Feature Request? or Potential Insanity? hard to tell really...

[SomewhatLost666]

ok, so I was playing with my Mame mock up/test rig, thinking of how I want to build my eventual cab, and I noticed that the games that were made to be played on a sideways monitor, actually look better when the monitor is on its side... odd... but then I had an idea....

Feature Request starts here: implement some way for hyperspin to know if a selected game needs the monitor in the horizontal or vertical position (new addition to the database?), and then set a pin on a com port (RTS maybe? DTR? I doono) high or low depending on what position the monitor should be in...

with this feature it would then be possible to have said com pin drive a linear actuator (I have used Firgelli (http://www.firgelliauto.com/)before, they are fairly cheap, and the work well...) and turn the monitor to the correct orientation...

does this seem like a decent idea? or is Mame driving me into some sort of over thinking insanity?

[Dazz]

I honestly don't think there would ever be enough people with a similar setup that would warrant such functionality...

[BadBoyBill]

Do you have a video of this in action? I would like to see it.

[The Loafer]

That would be cool, but Hyperspin doesn't presently support vertical resolutions and if I understand correctly, even the res itself was supported, wouldn't the themes look "weird" in a vertical resolution since that's not their original aspect ration (ie: woudn't they looked stretched or crunched up?). That is, unless everytime you exit a vertical game, it first has to rotate the monitor back to a horizontal resolution (which would seem slow/sluggish) when navigating from HS to game, back to HS, back to game, etc.

Cool idea, I think I have seen a vid out there where someone had automated the rotation of his monitor. Beats me where I saw that though...

[SomewhatLost666]

@Dazz, you may be right... and it definitely would only apply to people who are still designing/building their cab, I doubt it would have any use for people with existing cabs... but still it would be cool...
also, maybe the reason there hasn't been more interest in this is because its been hard to do? and no FE has supported it? but all that could change...

@BadBoyBill, nope... no video, as hyperspin doesn't support it yet... apparently that HS coding guy just isn't coding fast enough...:)
besides, my cab isn't done, or even started yet... :flute:

@The Loafer, flipping the monitor back to normal on game exit was the plan... I don't think the sluggishness would be too bad... unless you really suffer from some serious ADD or something and all you do is start/exit games...

[SomewhatLost666]

well, I got my linear actuator, and built a quick little mock up... takes a little less then 3 seconds to change from one position to the other... not to bad at all... still need to figure out how exactly I will hook the monitor up to my Swivel Controller Doohicky(TM)... now if only there was a front end that would support auto-swivel(TM):)

[StarControl]

The general idea is not any different than auto-configuring the programmable joysticks or setting up your LED's. You just have to shell out to a configuration program that rotates the monitor before you start the game like you do for an Ultrastik, GPWiz49, or LED-wiz. You could pass the ROM name to your configurator and it could look it up in a file to see if the monitor needed to be rotated or not.

Of course, you'd also have to shell out to the configuration program to switch back to horizontal when exiting mame and reentering Hyperspin. Most of the front ends have these entry and exit hooks already. I'm still looking around to see if it has made it into Hyperspin yet.

EDIT:
I did a little more looking around, and CPWizard is the answer to all your woes and HyperSpin supprts it now.