New to GM. A little confused about settings.

[timply]

First off my specs: I have a (Betson) Kortek KT-2914F multisync monitor with an ArcadeVGA 2 x550 running Windows 7 64 bit.

Now i've used the original mame with Ultimarcs recommended settings for years and even using Gavin Bensons ini tool i've gotten headaches messing with it. I know cab owners have talked really well about GM and I hate I waited this long to try it out. I created a fresh mame.ini and changed the "monitor" setting to arcade_15_25_31. Switching between d3d and ddraw both pictures look fuzzy and not as crisp and clear as my old mame64. I know there are a lot of options in the core switchres but i'm a little overwhelmed because I have no idea what i'm doing when it comes to those.

Any advice?


Edit: Identified correct ArcadeVGA version.

[Calamity]

Hi timply,

When using an ArcadeVGA with its original drivers, you'll need to enable these two options in mame.ini:

-lock_system_modes
-refresh_dont_care

- New option -lock_system_modes for mode filtering. In order to limit the possibility of selecting a potentially dangerous mode, the new option -lock_system_modes will prevent any mode not created by us from being picked. This will enforce GroovyMAME to use custom modes previously generated by CRT_EmuDriver. For non-ATI cards this option will block all modes actually since none of them is recognized as custom. This is the case of NVidia cards in combination with PowerStrip, or the ArcadeVGA 3000, where its custom modes are actually reported by the system as standard modes. So for these cases you should disable this option.

- New option -refresh_dont_care. The new algorithm will filter resolutions that are out of your monitor specs. Old versions of the ArcadeVGA, as well as the Soft-15kHz program, label all resolutions as 60 Hz. This means that if this value were to be taken seriously, resolutions above 240 lines would be out of range for most arcade monitors. This option is provided in order to cope with this peculiarity, and it basically tells the algorithm to ignore refresh for range checking.

[timply]

Thanks! I'll give these options a shot.

[timply]

Its seems to look better now with those settings enabled. The Donkey Kong games are to big for the screen though.

What about all of the monitor specs I see people posting? Do I not need those because I have an AVGA card? Because that's what really confused me the most.

[NightSprinter]

Timply, http://www.casinotech.com/kortek/support_materials/PDFs/CRT_Manuals/KT2914F_2914DF_Service_Manual.pdf This will be of great help if you ever decude to use Calamity's CRT_EmuDriver.  The timings are provided surprisingly-early into the manual.  Calamity might be able to further help you until I can get my linux issues fixed.

[timply]

So there's no reason to use the monitor specs if i'm not using Calamity's video drivers?

[Calamity]

Its seems to look better now with those settings enabled. The Donkey Kong games are to big for the screen though.

What about all of the monitor specs I see people posting? Do I not need those because I have an AVGA card? Because that's what really confused me the most.

You can't specify custom timings with the ArcadeVGA, but that's just one of the functions of the monitor specs, the other one (and most important) is to tell GM the frequency ranges of your monitor. This will be used for choosing the appropiate resolution for your monitor.

So, if yours is a tri-sync monitor, and you have installed the AVGA's tri-sync utility, use 'monitor    arcade_15_25_31'  in mame.ini, so that GM knows it can use higher freq resolutions.

Vertical games like dkong that are 256 lines tall won't fit in your screen when rotated unless you manually tweak the v-size control. This is what you're supposed to do.

[timply]

When trying to change the v-size setting all it does is make my picture smaller, it never shows any more of the actual donkey kong screen. Its still to big but it now has black borders across the top and bottom. Does that make sense? All this technology is to harsh on my fragile mind! 

[NightSprinter]

Are you rotating the image, or do you wish to keep it in a square aspect ratio?  I know for the testing I'm doing for Calamity in Windows on my monitor, I have vertical games set to be stretched to a 3:4 ratio (and it looks quite nice at that).

[timply]

I'd like to keep it vertical. I'll entertain any idea though. I'm still just getting used to the settings and things with GM. Its quite different from going to the ini's of the default MAME setup. Even with the the AVRes program I was having problems with some of the vertical games. Maybe my monitor is not setup right? But I'm not sure what else I can do with it.

[krick]

Try making a log from running donkey kong and attach it to your reply...

groovymame.exe romname -v >romname.txt

I want to be sure that groovymame is actually doing the right thing.  If it is, then it's just a matter of figuring out your monitor's vertical height adjustment to allow more lines on the screen.

You may want to post a question over in the BYOAC Monitor/Video forum about your specific monitor to see if anyone there can help you figure it out.

[timply]

Ok, here ya go.

[krick]

I'll let Calamity do the detailed analysis, but right off the bat, one thing sticks out...

SwitchRes: Monitor: arcade_15_25_31 Orientation: vertical

Is your monitor actually installed vertically in your cabinet?

Also, when you started messing with GroovyMAME, did you remove your old mame.ini file and create a new one by running groovymame.exe -cc  ?

[timply]

Its installed horizontally. Yea, I created a new mame.ini using that method. The only 2 games that I have actually tried that mess up are Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong 3. Pac-man and Ms Pac-man work great, as does 1942 and Gun.Smoke. Those are about the only vertical games that I have tried thus far.

[Calamity]

Ok, I now see what's going on, GM is picking 1024x768 for refresh accuracy reasons (as compared to 400x256), but AVGA's 1024x768 is a fake resolution, it does not have 768 lines indeed, unless you run Ultimarc's tri-sync utility (as I mentioned above). That's why borders are chopped.

Try using 'sync_refresh_tolerance 8.0' in mame.ini. That should avoid 400x256 from being dropped in the first place. You may need to adjust your v-size anyway, but at least the game should fit. Please post a log when done. If have a deficit of AVGA logs.

[timply]

That worked! Thanks Calamity! I'll let ya know if I run into anymore problems. New dkong.txt posted also.

[Calamity]

Thanks for the log!

[timply]

I can do logs for whatever game you want. Just message me if you need anything. I'll be happy to help out.