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First MAME cabinet--Questions

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fredster:

You need more video card.  64 mb min to run the new games.

sTyLeS:

I'm using a 27" TV, with a GeForce2 card with s-vid out. I really like the size of the screen and just the "look and feel" of it better than playing on a PC monitor.
I would say that any mid-level ATI or nVidia card with TV-Out would work just fine if you were planning on hooking up to a TV. I've tried a few other lower-end brand cards with TV-Out, and they don't work very well...like they won't boot up to the TV, only a monitor and then you have to switch it manually once Windows loads. Not very good if you only have a TV hooked up to it.

krick:

My $0.02 on the OS debate...

If you plan to run windows, you have 3 real choices...

Windows 98SE
Windows 2000
Windows XP
(No-one should use 95, 98 or ME if they can help it)


Each of the three have plusses and minuses....


XP has annoying product activation.

98SE has better support for older hardware.

XP and 2000 support more memory and larger hard drives along with the NTFS file system for greater resistance to fragmentation and

98SE (being built on top of DOS) can be stripped down to boot much faster.  However being built on top of DOS is also a liability because poorly written drivers or applications can completely crash the OS much easier than on 2000 and XP.

XP will officially support an Intel processor with HyperThreading.  Windows 2000 will work but will just show up as two separate processors.  I don't know if 2000 will take full advantage of the CPUs abilities or not.
(Note: I THINK you need XP or 2000 Professional to support a HyperThreading CPU.)

The startup and shutdown screens are easier to customize on 98SE to help hide the fact that you're running windows in your cabinet.

If you want to play games that require dual trackballs (mice) then you have to run 98SE or XP.  Windows XP supports dual mice via the RawMouse API. Windows 2000 doesn't support multiple mice (at least without a lot of work and special drivers).

If you want to use an ArcadeVGA with a 15KHz arcade monitor and take advantage of the non-interlaced "virtual desktop" features in the ATI drivers to run 640x480 or higher resolutions, you'll have to run Windows 2000 or XP.  98SE doesn't support it.

I'm sure there are more.  These are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.


Personally, I like the fact that 98SE is closer to the hardware.  2000 and XP try to hide all the actual IRQ assignment from you and will actually tolerate (somewhat) an incorrectly configured system leading to poor performance and instability.

However, I can't live without the ArcadeVGA virtual desktop and the large drive support so I'm stuck with Windows 2000 or XP.

I'm currently using windows 2000 because I hate the XP product activation so much, but I'm considering installing XP Home to get the dual mouse support.

Confused yet?  Me too.

etumor:

Krick,

Fantastic summary of the OS issues involved!  I wasn't aware of the ArcadeVGA limitation in Win98SE.  This is something that I need to take into account.

Let me ask you a related question.  Do the drivers for the ArcadeVGA support rotating the desktop?  Yes, I know I can use a frontend that displays vertically (ArcadeOS), but I am exploring all possible options for a future cocktail cabinet.

I did some experimenting with my nVidia card, and found an unexpected behavior when using nVidia's "nView rotate" to rotate the desktop.  Using WinXP, I took a major performance hit after rotating the desktop (and this is on a blazingly-fast system).  This performance problem manifested both on the desktop, and when I ran MAME.  It was completely unacceptable.  I rebooted into Win98SE on the same machine, and saw absolutely no performance problem when I rotated the desktop.  Obviously this is a driver issue.

Anyway, I think I understand that the ArcadeVGA card uses ATI-based drivers, and I think ATI also includes a desktop rotating utility.  Since you have one, I was wondering if you've seen it or played with it?

-etumor

krick:

First off, a correction to my last post...
Windows XP Home DOES support Hyperthreading CPUs.

Anyhoo...
On my 15KHz arcade monitor, when running windows, the interlaced 640x480 and interlaced 800x600 are almost impossible to look at.  They hurt my eyes something fierce.  The 640x288 non-interlaced mode is MUCH easier on the eyes, even with the 60Hz refresh rate.

The thing is, if you don't run at least 640x480 (interlaced or virtual desktop on XP & 2K), you can't configure windows at all.  Almost all properties dialogs are too tall for the 640x288 non-interlaced mode.  You can't see the bottom third of the dialog and you can't get to the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons.

I keep the desktop in 640x288 non-interlaced most of the time.  If I need to configure Windows or I'm trying to look something up on the internet, I switch to the virtual desktop 640x480 (which is also non-interlaced) and just pan up and down as necessary.

As for desktop rotation, I'd never tried it until tonight.  I'm happy to tell you that it's as simple as right clicking on the ATI icon in the tray and selecting "rotation".  Then you're given the choice of rotations... 90* left, 90* right, 180*, or standard.  It's kind of disorienting when you rotate it sideways because the mouse rotates with the screen.  But, yep, it seems to work as advertised on the Ultimarc site
(http://www.ultimarc.com/avgainst.html) ...

Rotating the desktop for vertical monitors in Windows XP and 2000:
This feature is only supported in Windows XP and Windows 2000. Right-click on the ATI taskbar icon. Select "Rotation" choose correct value.


As for possible performance issues, I'm not really sure how to test that.  On my computer,  MAME (and Mamewah front end) is set up for horizontal orientation.  If you want to give me explicit command line instructions for running a game "vertically" under MAME, I'll be glad to do the testing for you and report back with framerates.

If you're wondering, I run vertical games on my horizontal monitor and they look awesome.  My monitor is 25" so when running a vertical game, the image is about the same size as as on a 19" monitor.  There's black bars on the sides.  Kinda like reverse letterboxing.

I've tweaked my monitor so the vertical games aren't cut off at the top and bottom, this has the effect of slightly squishing some of my horizontal games but it's really not that noticeable unless I pointed it out to you.

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