3 replies to this topic

[gaminglord]

I figured this would be very handy for those who edit their DMD sizes through table scripts for Pinmame. The issue has come up before of how to scale the DMD properly without getting a nasty distorted tile effect that makes the animations and such look ugly. This thread here: http://www.vpforums....md proportional is one example that had a solution, stating that basically scales of 4:1 would work well, while adding 3 pixels to both width and height afterwards would yield better results. Some experimentation required.

...Well, I discovered that around 5:1 works just as well (adding 8 to width and then 6 to height afterwards), if not more exact for desired cleanness in DMD. I know they're not the standard DMD resolutions, but they look good and don't have the tile effect. Some are precise in the 5:1 scale, while others are oddly enough just around that area.

The larger scales were easier to handle (to a ridiculous size even) and easily looked nice and clean, it was the smaller ones that were a lil more difficult. Without wasting anymore time, I'll list the DMD scale settings that seemed to work best for clean, even dot matrix display. I tested them all using the game Attack From Mars.

5128x1030 World's Largest VP Cabinet! (Yes, I tested this one also)
2568x518 Insanely Huge
1288x262 Large
648x134 Big
518x134 Moderate
518x101 Average
168x38 Small, good. Pretty much default size... I tried to go smaller than this using the 5:1 ratio, but it doesn't work

I'll work on this some more I suppose, to get numbers between 600 and 12000, and 200 and 500 for more varied scale solutions. 518x101 works well for my iMO 7 inch usb monitor with UVP. (I know, it's silly having UVP on such a small monitor, but it's still nice)

Hope this comes in handy!



ALSO IMPORTANT! Windows 7 Home Premium users, at least (Not sure about others or Vista), I've noticed a weird quirk with the Pinmame DMD/alphanumeric window displays if you do NOT have aero visuals on. If you have the basic windows theme installed to cut down on resources being used, it seems to have made the DMD stay black, or not visually display anything. A weird visual glitch. But with Aero running, it seems fine. Maybe it's just a strange thing on my end, but I thought it'd be useful if it ever happened to anyone else.

Little Note: Just thought I'd share how I figured out the exact scale dimensions of the DMD settings. Basically I had the border on for the DMD, and painstakingly stretched bit by bit and stared at the "regular" size setting (not double size, that screws up stuff) until the tile effect was completely gone and every dot looked about even. Then making sure I had clicked on the DMD window, I held alt and pressed print screen to take a picture of only that window. I then opened up Photoshop, pasted the image I printscreened, and cropped out the windows border around the DMD display window by zooming in carefully and using the selection tool at the pixel level. With the end result, I checked the image size by going to the resize option in Photoshop, noted the width and height, and inputted that into the table script to resize the DMD to test. If it seemed off by a pixel or so, I would edit little by little by increasing/decreasing numbers for the height or width until it was perfect.

Edited by gaminglord, 13 October 2010 - 02:56 AM.

[Sabbat]

Thanks for the research and time taken to find this out

[cry me a river]

Optimal DMD scaling values will also depend on your video mode, ie; some tables I can't run in 1600x1200 if I use the same DMD parameters in 800x600 the DMD is twice the size. If someone is using a different video mode from you they're going to need to rescale your values.

There might be some useful DMD parameters in this thread for anyone tweaking DMDs:

Fixing Full Screen Tables for 4:3 Standard Portrait Computer Monitors

[chriz]

thanks for the info! awesome!