Massive thankyou!!!

[zulu69]

Hi guys,

Long time lurker but finally decided to post an appreciated post...

A little back story. I grew up with playing arcades in the late 80's and throughout the 90's (golden era IMO). In 2004 i bought a 4 player ex nba jam cabinet for $450 AUD (bargain!) - as luck would have it i called an arcade place inquiring about a 4 player cabinet and the guy was literally about to put it on the back of a truck for an auction. At the time i had mame32IU with Mala FE. Needless to say that i had a good set up (weak pc - athlon and an arcadevga agp card win xp 32bits) but it was very limited with what was emulated and what was playable at the time with the hardware available. In 2008 the pc died so bought a Pentium 4 3.0ghz with a same setup (bar updated mame builds that supported CP3 at the time). In 2019 the pentium died and changed to a e8400 at 3.0ghz. At the time i wanted to update my setup but so much had changed especially with the directdraw bug/lack of MS support) that it scared me off, i bought an arcadevga 5000 card (a mistake i now realise) as i always wanted as an accurate experience as possible.

Ok so with that in mind - my old desktop died and i thought it would be great to fix it and put it into my cabinet. Lucky i was right and it was a bad PSU and the PCEI slot was fried. The mobo has dual PCEI slots (crossfire/SLI) so i could use the 2nd slot for the gpu - the plus side of this is that i truly get a hidden boot sequence even with POST as the mobo only switches to the discrete card once the OS boots which is hidden. Anyhoo my old desktop has win 10 and i was literally minutes away from installing win xp and using my old setup. Thank god i stumbled on groovymame. Can i just say a MASSIVE thankyou to the creators for groovymame. Not only does it solve the directdraw limitation but honestly it is just perfect out the box. I understand that the arcadevga i have is not ideal and trust me i will but a AMD card when it dies and install crt-emu drivers BUT the experience with groovymame is so much better that i can trust any game i launch will display as perfect as it gets. 

I cannot express in words how amazing it is to see such a well written version of MAME that ironically does a better job of preserving accuracy of these old arcades better than the official builds. I have noticed that sound sync is loads better with groovymame too. Needless to say i absolutely love my new set up and it has allowed me to have newer emus like flycast with naomi/naomi 2. I have bought a DAC (with an amp) which has greatly improved the sound output on my cab (it's jamma so no good sound output).

I have such a passion for arcades and thankfully i can now no longer dread if my computer dies and support dries up. I have kept my MALA FE but use a bat file that allows me to launch multiple emulators seamlessly. So once again THANK YOU to calamity and his team for groovymame. You have allowed me to still enjoy these childhood gems!!!

For those that want to see the set up (i love watching builds on this forums/reddit) i have linked some videos of my cabinet. I am more than happy if anyone wants any of my files/setup, etc.

Anyway enough ranting/gushing. Enjoy the vids!!

Boot sequence (an oldie intro vid but still like it)

https://youtube.com/shorts/xmRqW3k94hQ

Now for some games...


Dead or Alive ME (flycast), Daytona 2 (supermodel) and Daytona (Elsemi Model 2 emu)




Snow Bros, Sonic Championship, Street Fighter 2: The World Warrior, TMNT (1989).




Mortal Kombat, NBA JAM and NBA Showtime




NFL Blitz, Primal Rage 2 (mame4rage version of mame) and Raiden 2 (perfect example of groovymame ability to display this better than arcadevga's res tool or native mame).




The Combatribes, The Simpson's, Virtua Fighter and Virtua Fighter 4 Final Tuned.




Virtua Racing, War Gods, Wild Riders, X-Men (1992).




Guilty Gear XX: Reloaded and Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike.




The art of fighting and Altered Beast.




X-Men vs Street Fighter, Alien vs Predator.




Scud Race and Snow Bros (again).




Real Bout Fatal Fury, Rave Racer.




Tekken 3




Virtua Fighter 4 Final Tuned

(attract mode)

(gameplay)