Gorf issues with CGA monitor

[ahofle]

I'm getting the blank screen thing with Gorf for some reason.  I can hear the sounds and the MAME menus come up fine, but no game video.  When I've had similar problems in the past, Calamity provided a custom monitor description line that fixed the issue. Gorf does have a pretty strange resolution in MAME (204 x 320 or something) so I'm wondering if this is a similar issue?

[Calamity]

Hi ahofle,

That resolution shouldn't be any problem. Please create a log of gorf in your system so I can see what's happening.

[ahofle]

Thanks Calamity...log attached.

Below are my monitor settings:

#
# CORE SWITCHRES OPTIONS
#
modeline                  1
monitor                   cga
monitor_connector         auto
monitor_orientation       rotate
monitor_aspect            4:3
monitor_debug             0
monitor_doublescan        1
monitor_dotclock          0
monitor_ymin              0
soundsync                 0
cleanstretch              1
changeres                 1
redraw                    0
#monitor_specs0            auto
monitor_specs0            15250-15700, 49.50-65.00, 2.000, 4.700, 8.000, 0.064, 0.192, 1.024, 0, 0, 288, 384
monitor_specs1            auto
monitor_specs2            auto
monitor_specs3            auto
monitor_specs4            auto
monitor_specs5            auto
monitor_specs6            auto
monitor_specs7            auto
magic_resolution          auto
powerstrip                0

[krick]

I'll let Calamity provide the real analysis of your log file, but I just wanted to say that I noticed a warning about a missing directX dll file.

It's probably not related to your issue, but have you updated your DirectX files using the web installer?...

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35

It can't hurt.

[Calamity]

Hi ahofle,

The gorf game case is interesting. You need to enable to -artwork_crop option to make it work properly, even if no artwork for this game is present.

[ahofle]

Ah you are the man once again!  I'll give that a shot tonight, thanks!

[krick]

Isn't Gorf one of those games that has a starfield generator background similar to galaxian/frogger ?

Maybe it requires a similar hack.


EDIT:  Nope.  It looks like Gorf has a layout file that comes with stock MAME (i.e. not bundled with artwork assets) though it may actually be internal.  I'm not sure what it does, but it's probably changing the rendered size of the game, which is why "artwork_crop" fixes it...
 
http://mamedev.org/source/src/mame/layout/gorf.lay.html

It's possible that there's a bug in the layout.  I don't think any of them should do anything unless artwork is enabled.

As a side note, shouldn't artwork_crop always be on globally for GroovyMAME?  I can't see any reason to ever have the artwork not cropped on an arcade monitor.

[ahofle]

Well that did the trick.  I also went ahead and enabled the crop for all games in mame.ini as suggested by krick.
Thanks!

[Calamity]

Thanks krick, that explains all.

As a side note, shouldn't artwork_crop always be on globally for GroovyMAME?  I can't see any reason to ever have the artwork not cropped on an arcade monitor.

Yes, this is something I should have added long ago, it will be there for the next release.