made the jump to groovy/crtemu...not going well :(

[silverslc]

My old arcade vga monitor which at the time with generated scanlines looked pretty good... well thats until I saw mame on a 15khz monitor.. wow! Anyway I got my 19"crt arcade monitor and have begun this journey only to find myself ready to throw in the towel. 

System specs

intel 3.0 core2duo
2GB Ram
j-pac

winxp32
ati x600

The first fall which really isn't all that bad is I had a 141 complete perfectly working set of Roms .. Well I tried patching/compiling groovymame 142 in hopes to limit Rom replacement and that was not working no matter what I tried. (I guess many others haven't had to much success with groovymame142 either) OK so I just moved to 148 and yes I lost a pretty good amount but I'll live...OK heres where Im at..

with LCD hooked to VGA port I Installed the catalyst drivers ..rebooted, then opened VMmaker.ini . Made my paths to make xml etc.. ran vmmaker. it gathered all the video modes..  then i rebooted again.
opened ArcadeOSD and it shows a bunch of modes! Great.. so next I choose 640x480 60i ..LCD goes blank reads "mode not supported". So I pull the VGA plug from the card and the vga connector from the J-Pac plug  into the Ati card.. I hear a change in that high pitch TV sound I go to the front of the cab and I have a beautiful picture. So its the Arcade OSD dialogue screen with various options.. the picture looks good to me so I go ahead and select "save as default monitor". BAM screen scrambles and is out of frequency so i pull the VGA cord out put it back to the LCD and I have the original resolution up on the LCD.. There is the Arcade OSD dialogue box now says "keep" or "revert". Ive tried both and the out come is the same. The debug box in the back show the attempted resolution 640x48060i with an error next to it. Ive tried various order and rebooting and I can't get the arcade monitor to stay in 15khz!

When I select the 640x480 60i video mode my aracde monitor shows it perfectly but what won't it save? Im new at this stuff so If theres a crucial step Im missing please let me know..

Oh and the other thing I noticed is that when I go into my win video properties. Its showing I have two monitors. 1 primary is the LCD and 2. Im guessing the arcade monitor. Of course its greyed out since I only have one plunged in at a time.

Anyway thanks for any assistance. Ive come this far... and I really like what I've seen before so i hope this can be troubleshooted. 


Thanks!

NicK

[Calamity]

Hi silverslc,

Yeah that's a known issue of recent versions of Arcade OSD, probably introduced by the changes I had to do to support Windows 7. The reason this happens is because Windows believes the LCD is plugged all the time and doesn't allow you to set the resolution to the desktop permanently because it knows it's not supported by your LCD. I guess if you boot without any monitor attached and only plug it later while already in Windows you wouldn't have that problem.

The easiest workaround however is to use the Windows display properties dialog, advanced, monitor, show all modes, then select 640x480 and apply, switch monitors fast (you have only a few seconds), and accept.

[silverslc]

Calamity.. that did the trick! Switching modes via windows. Your right need to be fast or it will pull back previous resolution. Thanks! ok  on to the next....