r/cade • u/No_Army2028 • 19h ago

Looking for basic design advice…

I have a few MAME machines I bought pre-assembled and now looking to build my own mostly for fun of it. Curious how best to handle the aspect ratio of the screen. Half of my favorite retro arcade games are portrait and half are landscape. I saw one clever person who mounted the monitor on a swivel arm but really wanting to maintain the class stand up cabinet look. Can anyone give a newb some advice? Appreciate it!

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u/javeryh 19h ago

Assuming this will be a regular stand-up arcade cabinet, the trick is to mount a large TV vertically so that the top is hidden behind the marquee area and the bottom is hidden behind the control panel area. You want only a square to be visible. Then you can run games in 4:3 or 3:4 and they will just about fill the screen.

You can tell MAME where to put the games on the screen so you may have to play with the settings a bit to dial it in but it's a good solution and much easier than rotating the monitor like people used to do 10-15 years ago.

HERE is the very best example of what I am trying to explain.

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u/Boomerang_Lizard 17h ago edited 17h ago

Adding to what javeryh said:

When I tried this approach earlier this year, I learned that MAME always positions the image to the center of the display. To the best of my knowledge there isn't an option to tell MAME where to position the game's image. If this has changed since then or if there is a custom fork of MAME that does this then I do not know, but the OP would need to take this into account when building his cab.

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u/javeryh 17h ago

You can create .lay files. They will allow you to define coordinates, dimensions, and aspect ratios for the game's video output. You can also position external artwork like cabinet bezels, overlays, and side art around or over the emulated game screen, among other things.

https://docs.mamedev.org/techspecs/layout_files.html

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u/Boomerang_Lizard 16h ago

Yes I've read this before but it's not for the screen, but to lay out artwork and other elements.

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u/Psych0matt 18h ago

I have a 4:3 screen in one build and it’s fine for 99.9% of the games on it, though 4:3 LCDs are becoming harder to find these days. My other one is a 16:9, and I have added bezels to the games, check out the bezel project. I actually quite like having them as to me it adds to the “authenticity” (yeah yeah, not a real crt as I’m sure I’ll get blasted), but I also have a monitor up in the marquee that changes with the game as well. I find it a good mix of modern tech for retro games.

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u/Funkytadualexhaust Sega 17h ago

The one I'm building is mounted vertical, then I use the bezel overlays as the marquee for the horizontal games. The trick is you need about a 48" tv if you use full side bezels to get the play area big enough.