MAME in fullscreen?

Forum: Games
Topic: MAME in fullscreen?
started by: BobMuk

Posted by BobMuk on Feb. 05 2007,16:46

I've been trying to create a bootable USB key running mame... tried advancemame and a few others but all so far have barfed at my hardware.

So you can imagine how happy I was when I discovered DSL - it even has xmame available as a .dsl file so I don't even need to mess about installing anything!!!

Fantastic.... except for one small (but important!) irritation - I can't find a way to make it fullscreen. It looks like xmame supports it but the x-server doesn't (from what I've read of the documentation).

Has anyone got xmame to run fullscreen on DSL? If not, does anyone have any idea why it won't work?

I'm pretty competent with linux so if it requires compiling my own X11 or something I should be able to handle it.... I just don't know enough about DSL and xmame to understand exactly where the problem lies!

BTW - I've tried running the xfree86.dsl that's available but it seems far less compatable with my/any hardware so I'm doubting it'll be of any use to me (when tried it it asked all sorts of configuration questions, the inbuilt X11 just works out the box!)

Any help appreciated...!

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Feb. 05 2007,20:05

Quote

BTW - I've tried running the xfree86.dsl that's available but it seems far less compatable with my/any hardware so I'm doubting it'll be of any use to me (when tried it it asked all sorts of configuration questions, the inbuilt X11 just works out the box!)

Actually, you'll probably have to go this way. Since fullscreen things (such as movies, etc) like video acceleration, my guess it's the same for this. If you need help on that, paste your video specs, what you tried, and what problems/errors you get.

Posted by pig on Feb. 07 2007,18:21

Can anyone help me with the ATerminal?When I try getting into a directory such as /tmp it just says:"/tmp is a directory".
What am I supposed to do?

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Feb. 07 2007,23:39

pig, please do not hijack a thread. Instead, create one of your own topic.
As for your question, you should read a guide on nagivating a linux system from a terminal.

Posted by BobMuk on Feb. 14 2007,12:04

Hi thehatsrule
Thanks for the input! I did a bit of playing around and reached the same conclusion.

So... I added xfree86 to the mydsl directory and played about with the config file /etc/X11/XF86Config-4. First problem was that on reboot it complained it couldn't find the XF86Config file... I eventually had to unzip and mount the minirt24 image and add the file there; I guess there's a timing issue with file restoration and Xfree86 starting (this is on a stock DSL install so it can't be a problem I've caused!).

I'm doing my testing on my Thinkpad T42 laptop and wouldn't you know it, an example config file for my hardware (mobility radeon 9600) gets put in /home/dsl when xfree86.dsl gets installed. Great! So I switched to that instead of my home-made file.

Looking at xmame's fullscreen options it seems we need DGA enabled. Never heard of DGA before but looking at the XF86Config files it gets disabled by default. A quick commenting-out and it's enabled (again, had to mount the minirt24 image and put it in there... getting to be a pain!!)

So is everything working? I booted into a fairly high res, started xmame (outrun, my game of choice!), hit left-alt & home... and it went fullscreen!
OK, *kinda* fullscreen. It didn't scale up to full size but did scale up somewhat (it was bigger than the window it had started in). Playing with xmame's scale options I then got it to fullscreen (I can't remember the exact args but will post full details when I'm booted into DSL tonight)

As I said I've been doing my testing on my Thinkpad, the main machine I want to run this on is a Via Epia M10000 board (my MythTV frontend box) so my next to-do is get together a config file for it (already found but not tested one after googling).

My ultimate aim is to have a usb-key that can run xmame in fullscreen on any box so I'm going to do some digging around xfree86's documentation and see if I can come up with a general purpose config file that'll give 800x600 on any box and allow fullscreen.
(Infact for those who care... my final goal is all of the above, plus a bunch of scripts to wget the ROM files from my webserver so I can use a small 128MB key anywhere and still have access to the complete ROM archive over the network, caching the most recent ROMs on the key. May sound complicated but should actually be quite easy!)

Anyway once I've got it all up and running I'll post full how-to details to this thread.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Feb. 14 2007,23:46

Quote

First problem was that on reboot it complained it couldn't find the XF86Config file... I eventually had to unzip and mount the minirt24 image and add the file there; I guess there's a timing issue with file restoration and Xfree86 starting (this is on a stock DSL install so it can't be a problem I've caused!).

Using a frugal? Add /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 to your ~/.filetool.lst and then use backup/restore.

Quote

My ultimate aim is to have a usb-key that can run xmame in fullscreen on any box so I'm going to do some digging around xfree86's documentation and see if I can come up with a general purpose config file that'll give 800x600 on any box and allow fullscreen.

This one might be kind of hard to do... unless you try to use some video-card detection (only preliminarily in xorg atm afaik, maybe there's another external program that could do this). You can try just plan "vesa" - should work better than the tinyx xvesa that comes with dsl but has similar compatibility with better features - but doesn't have the benefits of using a specific driver.