groovemame on laptop

[nocrack]

Hello!

I've got a Hantarex MTC 9000 cab monitor, and was hoping to get it working using My dell laptop.
The laptop is on win 7 and the graphic card is a radeon 3650
If I try using grooyemame on Win 7, I get the screen to come up but the picture is going right to left and no mater how long I try calibrating it I can't get it to stop and have a stable image. It can be up and down sometime, or almost stable but with moving ghost at the back. Anyway, I can't get something playable at all. (I'm lowering my desktop resolution to 640x480 as it doesn't seem that groovymame does it when I lunch a rom)
I  have changed the screen in the mame.ini to H9110 and made sure I use d3d driver but this hadn't made a difference.
I'm not sure what else to do and if it is supposed to work with my setup anyway.

I've then tried to use the linux ISO.
My  screen being a 1920×1080, arch start with this resolution and I don't seem to be able to change it if I try to put different parameters in grub.
The second problem is that Linux doesn't see that there is a screen connected to my VGA output. I've tried on my Ubuntu as well and it is not detected either (I've got a J-PAC btw)
I've then tried playing with xrandr but it is of no help and still doesn't detect the second monitor connected to it.

So I really need some help here
Has anyone tried to do something similar eiter on linux or on Windows ?
Thank you !!

[nocrack]

no one can help ?

[Calamity]

Hi nocrack,

Your setup is a bit problematic indeed:

- The Radeons HD 3xxx can't do low pixelclocks under Windows.
- Windows 7 does not support dynamic modelines
- In Linux, you'll need to force either DVI or VGA output from grub menu, the one that's the primary ouput, this might not work with a laptop where the primary output goes to the internal LCD.

Your best options are installing Windows XP and CRT_Emudriver, but I guess this is something you don't wantt to go through.

BTW, are you using any software to enable the custom low resolutions in Windows? GM needs this step in order to work. You can use Soft-15kHz for this in Windows 7.

[nocrack]

Hi Calamity,

It's not really that I don't want to it's more that \i only have laptops available to me
I could try running XP instead of Win7 but by the sound of it, that won't help too much, will it ?
I indeed have an XP laptop too but it has an intel graphic card... I've tried the linux cd on it and It runs at 300% speed so I didn't bother any further on that one...

I've tried to use soft15k on the win7, yes but for some reason as soon as I close the software and re-open it, it doesn't keep the settings. Same if I reboot or log out and log back in.

Thanks anyway ! at least I know it's not doable...
Do you know how to activate the VGA screen on grub though ? I'd like to explore that a little more.

Thank you very much !

[kourampies]

From my personal experience with multimonitor setups, Dells behave better than most laptops regarding external monitors.

On the ones I used, if you hit the the fn button combo to switch to external monitor right on POST, before the OS booted, it switched right away, and I think It treated the external monitor as primary/single, at least for non "aware" OSes and drivers.

So I think that with this method you may be lucky using Linux, maybe even Windows XP. Windows 7 certainly wont work though.