.00
beam_intensity_weight     0.75
flicker                   0.15

#
# DIRECT3D POST-PROCESSING OPTIONS
#
hlsl_oversampling         0
shadow_mask_tile_mode     0
shadow_mask_alpha         0.5
shadow_mask_texture       shadow-mask.png
shadow_mask_x_count       12
shadow_mask_y_count       6
shadow_mask_usize         0.5
shadow_mask_vsize         0.5
shadow_mask_uoffset       0.0
shadow_mask_voffset       0.0
distortion                0.0
cubic_distortion          0.0
distort_corner            0.0
round_corner              0.0
smooth_border             0.0
reflection                0.0
vignetting                0.0
scanline_alpha            0.0
defocus                   0.0,0.0
converge_x                0.0,0.0,0.0
converge_y                0.0,0.0,0.0
radial_converge_x         0.0,0.0,0.0
radial_converge_y         0.0,0.0,0.0
red_ratio                 0.0,0.0,0.0
grn_ratio                 0.0,0.0,0.0
blu_ratio                 0.0,0.0,0.0
saturation                1.0
offset                    0.0,0.0,0.0
scale                     1.0,1.0,1.0
power                     1.0,1.0,1.0
floor                     0.0,0.0,0.0
phosphor_life             0.2,0.2,0.2

#
# NTSC POST-PROCESSING OPTIONS
#
yiq_enable                0

#
# VECTOR POST-PROCESSING OPTIONS
#
vector_beam_smooth        0.0
vector_length_scale       0.5
vector_length_ratio       0.5

#
# BLOOM POST-PROCESSING OPTIONS
#
bloom_blend_mode          0
bloom_scale               0.30
bloom_overdrive           1.00,1.00,1.00
bloom_lvl0_weight         1.00
bloom_lvl1_weight         0.48
bloom_lvl2_weight         0.32
bloom_lvl3_weight         0.24
bloom_lvl4_weight         0.16
bloom_lvl5_weight         0.24
bloom_lvl6_weight         0.32
bloom_lvl7_weight         0.48
bloom_lvl8_weight         0.64

That's all the settings in the vector.ini, so it looks like it has some control over the thickness.

[Lordmonkus]

For reference here is a video showing how Asteroids Deluxe should look.

I'm toying around with some settings now to see if I can find something better.

[Lordmonkus]

I did some tinkering to see if I could get the thinner lines and changing the beam intensity to a higher setting made them thinner so you can try that to see if it's closer to what you like.

I set it to 1.0 which is the max.

beam_intensity_weight     1.00

vector.ini

Here is a screenshot of it in action.

[FlightRisk]

Looks like I can do just about anything that Advmame can do then. I see settings for shadow mask too that seem worth fiddling with. See you in a week or two ?

[FlightRisk]

Yep, there is beam intensity, beam_width_min and beam_width max and screen gamma. They all control the line width and if you can see the brighter dots where the vector lines join or touch. Now I just need to figure out the secrete of the RL loader vs. using Mame. Mame sees my .ini changes and also adjust a gamename.cfg file. RL does not. It sets a more limited number of options. When I hit tilde in Mame, I can scroll through a ton of settings, including shadow masks. I read somewhere that RL tells Mame to ignore the .ini files and use RL settings, so I will have to learn how that works or tell RL to let Mame use a settings .ini file. 

[FistyDollars]

Does using a shader like this affect the input lag noticeably? I'd fiddled with the shaders in mame a few years ago and it made it really hard to play

[Lordmonkus]

No but it will impact performance if you have a bad on board graphics chip.

[FlightRisk]

@Lordmonkus, Have you tried BGFX here or just plain HLSL?

[Lordmonkus]

I haven't tried BGFX with vector line stuff but I have tried and used BGFX for a short while. I used back when they first implemented it before the HLSL fixes that made it good. But once they fixed HLSL so it looked good on every game I switched to it because I like it better.

[FlightRisk]

Ah, interesting. You wrote such a great article on BGFX too in another thread! I'll give that a try too.

[Agrajag]

Just found this and new to all this. Is there  simple way to turn the glow down? I find it a bit too intense as is.

[Lordmonkus]

I think it may be the:

beam_intensity_weight

But you can play around with the vector.ini settings til you find what you like, also while in a game you can press the (`) key which will bring  up a menu at the bottom of the screen and you can scroll through the different settings. Try the different ones out til you find it and the setting you like, keep note of the setting and then adjust it in the vector.ini, changing it in a game itself doesn't save it out.

[FlightRisk]

Yes, doing it in realtime is the way to go. You can scroll through each option and use the keyboard to move each bar left and right and see the result. The settings aren't saved, however, so you have to write them down and then manually enter them into the vector settings file.

[MrNoHolster]

On 7/9/2018 at 8:52 PM, Lordmonkus said:

I don't know what AdvanceMame looks like with vector games but you can adjust the vector settings if Mame when using HLSL by editing the vector.ini in the \ini\presets folder.

Below are some screenshots of how mine look but of course you can adjust to your taste and hopefully find something to your liking.

Just found your post on this - I'm running lr-mame2016 on the Retropie (Raspberry Pi 4) but I can't get any of those glow effects to work - could you help? I have the vector.ini config above but it's not doing anything. Thanks!

 

[damageinc86]

I'll have to mess with this too,...I've always wanted those nice vector effects in mame.