Single Dots not displayed/turn into vertical Bars in Vector Games like Asteroids or Battle Zone (Linux)

[hkramski]

I have two issues with the display of single dots in vector games like Asteroids or Battle Zone on a fresh install of MAME on Arch Linux (I’m new to MAME).

1. With "-video opengl” (the default) single dots (missiles, radar objects etc.) are completely invisible. I need to switch to "-video soft” to make them appear.
2. However, if I try to enlarge them with e.g. "-beam_dot_size n”, they are only scaled up vertically, so they turn into vertical bars of height n and width 1.

To reproduce 2.:
$ mame asteroid -beam_width_min 1.5 -beam_width_max 1.5 -beam_dot_size 8 -flicker 0.1 -contrast 1.2 -gamma 1.2 -video soft

Wait until the UFO begins to fire/explodes.

Details of my box: mame-git 0.225.r401.gf21bb19990e-1, Intel HD Graphics 530 (i915), X.Org 1.20.9, OpenGL version string: 4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 20.2.1

[mahlemiut]

I can confirm this in MAME 0.225, at least on Battlezone. It does appear to work with -video bgfx, though. My system is pretty similar to yours (Arch Linux, X.Org 1.20.9, Intel HD 530 (Iris).

[rb6502]

The GL renderer is using actual GL points in this instance; that's probably not a well-tested feature of consumer OpenGL drivers because outside of MAME only CAD programs use them. It worked OK on the Nvidia blob last time I checked, but that was a while ago.

We're expecting to deprecate some/all of the existing renderers at some point in favor of Vulkan-on-everything (with MoltenVK underneath on the Mac) but I don't know what the time frame is going to be there.

[hkramski]

I can confirm this in MAME 0.225, at least on Battlezone. It does appear to work with -video bgfx, though. My system is pretty similar to yours (Arch Linux, X.Org 1.20.9, Intel HD 530 (Iris).

Thanks, -video bgfx works well.

[pmarks-net]

#13116 should fix this.