Soft-15KHz - slim new tool for 15KHz on normal vga cards

[SailorSat]

atm. theres a limit of 31 resolution on nvidia and 5 on intel (but thats not even in the public alpha yet)
none on ati, 3dfx and matrox

[Silver]

atm. theres a limit of 31 resolution on nvidia and 5 on intel (but thats not even in the public alpha yet)
none on ati, 3dfx and matrox

ATI on everything here. So in theory, you could go the advancemame route and create an exact custom resolution for every single different resolution.... although I imagine there are advantages to restricting the number a bit to keep things displaying without monitor adjustments (depending on your monitor).

[Ummon]

atm. theres a limit of 31 resolution on nvidia and 5 on intel (but thats not even in the public alpha yet)
none on ati, 3dfx and matrox

ATI on everything here. So in theory, you could go the advancemame route and create an exact custom resolution for every single different resolution.... although I imagine there are advantages to restricting the number a bit to keep things displaying without monitor adjustments (depending on your monitor).

Yes, slightly different timings can and often will affect screen geometry, but it won't be enough to shift it to a different mode on the monitor. The ultimarc/soft15 modes seem to be good approximations to meet 95% (or more, I don't know as I'm not a pokerom) of cases. It depends how picky you are. I think the really picky advancemame users create a special timing for each game. Incidentally, it seems Advancemame and regular MAME treat the same modes/timings differently.

[alui]

I've installed the Soft-15KHz (all 3 modes) on my P4 PC w/ the 6600GT video card and everything seems to be running great.  The only games I seem to have some slight problems with are the vector games, in particular, Tempest.  In Tempest, the game seems to have shifted slighted down on my WG D9200 monitor.  Is there any way to correct this?  Also, these vector games are significantly dimmer than the regular mame games.  How can I brighten them up?  And why are there no resolution listed (0x0) for these vector games?

I'm also wondering if there is an English version of the document which explains how to calculate custom resolution settings.

Thanks

[SailorSat]

Vector Games use another type of monitor, and don't have a "real" resolution (altough you could a define a min and a max value for the beam position), thats why the show a resolution of 0x0.

As for the brightness... Theres some option in mame.ini to increase brightness.
Try to increase "beam" to 1.25 or something (2.0 is really bright!).

[Silver]

Yes, slightly different timings can and often will affect screen geometry, but it won't be enough to shift it to a different mode on the monitor. The ultimarc/soft15 modes seem to be good approximations to meet 95% (or more, I don't know as I'm not a pokerom) of cases. It depends how picky you are. I think the really picky advancemame users create a special timing for each game. Incidentally, it seems Advancemame and regular MAME treat the same modes/timings differently.

Ok thanks.

I'm not that picky , so will proably just go with the standard - although I think getting correct refresh rates is most important as it stops all the nasty juddering/tearing on scrolling...

[SailorSat]

just enable tripple buffering and disable "throttling" and you will never have any tearing again

to bad mame doesn't export the "real" modeline of the hardware it emulates (okay neogeo mentions the modeline in the source)

[Silver]

just enable tripple buffering and disable "throttling" and you will never have any tearing again

to bad mame doesn't export the "real" modeline of the hardware it emulates (okay neogeo mentions the modeline in the source)

Really? I appear to still have difficulty. Triple buffering helps but seems to cause odd slowdowns when used with directdraw on my system.

If I enable vsync I get rid of tearing but get that nasty 'jump' every few frames....

What does throttle do exactly - throttle game speed to current vertical refresh?

[Ummon]

just enable tripple buffering and disable "throttling" and you will never have any tearing again

to bad mame doesn't export the "real" modeline of the hardware it emulates (okay neogeo mentions the modeline in the source)

Really? I appear to still have difficulty. Triple buffering helps but seems to cause odd slowdowns when used with directdraw on my system.

If I enable vsync I get rid of tearing but get that nasty 'jump' every few frames....

What does throttle do exactly - throttle game speed to current vertical refresh?

I get an 'erk' every few seconds using triplebuffer on some games. Mainly namco vertical games - pac, mspac, and mappy. As for throttle, uncheck it and the game runs at the horizontal refresh. FAST. Maybe it's different in cabmame?

[SailorSat]

throttle keepts the game run at "100%" original speed.
if you disable it, the game runs as fast as it can.

tripplebuffer limits the game to the vertical refresh rate (i.e. 60hz)
however there still is the "frameskip" which should be set to 0 to avoid those "bumps".

the downside is that the sound gets disorted a little (some games more, some games less) until your useing either cabmame or mameuifx (or any other mame version with a soundsync "hack")


there's allways a small tradeoff in "perfect" emulation until you get the perfect modeline.

[Silver]

throttle keepts the game run at "100%" original speed.
if you disable it, the game runs as fast as it can.

Thats what I thought.

tripplebuffer limits the game to the vertical refresh rate (i.e. 60hz)
however there still is the "frameskip" which should be set to 0 to avoid those "bumps".

Not sure I agree with you on thisthere. frameskip is 0 and self-explanatory - the "bump" is not a skipped frame, its a problem mosty visible on smooth scrolling games, where there is a difference between the screen refresh and the original games screen reresh. e.g. dragon ninja - horizontal scroller - 57Hz. Running mame at 60Hz, you can see a bump every few frames as it scrolls..?

Anyway, I need to look up what difference triplebuffer makes and why it stops tearing as I think all the "sync to vertical refresh" options are rather important here too....

[Ummon]

I think it's like she said at the end, Silver. That's the reason for Advancemame. By the way, did you notice the ATI update in my thread?

[Silver]

I think it's like she said at the end, Silver. That's the reason for Advancemame. By the way, did you notice the ATI update in my thread?

Oh, I agree there is always a tradeoff...

...It's just that it currently sounds like soft15Khz+ATI card allows for unlimited number of custom modelines. Which is basically what advancemame offers, except that advancemame calculates the perfect one for each game. Simply creating a few at varying frequencies, alongside the 60Hz ones, should be a pain free way of removing both the jerky issue and the sound issue in one go?

[SailorSat]

or just use cabmame or mameuifx which include a simple yet fantastic "hack" that fixes the sound.

[Silver]

or just use cabmame or mameuifx which include a simple yet fantastic "hack" that fixes the sound.

Ok I'll take a look. Can't see cabmame anywhere, though mameuifx pops up easily enough - I notice that you are credited with the sound/audio hack. Out of curiousity what is the change? Or - why is the audio/video not synced in regular mame?

Obviously won't fix the scrolling jitters though.

[bent98]

http://community.arcadeinfo.de/showthread.php?t=9555

there is link for cabmame.

You can use the .diff file and compile your own build of mame if you just want to apply the sound hack. I use hack plus hi.diff to remove nag screens. Headkaze made a simple GUI FE to recompile mame source.

Question for sailor. I see you removed the neogeo.diff. Can you tell me what is the specific .diff files I need just to apply the soundsync fix to mame.

[SailorSat]

@bent98: emuspeed and soundsync should do the job

@silver: autoframeskip 0, throttle 0, tripplebuffer (or vsync) 1 - scrolling smooth as butter.
base mame is aiming for perfect emulation, and fiddling with the sound speed to match the video speed is not perfect

[Ummon]

Oh, I agree there is always a tradeoff...

...It's just that it currently sounds like soft15Khz+ATI card allows for unlimited number of custom modelines. Which is basically what advancemame offers, except that advancemame calculates the perfect one for each game. Simply creating a few at varying frequencies, alongside the 60Hz ones, should be a pain free way of removing both the jerky issue and the sound issue in one go?

It might be. I had the idea of adding a modeline in Advancemame using the data from a soft15 modeline. Advancemame displayed it at slightly higher refresh - something like, 16.4khz (and a little lower or higher than 60hz). For some reason, it doesn't display all it's modes at 15khz, as the arcade vga and soft15 do. Mame just does what you tell it. Advancemame does something with it. Not necessarily one way or the other, but it is interesting.

I also noticed some difference in behavior between my Geforce Ti200 + soft15 and the arcade vga. For example, I have polepos set to 256x240 and I get a 'user mode' with the arcade vga but the Ti200 ends up doing 640x224 on the same monitor. Also with the Ti200 + soft15, I put on triplebuffer on Mappy (or any 224x288 game), and it was smooth. Not so on the arcade vga.


SailorSat: what is the limiting factor on Nvidia cards?

[SailorSat]

SailorSat: what is the limiting factor on Nvidia cards?

A "bug" in the ForceWare.
They read/write from/to the CUST_MODE registry key with a 3000 byte buffer, while one mode is 92 bytes.
32 Modes * 92 Byte = 2944 Bytes = fine.
33 Modes * 92 Byte = 3036 Bytes = buffer overrun.

If you add more modes via the default NVidia controls you'll end up with garbage in the registry the first way.
If you add more modes via Soft-15kHz the data in the registry is fine.
However, on bootup, the driver reads only those 3000 bytes, which cuts off the 33rd mode and anthing behind it, causing the whole CUST_MODE string getting detected as "faulty" and droped, hence the card generates the modes itself IN 31kHz.

*EDIT*
It may be possible to "hack" the driver to increase the buffer size, however I'm not that good in disasembling drivers
If anyone does, please also take a look on the Intel Driver

[Silver]

@silver: autoframeskip 0, throttle 0, tripplebuffer (or vsync) 1 - scrolling smooth as butter.
base mame is aiming for perfect emulation, and fiddling with the sound speed to match the video speed is not perfect

Ok thanks. sounds like a reasonable workaround, as speedup/slowdown and pitch shift will be quite small for most games, although I'll still look at custom resolutions at varying frequencies.

[SailorSat]

hm... my current build (not public yet) includes an option for seperate "user modes" already, it should be possible to enhance those, so they don't get added with "fixed 60hz" to windows, but rather their "real" vertical refresh. 640x480 @59Hz anyone?

(there's an extra button "install user", and an extra textfile called usermodes.txt, so you don't have to modify the base modelines)

[bent98]

They way it stands right now with the limitation of 31 modelines for nividia cards, how many do we have right now? Just wondering with your new build of soft 15khz if it gives nvidia users room to add additonal modelines. Or is it keep exsiting modelines and just add addtional refresh rates?

[SailorSat]

if I remember correctly... 29 @15khz modes, 2 additional @25khz, 6 changed @31khz
so if you only use 15khz, you can define two or three new modes without removing some of the base modes.

[bent98]

Do you mind if I ask when you will be making your newversion of soft 15khz available to the public?

[SailorSat]

Do you mind if I ask when you will be making your newversion of soft 15khz available to the public?

"when it's done"

[Ummon]

hm... my current build (not public yet) includes an option for seperate "user modes" already, it should be possible to enhance those, so they don't get added with "fixed 60hz" to windows, but rather their "real" vertical refresh. 640x480 @59Hz anyone?

(there's an extra button "install user", and an extra textfile called usermodes.txt, so you don't have to modify the base modelines)

Though I have a copy of Winmodelines, as the site is down, everyone else is going to have to use your new version for that. Incidentally, it doesn't have any stock modes like yours, and I kept getting line errors so I gave up.

Slightly off topic: you might consider putting links to soft15 and cabmame in your signature or whatever.

[tisurame]

@bent98: emuspeed and soundsync should do the job

@silver: autoframeskip 0, throttle 0, tripplebuffer (or vsync) 1 - scrolling smooth as butter.
base mame is aiming for perfect emulation, and fiddling with the sound speed to match the video speed is not perfect

So, using MAMEUIFX32 (or cabmame), do I also need to enable "Synchronize audio with video" ?

What about "Sync to monitor refresh" and "Refresh speed" ?

[SailorSat]

So, using MAMEUIFX32 (or cabmame), do I also need to enable "Synchronize audio with video" ?

yeah.

What about "Sync to monitor refresh" and "Refresh speed" ?

don't enable.

[SailorSat]

Build 37 online.

[bent98]

Hey Sailor

Great new on the new release. I see this is whats new:

Alpha Build 37 (February 06. 2008)
"User" resolutions added. (usermodes.txt)
Attention! These are added with their real vertical refresh to windows.


Intel GMA and EGD drivers added. (experimental)


"doublescan" modelines featured on NVidia and 3Dfx.


New command-line switch.
-ius - installs "User" resolutions

Are you going to update the FAQ and get some more info how to utilize the new features?

Also on the doublescan" modelines featured on NVidia and 3Dfx. update does that mean I dont need to run a custom 15khz.txt file to fix that??

Thanks

[SailorSat]

it just means it accepts modelines with the "doublescan" flag.
and if you add a modeline, say 400x300 @ 55Hz to the "usermodes.txt" it will show up in windows as 55hz, if you add the same modeline to custom15khz.txt it will show up as 60hz.

[Silver]

it just means it accepts modelines with the "doublescan" flag.
and if you add a modeline, say 400x300 @ 55Hz to the "usermodes.txt" it will show up in windows as 55hz, if you add the same modeline to custom15khz.txt it will show up as 60hz.

Ah, did not realise the custom15Khz.txt forced vertical refresh to 60hz. Excellent, will use usermodes.txt

[SailorSat]

Ah, did not realise the custom15Khz.txt forced vertical refresh to 60hz. Excellent, will use usermodes.txt

Na, it only show 60hz in the resolution list, the resolution itself is output correctly.

[bent98]

it just means it accepts modelines with the "doublescan" flag.
and if you add a modeline, say 400x300 @ 55Hz to the "usermodes.txt" it will show up in windows as 55hz, if you add the same modeline to custom15khz.txt it will show up as 60hz.

1) I am not sure I understand. Can you explain further. Do I still need add:

remove 288x240
remove 296x240
remove 256x256
remove 240x240
remove 321x256
remove 352x256
remove 352x264
modeline '288x240@59,305' 6,2 288 320 352 396 240 243 246 264 -hsync -vsync
modeline '296x240@59,305' 6,2 296 320 352 396 240 243 246 264 -hsync -vsync
modeline '352x256@59,697' 7,47 352 352 405 450 256 257 260 271 -hsync -vsync
modeline '352x264@59,697' 7,47 352 352 405 458 264 265 268 279 -hsync -vsync
modeline '321x256@59,014' 6,45 321 336 368 414 256 258 261 280 -hsync -vsync
modeline '256x256@60,436' 5,3 256 272 296 352 256 260 263 277 -hsync -vsync
modeline '240x240@60,436' 5,3 240 240 280 336 240 244 247 261 -hsync -vsync

or is that incorperated into the new version of soft 15.

2) Concering usermodes.txt do they conflict with the standard modelines? What i mean is can you have the same resolution twice with a different refresh? How does one tell Mame to use the different refresh? Is it just for example 240x240@59 in the rom.ini file for the game?

[SailorSat]

1) I am not sure I understand. Can you explain further. Do I still need add:

<CUT>

or is that incorperated into the new version of soft 15.

No it's not, as it works fine on most cards without those changes.

2) Concering usermodes.txt do they conflict with the standard modelines? What i mean is can you have the same resolution twice with a different refresh? How does one tell Mame to use the different refresh? Is it just for example 240x240@59 in the rom.ini file for the game?

Exactly that way.

[bent98]

1) I am not sure I understand. Can you explain further. Do I still need add:

<CUT>

or is that incorperated into the new version of soft 15.

No it's not, as it works fine on most cards without those changes.



So for clarification if I still need the custom15khz.txt what do you you mean by "accepts modelines with the "doublescan" flag"??

I dont want to be bothersome I just am not clear on what it means.

Thanks again Sailor.

[SailorSat]

doublescan is a modeline flag, just like -hsync or interlace.
it simply means that each line is output TWICE.
i.e. 320x240 is output as 320x480.

[Ummon]

I've had some other computer trouble in the last day. One I got fixed, another I have no idea on, but before them, I had stopped some win services with idea of freeing up memory and such and now when I click on any version of soft15 I get a "runtime error '5' invalid procedure call or argument". Do you know what could be the issue here, SS?

[bent98]

I sent an email to the omega driver team in hopes they can hack the 3000 byte buffer limitation on the forceware drivers. I really would like to fiddle with the usermodes.txt feature.

[SailorSat]

I've had some other computer trouble in the last day. One I got fixed, another I have no idea on, but before them, I had stopped some win services with idea of freeing up memory and such and now when I click on any version of soft15 I get a "runtime error '5' invalid procedure call or argument". Do you know what could be the issue here, SS?

Err... Okay ^^,
I'm pretty clueless on that one.