Help with Hantarex Polo/2 Star

[cloaknite]

Hi there! I'm new on this subject of the arcade cabinets and I would like some help if it's possible My cabinet has a Hantarex Polo/2 28 Star monitor and I bough J-Pac, everything is connected and despite the scrambled image on windows when I enter groovymame it gets stable, only with some weird colors. I choose a game and the picture is a little chopped and out of screen, every game as a different setting! How can I solve this? I'm really newbie on these sort of things 

My VGA is ATI Radeon X1650Pro, I installed the crt emudrivers 9.3, executed groovymame with -cc and then I executed VMMaker, what is the next step?

Btw, how can I fix the picture with windows or with a frontend like hyperspin?

Thank you very much for your patience!

[cloaknite]

Hi again, I managed to get the picture working on windows with ArcadeOSD but only one of the resolutions worked, it was 664x496, all the others were scrambled Is this normal? I couldn't fix the chopped picture yet, I think it has to do with the monitor setting, can someone help me in that field?

Here are some pictures of my progress 

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ko9o5uelwqda25g/CwU2a9eKHq#f:IMAG1301.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ko9o5uelwqda25g/CwU2a9eKHq#f:IMAG1302.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ko9o5uelwqda25g/CwU2a9eKHq#f:IMAG1303.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ko9o5uelwqda25g/CwU2a9eKHq#f:IMAG1304.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ko9o5uelwqda25g/CwU2a9eKHq#f:IMAG1305.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ko9o5uelwqda25g/CwU2a9eKHq#f:IMAG1306.jpg

[Calamity]

Hi cloacknite,

I have a doubt, is your monitor a Hantarex Polo/2 Star (Polostar, 15-25-31) or just a Polo/2 15-25?

For the Polostar, we have already the "pstar" preset.

[cloaknite]

Hi calamity, thanks for your answer, I think my monitor is a polo/2 star as you can see in this photo I took: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rcjv2q363fa3swa/IMAG1307.jpg
I've edited mame.ini and set the preset to pstar, when I open the emulator everything seems right but some games are chopped. When I run vmmaker it only gives me 1 modeline, I have all my roms in the roms folder and the preset on the vmmaker.ini is set to generic. By the way, there are some black stripes across the image on the left side, could it be some malfunction of the monitor?

Thank you very much!

[Calamity]

Hi cloacknite,

I believe the "Star" should be tri-sync, but please make sure this is so, because my Hantarex Polostar manual doesn't list any Polo/2 28", only 25" - 29".

By the way, that monitor allows direct VGA input, it probably will give you a better quality than the RGB. Just make sure you set the impedance right with the correspoding jumper.

If VMMaker just gives you 1 modeline, you're not probably using it right, edit VMMaker to point to your MAME executable, etc.

[cloaknite]

Hi again, I searched everywhere but I can't seem to find the low impedance jumper, can you help me on this one? Thanks a lot!

I plugged the VGA cable from the pc and everything went well, the image is sharper than before, I executed vmmaker and I got 80 resolutions but I can't seem to find one that works flawless. Even when I choose one and adapt the screen when I open a game the picture is off the borders, a lot!

[Calamity]

GM does not read your adjustments from Arcade_OSD, it reads everything from mame.ini (either the -monitor preset or the crt_range# options). You need to manually port the adjustments in Arcade_OSD to crt_range lines.

[cloaknite]

I think I'm on something here  When I put on mame.ini the arcade_25 preset the picture looks great but when I open the emulator it gives me a warning "SwitchRes: could not find a video mode that meets your specs" when I click ok the game opens and the picture seems ok, is something wrong with the config?

Thank you for your patience!

[Calamity]

I think I'm on something here  When I put on mame.ini the arcade_25 preset the picture looks great but when I open the emulator it gives me a warning "SwitchRes: could not find a video mode that meets your specs" when I click ok the game opens and the picture seems ok, is something wrong with the config?

It's just that you picked the 25 kHz preset, and because you don't have any 25 kHz resolution available in the system (you didn't create those with vmmaker) then GM turns -switchres off and you're running everything on the default desktop's resolution, with hardware stretching, it just seems ok to you because probably you haven't seen the real thing working 

BTW, before you break your monitor, please make a research to find the working ranges of that model, I still don't know if your monitor is dual-sync, tri-sync, etc.

[cloaknite]

So it is better to use a 15Khz preset? I've read that only a few games work with 25Khz resolution. I'm trying to get the specs of my monitor to better understand it's limits 

From what I gathered my monitor is 15-25 khz, by the way, when I turn on the pc the windows boot screen looks flawless, maybe if I try that resolution things work better?
Can't I use a 25khz resolution for the desktop and the frontend and 15khz resolutions for the games/emulator? Or is it going to affect the picture geometry?

I contacted a Hantarex technician and is answer was this: "the chassis is tri sync - but it only supports 640x480  and 800x600 res - normally anything higher then 800x600 will cause a split image on the screen"

Thanks again for your patience, I'm a noob on this sort of things

[Calamity]

All right, then you've got a Polostar, and you can safely use the 'pstar' settings. Forget about the 800x600 mode, it won't work although advertised.

Edit vmmaker.ini, set MonitorType = "CUSTOM", set ModeTableMethod_XML = 2, and add these custom specs:
monitor_specs0    15700-15800, 45-80, 4.000, 4.700, 5.300, 0.062, 0.062, 0.740, 0, 0, 288, 448
monitor_specs1    16100-16200, 45-80, 1.280, 4.500, 6.420, 0.062, 0.062, 0.740, 0, 0, 288, 448
monitor_specs2    25100-25200, 45-80, 0.200, 0.400, 8.000, 0.040, 0.040, 0.640, 0, 0, 384, 768
monitor_specs3    31500-31600, 45-80, 0.170, 0.350, 5.500, 0.040, 0.040, 0.640, 0, 0, 576, 800

Then create the modes again (run vmmaker + restart). Now set the monitor option in mame.ini to 'pstar', and run GM.

Your modes might be still not properly centered in all ranges anyway, because each monitor can have slightly different adjustments internally.

[cloaknite]

You're the man calamity  I've set the vmmaker.ini and the mame.ini like you said and restarted, when the system booted the resolution was already nice! 640x480 30khz   
Now I think I have to adjust the values that you gave me because the picture is almost always offcentered, in the vertical games the picture is great and centered but in the horizontal ones the pictures is always to the right, witch value I have to change?
specs0 is for 15khz games, specs1 to 16khz, specs2 to 25khz and specs3 to 31khz, right?

Thank you a lot

Here are some screens of the result:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ko9o5uelwqda25g/CwU2a9eKHq#f:IMAG1351.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ko9o5uelwqda25g/CwU2a9eKHq#f:IMAG1352.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ko9o5uelwqda25g/CwU2a9eKHq#f:IMAG1353.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ko9o5uelwqda25g/CwU2a9eKHq#f:IMAG1354.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ko9o5uelwqda25g/CwU2a9eKHq#f:IMAG1355.jpg

[Calamity]

You have basically two options:

- Option 1: adjust by hardware. The Polostar allows adjusting the horizontal phase of each range individually. On your monitor's chasis, find the East-West board, and on it, the RV1 pot. This will allow you to center the 15 KHz range on the horizontal, while leaving the others (25, 31 kHz) unmodified.

- Option 2 (recommended): adjust by software. Edit mame.ini, set the 'monitor' option to 'custom', and edit these lines:

crt_range0 15700-15800, 50-65, 1.800, 0.400, 7.400, 0.064, 0.160, 1.056, 0, 0, 192, 256, 0, 0
crt_range1 16200-16300, 50-65, 0.200, 0.400, 8.000, 0.040, 0.040, 0.640, 0, 0, 256, 264, 512, 528
crt_range2 25300-25400, 50-65, 0.200, 0.400, 8.000, 0.040, 0.040, 0.640, 0, 0, 384, 400, 768, 800
crt_range3 31500-31600, 50-65, 0.170, 0.350, 5.500, 0.040, 0.040, 0.640, 0, 0, 400, 512, 0, 0

Now, the values in black, are the ones that you need to tweak in order to center the 15 kHz range. To shift it to the left, you need to increase the first one and decrease the second, e.g. 3.800, 0.400, 5.400.

You don't need to mess with VMMaker anymore, this is just a matter of editing mame.ini and launching games to try.

[cloaknite]

Hi calamity, i managed to center the picture on the screen! Thanks a lot! Now i've got to find a place to fix the black bars on the left side of the screen  Strange that they are larger when the resolution is lower 
By the way, I noticed that the picture doesn't fill the screen vertically, is there a way to fix it or is the picture ratio?

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ko9o5uelwqda25g/CwU2a9eKHq#f:IMAG1365.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ko9o5uelwqda25g/CwU2a9eKHq#f:IMAG1366.jpg

Thank you very much calamity!

[Calamity]

Hi calamity, i managed to center the picture on the screen! Thanks a lot! Now i've got to find a place to fix the black bars on the left side of the screen  Strange that they are larger when the resolution is lower 

Hi cloaknite, I recommend you to ask the experts on the Monitor/Video subforum, this looks like an electronic problem.

By the way, I noticed that the picture doesn't fill the screen vertically, is there a way to fix it or is the picture ratio?

This question is asked every day (literally), so I already have a template answer:

- GM can make all your resolutions to almost fit perfectly on the HORIZONTAL, once you find your custom specs.
- No software can control the VERTICAL size of a resolution on a CRT monitor, you need to adjust it physically (potentiometers, service menu, etc.).

I'm thinking I should probably copy this to the main GM's thread