Framemeister and scaling for vertical fit

[aioneldotnet]

Hi.

I recently got Framemeister and one of my main targets for using it is PS1 (PAL version). With so many options affecting scaling I'm feeling lost. I've read all I have found in this topic and I still can't setup it to my liking.

I would like to scale the image so that it fits the 16:9 LCD screen vertically. That would obviously leave black borders on left and right to account for the original 4:3 aspect ratio. I'm not a real pixel perfect freak and I'm aware that the vertical scaling will be not integer based this way so some pixels from the original image will be represented as more pixels in the final image while others will be represented by less pixels. I'm fine with that.

1. I have followed this guide. First I've set Zoom to On, next I've reduced Zoom_Size from 100 % until the image was a bit smaller than anything that could fit vertically, next I've used Zoom_V_Pos to center it vertically leaving same amount of space on the top and bottom, next I've decreased Zoom_Size one more step so that the image is touching top and bottom edge of screen, now I have again used Zoom_V_Pos until I saw small gap on top, undo this change, changed it again to see small gap on the bottom and finally set it to the middle of those values for perfect vertical centering. By comparing it with a version with Zoom set to Off I've made sure that I'm not loosing anything on the bottom and top of the image. Now the horizontal size. By using H_Width I should be able to change size of left and right black bars that are cropping the image. I've checked all the settings (it takes a while since the screen goes blank every time I change this value) and I'm always loosing some image part on left and right when compared with Zoom set to Off. By using Zoom_H_Pos I can move the image so that either everything on the left is visible perfectly but something is cropped on the right or the other way around. What am I doing wrong?

2. I have measured the horizontal and vertical size of game image area with Zoom set to Off on my 32" LCD for various games and those are the results:
- Pandemonium 1 - 51x35 cm,
- Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo - 46x30,5 cm,
- Super Bust-a-Move 3 DX - 47x35,5 cm,
- Spider - 45x34,5 cm.
All of them are outputting 720x288 pixels but the game area is so much different each time. How do I choose a good vertical size so that I will be not loosing too much of the useful image area while not having to make a separate profile for each game? I'm aware that those games were designed with the thing in mind that CRT TVs are always cropping some picture here and there and also some of the PAL games have black bar on the top and bottom to compensate for the PAL/NTSC vertical pixel difference, but such differences between each of those games seems odd to me.