H9110 issues

[Podbod]

Hey guys!

So I finally got my shiny new jpac/radeon4xxx combo working in my cab and before hooking up the monitor I did all the driver set up on a normal CRT. All good, modelines found and saved etc.

Tried to boot on the arcade monitor but after a vary fast rolling dos screen it went black. (trying to set 800*600 I guess, dunno why the jpac didn't sort that out). Anyway, rebooted on the crt. Used the arcadeosd tool and selected 640*480i. Crt turns off, switch over to Jpac and rolling screen. Fiddle with screen controls and screen comes into focus.

Now this is where the issues start
640*480i is extremely flickery. About a cm of vertical flicker. Setting it as the desktop mode drops me to a very washed out (as if brightness was boosted 300%) XP desktop with the startbar missing and diagonal lines along the screen (as if the horizonal sync was out, only it isnt)
I've never run this monitor at this res before (My old setup was arcadevga mark 1 and that did 640*288i or something in windows. Maybe it just can't do it? Maybe my monitor is so old that its just unable to cope with this res?

I flicked through various other modes. Quite a few had rolling screens but then I expect the different resolutions to cause this with their different v-hz rates. However one thing is clear. Anything above 280ish vertical lines has this crazy flicker.

I tried using a lower res as my desktop res but windows was still messed up (Zsnes seemed fine tho, I'd have tried mame but when I went to try that I realised I'd left my rom drive in London, 80miles away! Argh!). Often I'd only get a partial screen. Is there some limit in windows that prevents anything below 640*480p?

Long term it might not be an issue. I can remove the duff modes and set up GameEx and all the emulators to use lower resolutions. Then just auto boot into GameEx bypassing windows entirely.

However, if anyone has any advice on things I might be able to do to improve the situation it'd be much appreciated


TLDR : Resolutions above 280ish vertical lines have horrible flicker. Windows is bleached out and missing some of the screen. At lower resolutions windows is still visibly broken and mostly unusable. Anyone got any advice? Is my 9110 just too old? Or is there possibly some other issue?


Cheers for any advice

Pod

[Calamity]

Hi Podbod,

I've got two Hantarex MTC 9110 monitors and they're great. There're several issues going on there:

- Wash up colours. Fix this the first. I guess you've just installed your new j-pac and you didn't have this problem before. The j-pac has a built-in video amplifier, which is necessary to adapt vga signals to the standard used by arcade monitors. However, in my experience, I always needed to correct the contrast pot in the monitor's chassis when switching from a pcb source to vga+jpac. Sometimes you also need to fix the color pots on the monitor neck board.

- Rolling screen happens when your vertical frequency pot needs adjustment. This one is on the remote board. Go into Arcade_OSD and set a mode with a 60 Hz refresh. Adjust vfreq pot to get a stable picture. Then set a mode with the lowest refresh available, 50 Hz or so. Re-adjust. You need to find the sweet spot where both frequencies are stable. Then you'll be covering the whole useful range.

- You may also need to adjust the horizontal frequency pot. Set one of the modes with highest horizontal frequency, around 16.7 KHz, those will be the  256-288 lines tall modes. Adjust until you get a stable picture. Then go back to your desktop mode and make sure it's still on sync.

- Forget about getting a stable picture during boot. J-pac can't resolve some of the high frequency modes built in the modern video cards.

- Interlaced modes are what they are, they flicker a lot. However the flicker is more annoying on some monitors than others. Some video cards seem to produce nicer interlaced modes than others, for some reason. This is something you have to live with.

[Podbod]

Ah right. I'd played with the normal controls to adjust Hfreq, VFreq but hadn't touched any of the others. (I didnt even know some of them existed).
I'll play with them tomorrow and see if I can improve the picture. As mentioned I did manage to get a good picture at the lower resolutions but maybe its a cliff style situation? A tiny bit over and the picture drastically fails? (clue might be that the limited colour arcadeosd screen at 640*480 isn't washed out but the desktop is?)
If I cant get it any better I'll take some photos/videos

Shame about the interlaced modes. I was able to run windows on the old arcadevga which I think was some special interlaced mode that was essentially 640 *288 or something? That didnt flicker anywhere near as much but perhaps that the same thing as the washed out stuff and a little fiddle will improve it. Just to clarify. This isn't a shimmer style flicker. It literally looks like the image is moving up and down about 1cm every frame.

Cheers for the info.

Pod

[Podbod]

Played with it some more this morning. Contrast and brightness altered as suggested and the wash out is gone! Horray.
But the flicker is still there (sometimes) and now that I can see clearly I have identified further issues.

The screen often looks like its rolled partly over as if its started drawing the screen from about 1/5 down. Then theres a small gap and then it draws the first 1/5 at the bottom of the monitor. When selecting a resolution it'll often roll the picture vertically once and settle like this.
Each resolution is slightly different (sometimes its half of the screen!) and it also changes depending on how much information is on the screen. Opening control panel or being on a arcadeosd color pallette screen often results in it being 100% correct for instance. Ther vertical flicker explained in my earlier posts at 640*480 is actually only present when in the arcadeOSD screen. Again, could be a symptom of how much work its having to do?

I know you said ignore dos modes but if it helps the boot screen is now split down the center (as I expected the jpac to do with a 31khz mode) but the top half is diagonal where as the bottom half seems to be fine!

Do you think this is likely to be a capacitor issue? I've been reading around and replacing them seems to be the first step people make but I'm a little reluctant to play with all the high voltage stuff!!

Cheers for any further help

Pod

P.s I'm also having trouble getting windows to boot into the correct resolution. If I boot with the arcade monitor plugged in it gets past dos and then the jpac drops sync and never recovers. Swapping in a pc crt doesnt display anything either. If I boot with the pc crt plugged in I get nothing as expected but if I swap to the arcade monitor at this point it displays ok. I assume its some kind of monitor auto detection thing windows is trying to do but I've changed the monitor to default (away from pnp) and it hasn't made any difference. Any ideas on this one too? Cheers again

[Calamity]

P.s I'm also having trouble getting windows to boot into the correct resolution. If I boot with the arcade monitor plugged in it gets past dos and then the jpac drops sync and never recovers. Swapping in a pc crt doesnt display anything either. If I boot with the pc crt plugged in I get nothing as expected but if I swap to the arcade monitor at this point it displays ok. I assume its some kind of monitor auto detection thing windows is trying to do but I've changed the monitor to default (away from pnp) and it hasn't made any difference. Any ideas on this one too? Cheers again

You *need* to use the dvi output with the HD 4xxx cards, by means of a dvi-vga adapter. This will fix this issue.

As for the vertical inestability you're describing, that's definitely something you wouldn't expect from a properly working monitor. There's something odd with vertical circuits. I have never repaired a monitor so I can't be of much help here but there're plenty of skilled people in this forum that will help. However before messing with that I would try using some contact cleaner on the remote board pots.

The boot screens you describe are the best you can get with the HD 4xxxx, trust me on this.

[Podbod]

I'm already using a dvi-vga converter (As otherwise how would I be getting the input to the jpac. Or are you suggesting that the converter I'm using might not be fully compatable etc?) but acutally that got me thinking about the fact that theres two dvi outs on the back of the card. Didn't occur to me at the time that it might be swapping over the output when it reaches windows (dunno why but its plausable right?)
That might explain why swapping to the PC crt also doesnt show anything.
The the PC pnp monitor in from boot it might recognise its that port and then keep it set. Meaning I can swap over to the arcade monitor fine.

Cheers again for the reply. Nice to know I;m making some progress at least

Pod

[krick]

*usually* the port you need to plug into the JPAC is the one on the "bottom" of the card, that is, the one that's closest to your motherboard.

Typically, the installation procedure would go something like this...

Start with PC hooked up to "normal" monitor on primary DVI port.
Set desktop resolution to 640x480.
Uninstall standard ATI Catalyst drivers.
Run Catalyst Cleaner ( http://www.ultimarc.com/cat-uninstaller.exe ).
Install CRT_EmuDriver.
Shut down PC, disconnect "normal" monitor, attach arcade monitor to primary DVI port using dongle.
Boot up PC to 640x480 interlaced desktop on arcade monitor.
Configure and run VMMaker to generate optimal resolutions.
Profit.

I seem to recall reading about someone having issues when they were switching back and forth between a normal and arcade monitor and/or having them both connected at the same time.  I think it might have had something to do with the EDID plug and play stuff in the normal monitor.

[Podbod]

That settles it then as I had it in the top port! That means that apart from the v-pos issue I think its all sorted.

I'm getting married tomorrow tho so I wont be able to play with it again for at least a month. I'll repost in the monitor section then to confirm if its a cap kit job

Cheers once again for all your help guys.

Pod

[krick]

I'm getting married tomorrow tho so I wont be able to play with it again for at least a month.

LOL.  Unintentionally funny on so many levels.

Congratulations.   

[Calamity]

Congratulations Pod!

[Podbod]

Hey guys,

All married and settled so got a chance to play with the cab a little bit more.

Moved to the lower port and that sorted the boot issues! Woo. One down

For the screen roll I went ahead and replaced the 20 common capacitors (capkit plus the big 470uf cap) but I got no improvement.
I've taken a video now. Would really appreciate it if you could take a look and see if you've got any ideas.



Incedentally. I removed the keyboard connector from the jpac and this has the effect of cutting the power but still allows the video signal to carry through to the monitor. It dimmed right down (as expected given you told me it boosts the signal) but the picture started rolling. Adjusting the v-sync couldn't stablise it. Dunno if this means anything. Who knows what the jpac circutry is doing to the signal without the boost but thought I might as well mention it.

Cheers for any help. Let me know if I can provide any more info.

Pod

[Podbod]

As soon as I wrote the previous post I remembered I've still got a vga cable connector attached to the monitor (added back when I was still using an arcadevga-ipac combo)

Went back and removed the jpac dvi cable and attached the vga cable to my gfx card and I get a perfect picture (well once I remembered to disconnect the jpac's power which was signal bleeding into the jamma connector).
So looks like the signal boost of the jpac is just too much for the monitor (or its just plain faulty). I'm going to ping an email to Andy asking for suggestions but if anyones had a similar issue then I'd be interested to hear any potential solutions.

Cheers

Pod

P.s Finally got mame all running. Oh it looks so sweet in the correct resolutions! Double dragon with no scroll tearing! Bliss. Many thanks to Cal and the groovy mame team!

[Calamity]

Podbod, I didn't get it, you mean you connected the monitor completely bypassing the jpac?

[Podbod]

Yeah. However now it may be something else.
Andy replied mentioning I should be routing the composite sync line of the jamma harness to either the composite line or the H- line of the monitor.
H9110's take rgb and h and v. The VGA cable I have spliced in goes direct to these inputs and feeds true h and v syncs but the jamma harness obviously is wired slightly differently since its composite sync.  It maybe that composite sync is wired to both v and h or maybe just h. I will have a look tomorrow and try changing this and see if I can improve the problem. I've also read about using a 5k resistor between v and gnd so I may give this a go tomorrow if I can find one in the shopping crush that is New Year's Eve

I've also asked Andy what order the jpac does the sync check, amplification and sync combination in an effort to see if I branch away and skip some of them to help isolate the problem.

Pod

[krick]

Regarding the signal boost from the JPAC, you might want to look for a "Contrast" adjustment on your monitor.

See this thread for more info...

http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Number=289905

[Podbod]

Yeah Cal pointed that our further up and was useful in reducing the crazy brightness but appears unrealted to the current problem as no setting has any bearing in the problem at all.

Pod