Switching to XP from DOS... any suggestions?

[BenDalton]

Alright, since I just acquired some new hardware (a celeron 2ghz) for use with my mame cab, I've decided to ditch the dos-based approach and go with the stability and feature-ritch XP (as opposed to 98se/dos).

So, I need some suggestions on how I should set it all up. First off, I'm using a Trident Blade T64 video card to power my arcade monitor at the correct resolution. I would imagine I need to use powerstrip in xp to get this working correctly. (right??)

What resoution should I keep windows at for my WGk4600 monitor? (assuming correct h&vsync)

What FE would everyone recommend for use with powerstrip?  Will it support advance mame?

Should I still use advancemame to specify the various resolutions??

Any other tweaks or suggestions will be useful!


Thanks in advance for the help!

[wpcmame]

So, I need some suggestions on how I should set it all up. First off, I'm using a Trident Blade T64 video card to power my arcade monitor at the correct resolution. I would imagine I need to use powerstrip in xp to get this working correctly. (right??)

Don't know if the Trident Blade driver supports custom resolutions under XP. If not you can only use powerstrip to tweak existing resolutions.

What resoution should I keep windows at for my WGk4600 monitor? (assuming correct h&vsync)

Not familiar with the monitor but I assume it is a standard lowres CGA monitor (15KHz)

You will not be able to do any serious desktop work with a lowres monitor anyway so the the resolution doesn't really matter. Since arcade monitors only support one vertical resolution, just use it for the desktop as well. i.e. If you configure your monitor for 240/480 lines, use 640x480 for the desktop. If you configure it for 288/576 lines, use 768x576 for the desktop.

It could be good to use a dektop resolution outside the normal 640x480 (e.g. 648x480) since then you don't need powerstrip at all once everything is set up.

What FE would everyone recommend for use with powerstrip?

[Lilwolf]

I would recommend going straight for an ArcadeVGA card.   Very trouble free.

That machine will be able to run Zinc with almost every game full speed.  And some great games there... but I don't think you will have much luck with that card and Zinc.

If I had that computer and that card...  I would still probably stick with DOS.  Too many headaches configuring the system... And you already have them taken care of right now (faster computer shouldn't effect them).   I'm also scared of getting like the blue screen of death that defaults to 640x480 and starts hardware problems with your monitor when your not there.  I'm sure it could be done, but not sure what your gaining.

As for frontends.  I think there are a few great ones on this board.  All/most are free and all/most are skinnable so you can have them all look very very similar.  So its only an issue if you have anything weird on your setup.  Try them all.  Sure some are harder to configure, but none are that bad (none take more then an hour or two to get going with basics).  The harder they are to configure the more options you have later.