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RayB's AMUSEMENT 360 - STATUS: Almost done
arcadefever:
nice cab :) i really like red and yellow colour i also like the control panel the way the 4 push button are set up cant wait to see it finish :laugh:
RayB:
Still dragging on. Had software problems. Now they are fixed. The PC boots straightinto GameLauncher. If anyone needs help using GL, PM me.
Spent all weekend going through the lists and sorting them by:
A. Removing clones and regions I don't want
B. Removing entries that don't even work (I don't know why my list generator included non-working games!)
C. Dividing entries between horizontal and vertical.
phew! It's very time consuming.
RayB:
Finished my software setup (more or less) so next step was installing the ArcadeVGA card.
That also meant pulling out the 19" Happ Controls Vision Pro II that had been sitting new in box since I got it in May 2004. (Wow, sad huh?)
Before hooking all this up, I had to pull the RGBvhg connector, and wire in my JAMMA harness wiring to it. Once that was done, I hooked everything up, powered the monitor and then the PC.
YAH! NICE! Gamelauncher looks good!
Next, sizing. I ran a few various Horizontal games for starters. I picked Rolling Thunder (one of my fave games) and size the image according to that. Then ran some Neo Geo games.
It is amazing what a difference it is to see these games running on their original intended display device!! As I said in another thread, even though I had seen these games running flawlessly on a PC monitor with effects that simulate an arcade monitor picture, seeing it on an arcade monitor is like stepping through the looking glass from PC world to Arcade world. It's such a difference! Really worth the $160 the monitor cost.
So next was to see how Atari medium res games looked. They look pretty good. Kinda an "interlaced" look to them. But very small. I'm not sure MAME is picking the best res for these games.
Same goes for SMASH TV, Tengai, etc. They are basically a very small square in the middle of the monitor. :-(
RayB:
Resolution problem PARTIALLY solved. I had forgotten to use a resolution tool. So I used Mamewah's res tool. I followed the directions, created INI files, etc.
Now I believe that DMAME 0.78 doesn't even use the INI files. It didn't have an INI directory to begin with. It didn't have a path entry in MAME.CFG. And when I change the resolution in some INI files and test the changes out, I see no difference.
For example, GUWANGE runs a small box. It's a vertical game, so I expect black borders on the left and right, but it has large borders top and bottom too! After using the res tool, it made no difference. I even went in the INI and editted it to 800x600. No difference. 320x240. No difference. I don't think the INI files are used at all. Must have been a featured introduced later than 0.78.
Beyond that, using the res tool did help with SOME games. I believe that it's the deleting of certain resolution modes from the list that helped in that respect. (Tengai went from running in a small box like Guwange does, to fill most of the screen).
Should I delete more modes? Maybe the ones that are 53hz? Maybe even some higher ones?
RayB:
Here's a photo of my setup. Nice and junky looking eh?
1 = PC
2 = JAMMA harness plugging into a JPAC
3 = a keyboard! yay
4 = my temporary single-player control box
5 = new Vision Pro II 19"