SailorSat - I've found something interesting... not sure if it only applies to Catalyst 9.7 drivers or before.
I have a Radeon HD 4550 card running the latest Catalyst 9.7 drivers on Windows XP 32-bit.
Tonight I realized that I can open my usermodes.txt file and make changes, then open Soft15KHz->"Uninstall"->"Install User"->Close Soft15KHz. Then when I open a game (with the mode I made changes to) in MameUI, the resolution/timings I see are the ones I just installed (without rebooting)
I'm not sure if it's me, but it didn't seem to work 100% of the time. One important thing seems to be closing Soft15KHz after uninstalling->installing user modes.
This is going to save me a hell of a lot of time tweaking modes, as hopefully I won't have to reboot nearly as much. It could also make it a lot easier for you, if you wanted to add a mode adjusting feature to Soft15KHz at some time in the future.
On another point, something I have noticed that may cause driver problems, is that Soft15KHz restores the old registry backup if the graphics card drivers are updated - I found this because the information panel was saying that "Display 0" had Catalyst 9.6 drivers, while "Display 1" said the correct 9.7. Fortunately, with the ATI drivers, if I delete the entire registry key and reboot, the driver will recreate a new set of defaults in the registry - which is easier than removing and reinstalling the drivers if something gets screwed up.
Also, I've been meaning to ask how your program handles white-space or commenting in the user files. (ie: "#" or "//" single line comments, or "/*" and "*/" C style block commenting.) Can I put a comment after a modeline instead of at the beginning of a line?
One last thing, how many decimal places should I put for pixel-clock MHz rates? I'm sure there must be a limit, but didn't see it listed anywhere.
Steve