Please advise ! First MAME cabinet made

[drpslp]

Hi all!

I recently bought a 20" jamma cab and stripped it and converted to mame, its running really well but I have a couple of problems I was hoping someone would be able to help with.

I have replaced the 19" arcade monitor with a sony 19" svga pc monitor. The PC inside is a 600mhz P3 with 256mb of RAM. Here are my problems :

1/ Under this spec what is the best version of mame to run ? Im currently running mame (32bit dos) with mamaewah as the front end. mame 32 will not do as its not skinable (the machine needs to be easy to use for anyone). Will mame (true dos) be a better performer ?

2/ When playing horizontal scrolling games (shinobi, gng, shadow dancer etc) a line moves up the screen when you move left or right, how do i cure this ?

Many thanks for your help

Darren

[krick]

2/ When playing horizontal scrolling games (shinobi, gng, shadow dancer etc) a line moves up the screen when you move left or right, how do i cure this ?

I've seen this too on my arcade monitor.  It happens on vertical scrolling games as well.  If you watch carefully on the "choose your destiny" screen on Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, it happens during the vertical scroll.

I have no idea why it happens or how to fix it.

[Apollo]

It's got to do with refresh rates, not sure of the fix though. Mine does it as well.

[drpslp]

Looks like it could be that. Its not too bad a suppose. Regarding mame - which version will give highest pefromance ? Any one know please ?

[pmc]

On-board video? I've seen this with one of my machines and always assumed that on-board didn't have enough oomph to refresh fast enough. I ususally see it when things are really moving along.

I have not gone so far as to swap in a better video card and verify this.

Not sure about which MAME to run, but I have always used the Windows command-line versions and then just used an older or newer one to suit the horsepower of the underlying machine. Since I switched to a new PC I just run the newest MAME that's convenient for me and don't worry about performance any more. Do some searching for more on this topic.

[drpslp]

Im running mame (windows command line) I just found that the -waitvsync option fixs the line moving up the screen but then the FPS drops so low everything in unplayable.

Im going to swap in a nice 8x AGP ATI 128MB card and see if that makes a diff, I assume a 600Mhz P3 should be enough for street fighter II, shinobi and Smash TV - but smash TV runs like a dog no matter what setting I use, odd.

I assume that mame32 should give exactly the same performance as mame (windows command line version) ?

Thanks for all you help.

[Apollo]

No, Mame32 will give you a poorer performance than command line plus Mamewah, I have just changed from Mame 32 to command line and Mamewah and everything runs beautifully, much better.

[Lilwolf]

If its breaking of the video itself... not the monitor..

try turning triple buffer on.  This saves me on vertical games like SlapFight.

Also..  WHY DID YOU SWAP MONITORS??  For less then the price of a 19" monitor you could have had a ArcadeVGA WITH MUCH BETTER output!

Anyway... don't get rid of that monitor.  Maybe one day it will be worth it.  SVGAs really are GREAT for PC games... suck for arcade games.

[krick]

Im running mame (windows command line) I just found that the -waitvsync option fixs the line moving up the screen but then the FPS drops so low everything in unplayable.

I'm running MAME for Win32 optimized for the P4 from here...
http://www.redump.de/mame.shtml

My system is a P4 2.8GHz with 512M of memory.  My video card is the ArcadeVGA connected to a 15KHz arcade monitor.  Even with this horsepower, I see tearing artifacts in many games.

I looked up the "waitvsync" option (which I haven't tried yet) and this is what I found.  It sounds like exactly what we are experiencing.

http://www.mame.net/readmewin.html

-[no]waitvsync

        Waits for the refresh period on your computer's monitor to finish
        before starting to draw video to your screen. If this option is off,
        MAME will just draw to the screen at any old time, even in the middle
        of a refresh cycle. This can cause "tearing" artifacts, where the top
        portion of the screen is out of sync with the bottom portion. Tearing
        is not noticeable on all games, and some people hate it more than
        others. However, if you turn this option on, you will waste more of
        your CPU cycles waiting for the proper time to draw, so you will see a
        performance hit. The default is OFF (-nowaitvsync). This option
        requires -ddraw.

[drpslp]

Yes that option on my amd 2600+ 1gig ram, etc machine does solve the problem and all runs perfectly smooth, hovever the P3 in my cab cant handle it and performance sucks. Oh well.

As for the monitor I swapped the 19" WG for the Sony tube (took it out of its casing and installed as the original arcade one would have been, I did this for many reasons including saving money (i got it free) and ease of use / possible to use sony for other things. If any one wants to buy the 19" WG its on ebay and in pefect condition.

Any way, now controls! I intsalled street fighter II setup (6 butts for each player) and used a hacked keyboard encoder, this seems ok with 1 button but with 6 its not very good I seem to be suffering from ghosting and if I hit too many buttons too quickly the pc beeps and the game is ruined, would a i-pac solove these issues ?

Thanks again for your help - im new at all this !

[drpslp]

Oh ebay item for the 19" WG monitor is 3284277028 also selling the switch mode PSU, sunset riders JAMMA board and some other stuff from the cab before i gutted it.