Main > Main Forum
Updating my cabinet, need advice
Clavius:
Thanks dgame, a good friend of mine is coming over tonight and we're going to see how far we can get with cabmame, as I think I haven't tried that one yet. I'll report back with our progress. I think if cabmame doesn't work, I'll most likely replace my old ArcadeVGA with an ATI card listed in the link you supplied and do the custom drivers.
Thanks gray_area, I'm pretty familiar with all the MAME options at this point... I've spent so much time changing them to every possible combination that I almost know them by heart. :) I'm thinking cabmame might do the trick.
Clavius:
dgame - I've made more progress with cabmame in an hour than I have with other versions of mame over the course of months. Thank you so much for recommending it. I deleted my previous mame folder and started over from scratch with a fresh install of the latest version of cabmame (0.146). Seems like a lot of games just work with default settings and adjust the game speed up or down by a few percent, which I'm completely fine with. In fact, cabmame helped me notice something I hadn't before...
I'm wondering if this is normal and if it's directly related to my difficulties in getting other versions of mame to sync correctly with my monitor: it seems that when I'm in resolutions that are supposed to be a sepcific refresh rate, something like 640x480@60 for example, my monitor is *actually* in 640x480@61. Almost ALL the video modes my card/monitor combo are doing are slightly off (either slightly above or below) from what the refresh rate is supposed to be according to the manual! I'm guessing that all crt arcade monitors are slightly different in this way? It would explain why I had such a hard time getting a 60Hz game to not skip frames on a 60Hz display mode... because I was actually displaying 61Hz. If someone could elaborate on this topic that would be fantastic.
Anyhow, cabmame is a big step in the right direction for me and for the first time in a long time I don't feel like smashing my caninet into kindling and roasting marshmallows. Some games are going to need some fine tuning, as they don't seem to be defaulting to the best resolutions (mortal kombat and r-type for example both default to 640x480) so AVRes is next on my todo list. Thanks for pointing that out as well.
I'll post back soon with more results.
Clavius:
Just wanted to post an update - so far I really like cabmame. The one shortcoming I've found is that there is no hardware stretching or anything, which would be quite handy for vertical games where there isn't a good native resolution on my monitor. A good friend of mine who is a programmer is going to attempt making a custom version from the source code that will add in that feature (he's not just doing it for me, he also likes cabmame and wants that feature now). I think he said he's also going to adjust the auto resolution selection logic so that something like AVRes would be unnecessary. So thanks again, dgame, cabmame has really saved the day, and my sanity.
:cheers:
Also, wanted to bump this to see if anyone could maybe expand on the topic in my above post regarding my monitor actually displaying 61Hz instead of 60. If anyone can explain or point me to relevant info that would be very appreciated!