Hope this helps someone.
I have an arcadeVGA 7000 -> JPAC. Been using older MAME (0.110 or so) with Ultimarc drivers. To upgrade my New Astro City cab to MAME 0.142 using MS29 monitor I:
- uninstall Ultimarc drivers using AMD catalyst driver remover utility
- install crt_emudriver_6.5
- install groovymame 0.144 (o I believe)
- get the MS29 custom settings and include them into the newly generated MAME.ini file
- set monitor type to custom
- the CRT driver comes with a utility that scans Mame and patches the ATI driver to support those resolutions (I set my limit to 90 due to hyper spin bug)
All in all works great!!! ArcadeVGA gives me clean BIOS and windows boot screen, but then emudriver takes over. I noticed that some games I had to force into 640x480i now look great at native resolution!!
But there are also a couple of new issues I found, most not due to ArcadeVGA but rather monitor/software:
1) some games (like mortal kombat) are very far from 60hz. This might cause some vertical hold issues for some folks. On my machine, I don't tell vertical rolls, but rather the bottom of the picture squishes the last few lines much closer together. I know one can't force 60hz on this game, otherwise monitor can't refresh fast enough this higher resolution.
2) Mame info screens are at desktop resolution and not game resolution. MAME now switches its game resolution after warnings/info screens. Not sure when this changed.
3) I'm a big neo geo fan. And most games look perfect. Except for metal slug 1. I had to change the horizontal resolution 1 up via mslug.ini because the game was cropping first 20 horizontal lines and last 20. 95% of the frame. Basically only 2 squares on bottom corner were showing. Strange.
4) is it my, or is MAME much slower on same hardware (0.110 to 0.142 jump). Mslug3 takes FOREVER to load on my AMD 1700+ 256mb ram system
. Also, hyper spin is a PIG.. Time to upgrade.
Overall, very happy. Thank you all!!