Hi All,
I've been following the forum a couple of months. I yet to install groovymame on Linux and playing with graphics cards to find out which ones are suitable for low dot clock operation.
At the beginning, I was trying to figure out why I can't get any picture from some games (eg: Neogeo and Sega) with my onboard Radeon HD3200. I managed to get picture by setting "dotclock_min = 8" like what documentation suggests. But this time, picture gets narrow from sides (by doubling vertical resolution). So, I decided to try another card to get proper resolution and refresh rate. Since I'm running mame on Linux, I'm not limited by options as long as the card has 15khz and interlaced mode support regardless any chipset.
With Nvidia G210 and nouveau opensource drivers, there is not a dot clock limitation as HD3200 has. Picture is very clear like Ati but, an annoying tearing effect appears during fast paced vertical scrolling scenes. I tried many options from mame.ini and nouveau - xorg.conf but couldn't find cause of the problem. Probably a driver issue. Horizontal scrolling was very smooth, just like ATI anyway...
With an old Radeon X300 card, everything related with resolution, refresh rate, picture quality and tearing was OK but computer is freezing randomly with that setup. Probably the card is faulty. So, I decided to go with an another card.
I want to make sure that the new card won't has a low dot clock limitation. In the CRT_Emudriver documentation, there isn't any low dot clock info about the cards newer than HD4000 series, eg. HD5450, HD6350, HD7350 and so on. Since my system is not running on Intel cpu, I may delay the testing Intel option for a while until getting one.
As so far, can you share your experiences with the cards newer than HD4000 series (and the other options from Nvidia and Intel on Linux) in order to help the people in same situation like me please? Maybe we should have a pinned forum post to collect a graphics card list.
Thanks.