commodorejohn
Shameless recidivist
Argh. Aside from GIMP, this piece of [SNIP] might just be the best possible example of Why Unix Programmers Can't Write Usable Software. It's completely unbelievable. I spent the better part of half an hour poring through the documentation - documentation which is not linked from the front page of the site, documentation which is not on the Documentation Wiki which is linked from the part of the site, which is actually a threadbare development wiki - trying to figure out the video options, because I'd like to be able to play Ms. Pac-Man in something other than a blurry-ass bilinear-filtered scaling to a non-integer multiple of its native resolution in order to fit it to my monitor's native resolution, which isn't even in remotely the same aspect ratio anyway because Ms. Pac-Man uses a vertically-oriented screen, which MAME goddamn knows!
Half an hour, and I've come up with absolutely nothing. There are plenty of options that look like they should allow me to obtain a desired result - you can turn off bilinear filtering and set it to nearest-neighbor, which would be perfectly fine, except that it still scales to a non-integer multiple, so you just get lumpy, non-square pixels instead of blurry ones, which if anything looks even worse. Even setting it to run in a window doesn't work, it just scales to a different non-integer multiple. And there's no good way to address this! The only way I can find to address it is to specifically set it to run in a window with a specific resolution, and that means having to set specific resolutions for every damn game I have for it! Which of course means that this command-line application (because of course it's a command-line application, this is open-source Unixey development) is going to need a small army of specific shortcuts, or one of those bloated "launcher" applications, just to not look like warmed-over ass!
Honestly, how hard would it be to have an option to scale to the nearest integer multiple that can fit in the current resolution and then letterbox it if it's running fullscreen? That's the most basic of emulator video options, yet somehow in a setup that provides eleventy billion ways to configure the specific physical properties of the emulated CRT phosphors, nobody could be assed to add it! God, what a pile of [SNIP]. And it's the only pile of [SNIP] in town when it comes to arcade emulation, to boot.
Half an hour, and I've come up with absolutely nothing. There are plenty of options that look like they should allow me to obtain a desired result - you can turn off bilinear filtering and set it to nearest-neighbor, which would be perfectly fine, except that it still scales to a non-integer multiple, so you just get lumpy, non-square pixels instead of blurry ones, which if anything looks even worse. Even setting it to run in a window doesn't work, it just scales to a different non-integer multiple. And there's no good way to address this! The only way I can find to address it is to specifically set it to run in a window with a specific resolution, and that means having to set specific resolutions for every damn game I have for it! Which of course means that this command-line application (because of course it's a command-line application, this is open-source Unixey development) is going to need a small army of specific shortcuts, or one of those bloated "launcher" applications, just to not look like warmed-over ass!
Honestly, how hard would it be to have an option to scale to the nearest integer multiple that can fit in the current resolution and then letterbox it if it's running fullscreen? That's the most basic of emulator video options, yet somehow in a setup that provides eleventy billion ways to configure the specific physical properties of the emulated CRT phosphors, nobody could be assed to add it! God, what a pile of [SNIP]. And it's the only pile of [SNIP] in town when it comes to arcade emulation, to boot.
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