Comment about Video Cards in MAME

[bullish4]

I would just like make an observation that might save some of you a few $$.

[StLouisRod]

Thanks for the info!  But have you been able to get Windows 98 to come up on your Viper 330?  If so, what utility did you use?  Does VGA and VBE (Advance Mame utilities) both work with the card?  That is important if you want to play any of the other emu's out there like ZSNES, GENECYST, KGEN98, Z26, etc.  Thanks!

[lightspeed]

Good point - you certainly dont need a current generation card to run MAME.  

However, many older cards do hardware stretch very poorly or not at all (my ATI 3D Rage II stuttered a bit with hw strecth enabled).

Did you notice the same?  In most case, you can ger around this by just manually setting the resolutions for each game

[kf0yn]

This is definitely a YMMV situation.  I started out using an STB Velocity 128 (with the same Riva 128 chip), and was thoroughly unsatisfied with the TV output.  I switched to an ATI Rage Fury Pro, and life got a lot better.

[Lilwolf]

ATI's are known as the best for TV-out mainly.  

Geforce does a better job on HWStretching.  Some cards do GREAT for TV-out... but some suck.   Depends on the TV-out chip they have.  So you don't know until you get it.

But for your computer config (and VGA monitor) you wont care much.  Getting somethign with good HWStretching is good since you only have a few resolutions.

Also, if you are going to play PC games on it.  You will probably want something that can handle a good FSAA at 640x480 since you can't play any games at higher resolutions.  Makes a big difference.