Bezels for maximized gameplay area

[shroud]

I have many vertical MAME games which occupy only the central part of my horizontal screen. I have understood that there is an option in MAME to enable "bezels", which are background images that are displayed around the gameplay area in order to fill the screen.

 

I am not sure but it seems that kind of images are available in "MAME Artwork Pack" and "MAME Artwork Preview Pack", but from the look of them, they seem to go quite a lot around... above, below, left and right, and therefore greatly reducing the gameplay area!

 

I am rather looking for bezels that only go left and right, so that the gameplay area utilizes the whole height of the screen. Do you know where to find such format of bezels?

 

While searching for instructions on the GameEx forums, I stumbled upon Krakerman's MAME bezels impressive work. Even tho technically his bezels do reduce the gameplay area vertically a bit, it is not really that much, so they would be fine for me. But they don't seem to be in the format expected by MAME, which I think requires a .PNG image and a .LAY file zipped together. Krakerman's bezels use an .INI file instead of .LAY, I think they are meant for RocketLauncher which I do not use.

[phulshof]

If you have FTP access, check my MAME bezels set in the Upload section. Those are intended for use directly with MAME. They combine most of the bezel sets out there, including those of Krakerman, Griffin518, and many others.

Sent from my SM-G920F using Tapatalk

[shroud]

Maybe I should mention that I am using a 1280 x 1024 screen resolution. So actually Krakerman's bezel don't work for me because they are in 16x9 aspect ratio.

[phulshof]

They may be useful in crop mode perhaps?

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[shroud]

Thanks phulshof!

 

I checked a few of those out, but all the bezels are either 16x9 or they go all around the game screen and  shrink it. It's a pity tho, since they all look amazing!

 

Crop mode on MAME doesn't work for me, as it basically hides the bezel entirely and shows again just the game screen.

 

Basically I need to find 4x3 bezels that only add an image to the left and right of the game screen, but not above or below, so the maximum height is preserved. And possibly without any "fake border" around the game screen, which seems very common but slightly hides the game screen's edges... I don't know why this is popular, personally I'd prefer to see 100% of the game screen.

[shroud]

On second thoughts....

 

I just noticed that besides the standard aspect ratio 4:3/3:4 set by default in MAME video option there is also a pixel aspect 8:7/7:8 option.

 

I've always played the MAME games with standard aspect ratio i.e. full screen for horizontal games, full height but empty sides for vertical games. But now I'm confused on which one is the original or "native" aspect ratio for games??? It would be nice to play MAME games at the originally intended aspect ratio of course. If it's pixel aspect then I need to look even further for appropriate bezels, and it might be even more difficult to find them...