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[Discontinued][17-09-22] RatRefresh - refresh rate switcher, stops LCD tearing
Metalhammer:
--- Quote from: Rataplan626 on April 03, 2017, 08:59:52 am ---Now Ghosts 'n Goblins is not a good game to test this with, as it has 'native' jerky scrolling. It skips a step every 4 or 5 vertical lines or so when playing the game. When the map is shown at the beginning of a level or when you lost a life the scrolling should actually be smooth.
--- End quote ---
I knew it, I knew it :angry:
... so basically also the original arcade behaves like this :-\ !?
--- Quote from: Rataplan626 on April 03, 2017, 08:59:52 am ---I'm still working to get it to work without having to restart the videodriver but despite all suggestions of the people above, that's unfortunately not how it works and I'm afraid there are vendor or even driver specific calls needed to get that working. I'm currently trying to get things working through the ChangeDisplaySettingsEx API but so far it's the same as everything else - it works as soon as the display driver is restarted, but before that it won't pickup the just-created new resolution.
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So at the moment, there's no way to avoid any frontend to crash :cry: ?
(btw also MAME crashes as soon as you change the refresh rate :'()
... any hope in having Microsoft developers look into this :-[ ?
Man, I cannot believe we are stuck at this point after all your efforts ... now that finally I saw the light I need to go back into the darkness :banghead:
Metalhammer:
Rataplan, what about the following idea ? Do you think is doable ;) ?
- we know we need to use a FE to run our emulators
- we have the ability to pass parameters to RatRefresh whenever we need to run a specific game (mainly rom name)
- we know FE crashes as soon as RatRefresh restarts the video driver in order to have the change take effect :'(
And if we(you :P) change RatRefresh to:
- accept some more parameters to:
1) know what emulator we want to run the game from (ie. path of MAME exe)
2) know the emulator command line and parameters (basically the rom name)
3) know the front end (FE exe path)
We could:
- pass RatReftesh the game name which will trigger the refresh rate change
- as soon as RatRefresh is finished with the task it could (somehow) kill the FE and launch MAME with the selected rom (*)
- upon MAME exiting, RatRefresh could start again the FE
... as far as I know, the FE shouldn't keep any state from MAME (but the last selected game) which could prevent it from working correctly once restarted by RatRefresh :-\
Maybe a RatRefresh .ini could also be useful to avoid passing too many parameters (mainly lenghty paths) and easily change stuff.
What do you think :-\ ?
(*) we could also think about a way to ask the FE to exit as soon as it's finished passing RatRefresh the parameters it needs ! It will be RatRefresh which will take care of monitoring MAME process and spawn the FE back as soon as it exits ;)
Rataplan626:
Oh that's easy to do, and could even be done from a simple batch-file which you could start from your FE in stead of MAME64.exe. However, people might get other issues like a 'front-end startup animation' everything you quit a game and such. For now I still want to invest time in getting it to work the way it should rather than creating workarounds. Because I wanted to keep the tool versatile I did not create a standard ini file, but made it to for example specify an edid file, so you can simply pass another edid file if you have a second screen. But that's all gonna change anyway.
If you want your FE to quit and restart, make a simple batch file of it. Your FE starts MAME with parameters (ie ROM name) which you can fetch in a batch file with %1, %2, %3 and so on, each representing one parameter passed from the FE. From the top of my head you could try something like:
taskkill.exe /fi:frontend.exe (modify that to your FE executable)
ratrefresh /edidfile edid.txt /file refreshrates.txt /get %1;mame
mame64 %1
frontend.exe
Actually I have something like that in my own cab now, and it works but it's not ideal by any (of my) means.
Metalhammer:
Obviously I agree with your way of seeing things and that RatRefresh should be working as it is ;)
While you find a suitable and definitive solution, just to avoid not taking advantage of your great job, I'll go for the workaround we just discussed :)
Thanks mate :)
Metalhammer:
Rataplan, I'd like to ask you something quick:
I'm trying to parse a Mame.xml file with the nice tool you worte (MameXMLParser) anyway, despite it saying 'file written' I get absolutely nothing in my directory ???
I tried running it with admin privileges, running it in a different folder but all to no good :-\
Any idea on this :-\ ?
Fixed: it was my Antivirus preventing it from writing to the disk :angry: ... funny thing is that last time I tried, it worked fine :banghead:
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