About to jump into the pool

[donluca]

I was in the process of updating my cabinet to the latest GroovyMAME 0.210 over the weekend with intentions of doing some benchmarking and testing with frame_delay on my hardware and then... my trusty old Hantarex Polo 25 arcade monitor died.   

Hopefully, I'll be able to get it working again.

That really, really sucks. Hantarex Polos are fantastic monitors and very underrated.

What happened, if I may ask? I've fixed some CRTs here and there and got a little bit of knowledge about them.

[krick]

That really, really sucks. Hantarex Polos are fantastic monitors and very underrated.
What happened, if I may ask? I've fixed some CRTs here and there and got a little bit of knowledge about them.

I had it on for a few hours on Sunday.  I went to get some dinner and when I came back the screen was black.  There's no neck "glow" and it's making a faint "ticking" sound.  I started a thread over in the Monitor/Video Forum and someone posted a flowchart that gives me some things to check when I get some time.  I suspect that the  Horizontal Output Transistor (or one or more of the diodes) have failed...

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,160514.0.html

[haynor666]

DirectX installer is not needed on windows 7. I have now fresh and clean install and groovymame works perfectly. But it might be needed for nullDC and some other 3D emulators. Some Taito Type X games might needed as well.

[Paladin]

Flyback and cap kit installed.
Computer assembled and running Win10 and groovymame.

Next up is trying to find a front end for a vertical low res crt, followed by graphics drivers.  Oh yeah, I should probably rotate the monitor while I'm at it.

[Paladin]

Today I got the PC video displaying on the arcade monitor.  Looks like Emudriver and Switchres are working.
 Attract Mode with Opacity layout (thanks Frizz!) and GroovyMAME are displaying vertically.

I've got some tuning to do, the monitor will either focus in the middle or the edges, not both.  A little reading points to purity adjustment, tube rejuvenation or even a bad tube. The one time I did a PC restart with the monitor on, it seemed to go into shutdown just as the desktop was coming up.  I haven't done the card bios yet but I thought the J-Pac was supposed to prevent that.

I'm sure there are several settings I need to tweak in VMMaker and GroovyMAME as well to get the most out of it.  I still haven't turned the monitor vertical yet and I don't have any controls hooked up or even a proper panel.

As long as I make a little progress each week, I'll be happy.