MIMO Mini USB Monitor Use

[Jigenjuke]

Hi there, I was jsut wondering if anybody had tried to use one of the MIMO Mini USB monitors as a MAME display.  I would think that for older titles it would be great.  I guess it would depend upon the refresh rate.  Let me know what you think or if you have tried one of these puppies yet.

 

[wp34]

I picked one up to use in my cabinet as a second display.  I used it at work for a few days as an external monitor.  It works really well for that purpose. 

I've not tried running Mame on it yet.  When you move a Window on to the screen it looks choppy at first.  But video looks just fine on it.  I'll try hooking it to my Mame computer and report back.

[Jigenjuke]

OK that's great.  Thanks for the quick reply.  Hope to hear back from you soon. 

[Nataq]

Wow those would be nice for bartops! And nice little pinball bartops 

[Jigenjuke]

Yeah I think so too.  I used an 8 inch monitor with 800x600 native resolution for a 1/4 scale cabinet that I made and it worked out pretty good, but that montior was a little expensive (about 170 bucks).  The little Mimo USB 7 inchers are really cheap here. They tend to run about 60 bucks.  I am hoping that they will work.  I want to make a few mini replica cabinets using these.   

[Nataq]

Where do you buy them ? I saw 150$

[wp34]

I tried running MAME on my MIMO real quickly tonight.  I got the following error:

Proposed video mode not supported on device \\.\DISPLAY4
Unable to initialize Direct3D.
Unable to complete window creation

I spent zero time troubleshooting this as I just had a few minutes to try this tonight before Lost is on.   

One thing I did not do was reboot after installing the drivers.  My test machine has not been booted in a while and Windows is in the middle of a ton of updates.  I'll try troubleshooting tomorrow unless someone can point me in the right direction.

Where do you buy them ? I saw 150$

I got mine for $90 on woot.com a few weeks ago.  I'd not seen one below $130 before then.

[wp34]

Okay I've got my head partially out of my rear end.  Dumb mistakes.

I was able to launch MAME and play Asteroids and MS Pac-Man on the MIMO.  I need to do some more tweaking and will try and post video.

[Jigenjuke]

Wow, so it works.  I would be interested in knowing if these little things could run MAME as a main screen with a boot directly into a front end like MALA.  If so they would make sweet sub mini cabinet replicas.  If things work out I will build a few mini cab's Red Donkey Kong (kinda partial to the red color of DK, looks pretty sexy IMO) maybe a Pac cabinet or a Ms. Pac and finally maybe a Tempest.  Let me know man.  Looking forward to your post.

[wp34]

I’m glad you posted this question because I bought the iMo for another use and did not plan on trying Mame.  You can set the iMo as the default monitor and boot to it which surprised me.  It is a little flaky.  Windows has to boot completely before the iMo driver will start and you get a picture--but this makes sense.  Both Windows and my ATI drivers bark at me after boot up (see attached picture).  I didn’t have time to work on correcting this.  It seems to work fine after closing the error boxes.

The iMo does not support Direct3D so I had to change the Video setting in mame.ini to ddraw in order to get Mame to run.  The iMo runs at 800x480.   How that combined with the lack of Direct3D impacts using the iMo for Mame I’m not sure.  I’ll leave that up to others with more experience.

You will notice a little jerkiness in the Pac Man video beginning at around the 23 second mark.  It does not do that every time but I have seen it more than once.  I’ll do some more testing this weekend.  If that jerkiness is indicative of the iMo I would say it is not a good candidate for Mame.  I played a couple of games of Frogger and DonPachi on the iMo with no trouble.  The picture really looks much better in person than my crappy video shows.

[solid12345]

From what i can tell in the video the black levels seem pretty good for a cheap monitor?

[lilshawn]

you may have an IRQ being shared someplace with your video... check it out and change it if you can.

[Jigenjuke]

Well it sounds like everybody is making progress.  Direct Draw is fine for the older games.  I will have to fiddle around with it and see what I can come up with on my end.  It sounds like it might be able to handle a frontend and some of the older games.  These little monitors would be great (as I have noted before) for submini mame machines.