Modeline creation and game resolution issues (save me Calamity!)

[hayaeti]

Hi Calamity,

I hope you can help me out here... I did something stupid...
I had groovymame working great with version 146?  and decided it was time to update and try some new things out.

Only I managed to break EVERYTHING.

So here's my problem....
Once upon a time I had a lot of trouble see http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,121313.0.html

Once I changed this value in vmmaker everything was cool...

Nowadays, after all my messing about I seem to have broken all my resolutions.

I'm not sure if I have a d9200 or a d9800 but I've generated with d9800 in mind, it says it found 600+ modelines on windows xp 64 (is this correct?) most of which it discarded and kept 120??

CPS2 games like street fighter/final fight work great in native res.
If I try and play Galaga... it says the following resolution is used 244x288 60.61> 400x288 60.61 and my monitor makes the nicest high pitch noise you've ever seen and looks terrible. (like two overlapping images)

If I change the mame.ini to d9200 it tries 768x576 60.61 and my monitor doesn't seem to handle the high res image in a polite fashion....  it's washed out, with a nasty pattern-esque thing that makes me feel like it was never meant to go that high...

Same thing happens with games like dondon pachi ....

240x320 > 432x320 if set to d9200 and 768x320 if set to 9800 --- but if I put something stupid in the mame.ini that it doesn't understand, it goes to 688x469 (and actually looks pretty good)
same thing happens if I don't specify my monitor in the mame.ini... galaga will actually work at a resolution of 400x288 (same resolution that causes the high pitched sounds above but this time perfectly - if you don't count the fact that I can't shoot half the time )

I can't understand what I'm doing wrong here...

I want to play the games as close to their original resolution as possible, and I know that it's not possible on some vertical games.  I'd just like to get the best out of my system....
I'm not sure if I'm not generating the best possible resolutions I can, or I'm configuring things in a bad way...

I hope something I'm saying makes sense...

Basically my monitor doesn't seem to like displaying a good picture in high res, so I need to keep the res as close to original as I can...
But I feel like I'm not getting the right video modes   I also don't understand why I have to change a like in vmmaker when my monitor is meant to be supported

[Calamity]

Hi hayaeti,

I hope you can help me out here... I did something stupid...
I had groovymame working great with version 146?  and decided it was time to update and try some new things out.

Once you set it up right, the new versions work much, much better than before, so you did the right thing.

I'm not sure if I have a d9200 or a d9800

Well, that's not a good start...

If you're not sure what your monitor is, but your sure it's a tri-sync, my advice is to stick with the 'arcade_15_25_31' standard preset, which should be safe enough. Notice you don't need to actually touch VMMaker any more, just select this preset in mame.ini, and that's all.

More accurate presets for the D9200 were attempted in this thread:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,117334.msg1403336.html#msg1403336

... unfortunately MonkeyJug didn't fulfill his promise to report back so we still don't know if those settings were any better.

When testing these things, make sure to create logs of the games that don't look right and post them here (groovymame.exe romname -v >romname.txt) so I can see what's going on. Also, take pictures if you can.

[hayaeti]

Firstly, thanks for the quick reply!

I found this thread that you had linked to somewhere else...
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,117334.msg1403336.html#msg1403336

In there, someone posted some custom timings for their 9200 but had tried to set it up like a 9800 with a few tweaks?

I tried these settings and it seemed to fix EVERYTHING.

so I used VMMaker to create modelines and then used these custom settings.
Are you saying I didn't need to use vmmaker at all, just use the presets/custom timings in the mame.ini and everything will try and work itself out?

I had to generate a new mame.ini as well, as there was some change to the settings which left me with strange switchres errors everytime a game loaded.

I guess what really threw me were the large resolutions it was using to display some games in.. 8xx by 4xx etc... 

Mind you, I found this solution at 2:30am so now I'm tiiiired...

I might take a photo when I get home later of the weird mesh effect my screen displays if the brightness is too high (it's not so noticeable otherwise and just around the edges) and see if anyone here (you?) knows what may be causing it... I can only presume a bad monitor

and yes, I am naughty for not supplying a log file, sorry