Friday 27 February 2015

My Recommended Settings for CoinOPS

A quick run through of the settings I believe are particularly useful in CoinOPS.

You can access these settings from within CoinOPS by pressing Start, and choosing Settings, and then enabling Advanced Settings.

These settings affect how the games look, although I also change settings for the front end GUI these are pretty self explanatory and more down to personal preference, so I won't discuss those in this post.


Video Smoothing: Sharp

This stops any filtering of the image and gives a sharp pixel look.  Personally I prefer this over the smoothing as it retains the original image better.

The smoothing option will cause some performance issues too.  

Some people will think that smooth looks better, so try both options and see what you prefer.

Aspect Ratio Correction: Enabled

This will set a 4:3 game to show in 4:3, i.e. at the aspect ratio that it was designed for.  If you leave this option disabled then the games will stretch to fill your tv.  At first you may think this looks pretty awesome, but when you play games you know well you will notice things don't look right -games will appear to be too stretched and characters will look a bit fat.  



On the next page are two other important options.

VIDEO Advanced Arcade Aspect Ratio: Scaled

While keeping the correct aspect ratio, if you enable Scaled too then CoinOPS will attempt to fill up any awkward black space left around the game image.  So with the original setting you may have a bit of black space above and below the image, as well as on the left and right sides.  This setting will scale to fill any black space above and below and will look neater, while preserving pretty much how the game will look.  Hardcore arcade enthusiasts will disagree with this setting, but for play on a large HDTV I prefer this option.  Try it out and see what you think.

VECTOR BEAM Intensity: 1.000000

This will affect the line width of Vector games e.g. Asteroids, Major Havoc, Star Wars, Tempest etc.  The default is 0.750000 which in my opinion is too hard to see on an HDTV.  Even 1.000000 is a little weak in my opinion.  I requested the option to set even thicker lines but this has not proven popular enough to be considered.  If you look at an original Tempest arcade machine display and then look at CoinOPS emulation, you'll see what I mean.