Before I give up and resort to a CRT, I'm thinking there must be some way to tweak my LCD system.
I don't need a general solution, just looking for a specific fix for Defender on my current system.
Dell Optiplex 745 core2duo 1.86GHz, WinXP 32bit, Dell 1707 LCD 1280x1024.
I've tried: mame.exe -video ddraw -nohws -triplebuffer
It solves the tearing but crashes every so often. And people say it introduces lag. I'm not sure if I can sense that or not, on a bad day I blame it.
I currently run MAME as: mame.exe -video ddraw -nohws
I like this except for the tearing I get which moves slowly down the screen.
As an experiment I changed the video frame rate of Defender from 60.096Hz to 60.000 Hz. This caused the tear to move very slowly downwards instead of slowly up. Therefore if I tuned the game to my monitor I could probably get the tear to stay still, but that's not a solution.
But this got me to thinking about triplebuffer. How does it work? And might it work better if I slightly slowed or sped up Defender's video rate?
I could just experiment, but I'd prefer to understand how MAME works.
Any ideas? or other MAME options I could try?