Video cards not suitable for Groovy Mame

[mazinger-z]

I'd like to share this information with others so you can spare yourself some hassle.

There are some video cards that won't work reliably with some dotclock values. While this is a minor issue with Soft15KHz and PowerStrip (as you can set your modelines avoiding the offending dotclock values), it's a big problem with Groovy Mame, because, even if you tweak the problematic modelines, Groovy Mame has the ability to alter the modelines present in the system to best suit any game it runs. Every now and then, it will choose a dotclock value that doesn't work, and you'll be angry.
I had this problem with the first 2 cards I bought, then the 3rd one worked perfectly. The 2 troublesome cards are:
- GeCube Radeon 9200 256 Mb AGP (GC-R9200-D3)
- GeCube Radeon 9200SE 128 Mb AGP (R9200L/SE)

[Calamity]

This is highly interesting to have for future reference, thanks. There're more problematic cards we might add here too (for reasons different that dotclock stability).

[dmarcum99]

I have 2 Sapphire ATI video cards that do not work with my ATI chipset motherboards, but they do work with the intel chipset motherboards.

Sapphire 9200SE 64mb PCI
Sapphire 9250 256mb PCI

I thought these would be perfect for my linux groovymame, but alas not so lucky.  The screen starts to scrool and then freezes.
While not problematic for myself as I've found other cards to work, this may help someone else down the road to avoid any headaches or unneded purchases.

[Ansa89]

That sounds strange since these graphic cards are all based on the well known ATI 9200/9250 chipsets, which let me get low dotclock resolution (my test card is a Powercolor branded ATI 9250).

I'm wondering if the brand play a so relevant role for low dotclock capability and other fancy features...

[mazinger-z]

In my case, it was not a matter of how low the dotclock was. Some specific values would not work. Just increasing or decreasing it by one step made the problem disappear. Since the GPU is exactly the same on other cards that do work, I suspect that some external component on the card causes the problem, maybe a wrong resistor or capacitor, that the guys at GeCube used by mistake.