ArcadeVGA 3000 w MAME clipping top/bottom

[pbarcade]

Does anyone know what I may have off on my ArcadeVGA 3000 setup with Win10?

I'm running the 'recommended' 720x480 with my arcade monitor, but when I launch something basic like MsPacman with Mame at 352x288, the top and bottom of MsPac is cutoff.  I experimented a bit with ArcadePerfect to shrink the screen a bit, but it just ends up disorting the screen so it goes out of sync.  I can use the monitor adjustments to shrink the screen down so everything fits nicely, but then when I go back to a normal resolution, everything is super small in the default 720x480 resolution, so it's completely unusable/viewable. I'm running d3d, believe I have everything set per the ArcadeVGA website setup instructions with stretching and such... but willing to recheck anything that might help.

I"m not trying to do anything fancy with tying in bezels or anything like that. I've tried with some standard horizontal games and things look fine...everything is on track.  But some basic horizontal experiments, especially Pacman/MsPacman/etc in that 224x288 resolution are a mess.  Any ideas on what might help get these on track?

Thanks,
Pete

[mourix]

It sounds like it's either forcing a wrong type of strech, or your monitor changes size a lot depending on the resolution.

My advice would be to look at installing CRT Emudriver and GroovyMAME. It should work perfectly with your ArcadeVGA and it automatically switches to the right resolution and scaling for every game.

[pbarcade]

Actually, that's what I ended up doing.  Unfortunately the Arcadevga 3000 doesn't work with the emu driver and win10, so I had to dump the arcadevga and find a Radeon HD but it's all on track now.  Unfortunate as I feel like I'm solving my Mame issues but making future problems for other console emulators I need to resetup with super resolutions and having to disable all the hardware acceleration so preview videos would run...Not sure how that will go.  That's the next challenge!

Pete

[mourix]

There are two versions of the emudriver. The old one should work with the arcadeVGA, or am I mistaken?
Hardware accelation is only off in flash for hyperspin. Emulators are safe. I went with Retroarch and got all systems running at 640*240 by putting a fixed aspect ratio. That way is a bit of a cheat but will get every console upto playstation one running at one resolution and input config. Good luck!

[pbarcade]

As far as EMUDriver, goes, I see ArcadeVGA only supported in one of the two drivers, and in that one driver, only the 9000 series is listed...not the earlier 3000 series ArcadeVGA:  (Besides, i'm not sure using an ArcadeVGA and hacking it with all of this will get me anything in the end...I've taken the plunge, so I'm no longer in the ArcadeVGA 640x480 world, but into this world of superresolutions that I don't quite get yet, but that's my problem to figure out next! 

• Catalyst 6.5: ATI Radeon 7000, 7200, 7500, 8500, 9000, 9100, 9200, 9250, 9500, 9550, 9600, 9700, 9800, X300, X550, X600, X700, X800, X850, X1300, X1600, X1800, 1900, X1950, ArcadeVGA 9200/9250, etc.
  
  Catalyst 9.3: ATI Radeon 9500, 9550, 9600, 9700, 9800, X300, X550, X600, X700, X740, X800, X850, X1050, X1200, X1300, X1550, X1600, X1650, X1800, X1900, X1950, HD 2350, HD 2400, HD 2600, HD 2900, HD 3200, HD 3300, HD 3400, HD 3410, HD 3450, HD 3550, HD 3570, HD 3600, HD 3610, HD 3690, HD 3730, HD 3750, HD 3800, HD 3830, HD 3850, HD 3870, HD 4230, HD 4250, HD 4350, HD 4550, HD 4570, HD 4580, HD 4650, HD 4670, HD 4730, HD 4750, HD 4800, HD 4850, HD 4870, HD 4890, etc.

Beyond that, it's not just flash...flash I could get going fairly easily.  However, to also get MP4s playing properly in the OS, I had to adjust things with the codec tweak tool to disable MS DTV-DVD decoder and DXVA on Microsoft Windows Media Video Decoder to get things on track for the OS, and then to finally get Hyperspin happy, I had to also get the DirectX9 control panel and disable acceleration in two areas in there.  Now I'm no expert on this and some of this may be overlap and I may be confusing things on how I specifically tested things (Get them to work in the OS first, then get them to work in Hyperspin)... but the end result was disabling the hardware acceleration, and the few tests I tried with turning something back 'on' resulted in something breaking again... so I don't think that's going to help my performance cause when I start getting into Daphne, Retroarch, and all these one-off emulators for Jaguar and other newer systems..

Pete

[mourix]

The ArcadeVGA cards are just standard Ati ones with a custom bios. The ATI 9200/9250 are know as ArcadeVGA 2, and the ATI HD 2600 are knows as ArcadeVGA 3000. Emudriver will work for those, but you got a different card anyways.

Superresolutions are interesting. Flatscreens have a fixed horizontal and vertical resolution while CRTs only have horizontal lines. So 320x240 and 2560x240 are the exact same thing to a CRT. In the amount of milliseconds a line takes, your CRT will just put any amount of data on the screen. You are in reality only limited to the physical sharpness of the CRT so you might online get 500 true sharp pixels in that time, but any info you put there will not be a problem.

With the thousands of MAME games you will see many different horizontal resolutions, but most of them using either 240 or 224 lines. Instead of trying to support the hundreds of combos when this horizontal amount doesn't matter, why won't we just take a huge number that devides well into most resolutions: 2560/320=8, 2560/256=10, etc. That's how it works. With one resolution and a bunch of prescalers you can fit any game in the full with of the screen, just by changing the aspect ratio!

[buttersoft]

The ArcadeVGA cards are just standard Ati ones with a custom bios. The ATI 9200/9250 are know as ArcadeVGA 2, and the ATI HD 2600 are knows as ArcadeVGA 3000. Emudriver will work for those, but you got a different card anyways.

I thought there was a problem with crt_emudriver 2.0 and the ArcadeVGA 3000? Can't remember specifically, but I can never find old posts on the GM forum though - it's a mess, if one that I've contributed to

Hopefully he got a 5000, 6000 or 7000 series card like recommended atm.

[pbarcade]

Thanks for the good info! Very helpful.   Also, I did pick up a HD6450...however it seems to have an issue with the CRT driver in Win10 as well, as it appears as a '7400 series' or something to that effect.  But...it seems to be doing what it needs to do now, even though windows is still confused a bit.  I also have a HD5450 that I haven't messed with yet... that's also usable if there' some reason to go that route.   Quite an extravaganza of cards this past weekend....

[gravitar80]

Is CRT Emudriver supposed to be able to work with an ArcadeVGA 5000? I seem to be seeing conflicting information regarding this.

[buttersoft]

I think you've had this answered on the GM forum, but for anyone else looking - No, the ArcadeVGA cards don't work. They use their own special bios and crt_emudriver can't interface with it. You must use the Ultimarc drivers. Thanks to Krick for digging up the info!