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Updating my cabinet, need advice

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Clavius:

Hi everyone, I hope you're all having a safe and happy holiday so far, and enjoying some classic games with your family and friends. :) I've been needing advice about a change I'd like to make to my arcade cabinet but haven't had the time to do until recently.  I took a crack at it myself over the last couple of weeks but was unable to make any progress and so I need some info and advice.

I built an arcade cabinet back in 2005 and something I've never been able to get working right is getting MAME games to automatically pick the right display modes.  I've been living with frame timing hiccups due to incorrect refresh rates and have decided I want to eliminate them if at all possible.  When I built it I tried to pick components that, at least I thought, would allow me to get the majority of MAME games to display in their original arcade resolutions and refresh rates:

Intel Pentium 4 @ 3.2GHz
1GB RAM
ArcadeVGA (based on the ATI 9200 I think)
Betson Kortek KT-2914 27" Multisync
Windows XP w/SP2
MaLa + various emulators

I've been able to get other emulated systems such as the TurboGrafx, C64, Gameboy, etc., to display perfectly with no tearing and no frame sync hiccups or sound hiccups, but MAME games have been an enormous pain so I gave up.  I've done a ton of research and experimented with different flavors of MAME, and I've reached the limit of my own abilities.

So my questions/concerns are:

1) With my current setup, is it even possible to have most MAME games display properly without refresh rate related frame hiccups?  I've seen some people say you can only get close, and others saying theirs is 100% perfect for most games.
 
     A) If no, then what hardware needs to be changed? My video card? When I tried AdvanceMAME for instance, it kept hard-locking my computer during the video mode tests. I did some poking around and read somewhere that the AVGA 9200 card is not programmable due to its custom bios and that's why it was crashing. So I tried GroovyMAME last week and couldn't get it to display anything either.  I would even be happy to use the new MAME option that speeds games up or down slightly so that the games speed changes to reflect your video card and monitor refresh rate without causing sound stutters, but no matter what I try that feature doesn't work when I enable it.  I'm not sure if it's a bug or what.

     B) If yes, then which flavor/build of MAME is best suited for accomplishing that with my current hardware?  I also don't mind using an older version, I could go as far back as .89b if I had to because I have a full set for it.

2) If replacing the video card is the right solution, would that cause issues with other things such as bios setup, or getting other emulated systems like the TurboGrafx, C64, etc., to display properly?  I think I remember reading something about that.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.  Have a great holiday!

fallacy:

My mame and rom set work %100 fine when I was running them on a p4. Maybe if you register for a dropbox account and give me the username and password. I can upload it for you, so you can test to see if it your software or your hardware.

Clavius:

Hi fallacy, thanks for the reply!  Do you have the same video card and monitor I do?  Just to be clear, I don't have an issue getting MAME to work, only displaying games in the proper refresh rate.

fallacy:

When you say refresh rate are you talking about resolution? What version of mame are you using.

paigeoliver:

Refresh rate and resolution are two totally different things.

I run .78 on my cabinet.

Assuming you aren't running bleeding edge mame, I would say your problem is configuration.

Try downloading the .89 version of mame32 (or mameui, whichever it is called in that version), so you can easily mess around with the config quickly without editing text files. Once you get it right in that then you can switch to the command line version.


--- Quote from: fallacy on December 25, 2012, 02:15:38 am ---When you say refresh rate are you talking about resolution? What version of mame are you using.

--- End quote ---


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